This is part of a series of speculative sessions, that need facilitators read more here:
/t/unmonastery/315/speculative-session-proposals-for-unmonastery-track-2
Blurb:
We got to the second round of a nominet bid for 90k to build this, due to numerous factors we dropped the ball on this a bit but myself and Gaia are in the process of reorienting the approach, here’s some extracts from the first application we made:
“unMonastery-in-a-box supports rapid startup, running and evaluation of locality-based social innovation based on an existing prototype: the Italian unMonastery project in Matera. It allows for an iterative open source development approach to offline projects.
What need is your project looking to address (100):
Too much social innovation happens in small, disconnected projects and is disseminated in dry case studies that overstate success and downplay failures. Similar problems are being faced, and similar solutions often reappear.
“unMonastery”, a current model of place-based social innovation, addresses the interlinked needs of empty space, unemployment and austerity. This project allows unMonasteries to be started up and replicated easily, allowing each project to be consistently evaluated with innovations and improvements fed back. As with GitHub, the project models will branch and iterate so that different places can learn from the projects that are most similar to them.
How will your project address this need? (200)
The unMonastery model is well suited to a time of high youth unemployment, a sense that traditional approaches are failing, and a hunger for
participative, community-based solutions to common problems.
unMonastery-in-a-box uses digital tools to multiply the impact of local projects, and encourages locally-tailored replication with consistent evaluation and access to existing expertise. By taking an open source approach to projects, it iterates rather than copies in each locality, with each repetition the model improves and develops in response to each place’s need.
Evaluation will be upfront in the model allowing for common metrics to be used across projects, and for the live-time updating of how each project is doing along standardised measures.
With a peer-to-peer ethos, it will build on and develop a network both of ideas and people without the need for funding a central hub.
unMonastery projects will benefit from connection to others with similar ambitions and ideas, supportive challenge to the work they want to do, better evidence of success and measurement of progress, and a route to share their work and good ideas with the wider community.”
Key Questions:
-What can we learn from Github that we might apply to the replication of unMonastery?
-What are the base elements for an unMonastery in a box?
-What are the right tools for evaluating the success of the unMonastery?
-What are the pattern languages already emerging from the unMonastery building process?
-How can we capture tacit knowledge at each stage of unMonastery’s development?
Needs:
Tech Skills
Strong understanding for evaluation models
Ideal Facilitator:
Someone who’s built apps, software or social networks. Anyone involved in starting a hackerspace.
Possible Outcomes:
-Initial requirements for the unMonastery in-a-box platform
-New ideas for how to document the building process
-Set of pattern languages for what we’ve built so far.
Reference Points: