It’s clear now 
Just worked my way through the Learn Do Share site, the book and the DIY Days and WS WP events behind that. Now it makes all sense together for me So the Learn Do Share platform seems to be the extended arm of teh DIY Days and WS WP events, documenting what’s happening there and also allowing for permanent remote collaboration on projects initiated there and similar ones. And yes, that’s a worthwile ingredient to this movement, helping to make the events sustainable and publicly visible just like this platform does it for Edgeryders.
Let me now try to add something about the context of all the current buzz around social innovation, sostainable tech, society hacking etc… It’s inspired by what I’ve seen at the LOTE conference, and clearly nothing to question the basic idea behind the Learn Do Share platform. Hope I can get it over in constructive ways
Well I was not aware just how much is going on in grassroots initiated social change at the moment. I’m glad to see there’s a common goal, of which the best verbalization is maybe Buckminster Fullers “making teh world work out for 100% of the people” (just found the quote on the DIY Days site …). Yet the reason I wasn’t aware of roughly two thirds of what peopel try in that direction is, we’re a fragemented movement. There are the tech people working on tech solutions (like Open Source Ecology). There are the society design people working on policies and narratives. And there are the self-improvement people starting their approach with acquiring the right mindset for sustainable co-living on this planet. Compare Gelada’s great piece on the different personality archetypes mingled at LOTE.
Now I don’t question (any more …) that all these approaches are relevant and necessary. But we’ve got to join forces to be one movement instead of many disparate blocks. Edgeryders seems to have been one of the few places where social innovators and hard-core tech people and all the others meet, and become aware of each other … . The reason we don’t meet else is that it’s hard for us to communicate, as we have a different framework of mind and different logic … . It seems to be one of the few advantages of commercial enterprises that they can get these vastly different people to work together (by sheer financial pressure of course, not a good thing).
So what I’m looking for is a platform that can make people of all these different sub-movements and cultural groups collaborate on common projects. To get the impetus for the social change we all agree on anyway … . The Learn Do Share seems a good candidate for this, as it already crosses some borders. Found this quote in the Learn Do Share book about it, so maybe I’m really breaking open doors here:
"[…] help us determine what helped and what kept
them from overcoming their own boundaries.
All these efforts stem from our belief that
collaboration and sharing of culture are an
essential part of a ‘new commons’ thinking
for a future that works for 100% of humanity."
And, you’re already collaborating with several other initiatives (DIY Days, WS WP – better than re-inventing the wheel and fragmenting public attention …). Yet maybe you could try joining forces with one of the upcoming open hardware / open design project platforms, to also welcome the hardcore tech people for collaboration. (For example, see the kickstarter’ed Open Design Engine project … it’s all early stage for now however.)
And maybe, once there are people from all the social change sub-movements on the Learn Do Share platform, there could be an explicit way to foster collaboration across these cultural groups / sub-movements on the web platform? Like, it would be awesome to have for example electrical engineers, social scientists, narrative experts and web developers agree on fusing their existing overlapping projects into one high-impact one. Like for example the different approaches to healthcare and to re-development of abandoned houses.
Or put another way round, I favor the hackers’ “Show me the code.” approach: talking on a meta level is good if there’s something to talk about, that is, if there’s some practical work that has been done already. In that sense, the WS WP approach is really great. While totally “disconnected”, non-implemented stories without action are essentially a waste of resources (and sad as that is, the first two days of LOTE conference might fall into that category, depending on what Council of Europe finally makes out of the results …). So, let me encourage you folks to proceed with the WS WP approach in your platform, of combining both the thoughts, the social action and the hackers’ long years spent on tech. Change needs it all …
Cheers!
