Skills needed and potential skills that would be developed during UnMonastery in Matera

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Hi Everyone,

I’ve been thinking about the UnMonastery in Matera. I really do like the idea and currently I’m at a place where it might fit me pretty well to join a project like this. I’m still kind of wondering whether I would be a good fit and whether I would be happy with my personal outcome.

I have two questions that perhaps could clarify this for myself and for others as well.

  • What kind of skills do you think will be needed during the period you will be there?

  • What kind of skills do you think you will develop / polish as a result of participating in UnMonastery?

My preconceived ideas of what kind of skills you’ll eventually develop during the UnMonastery is firstly facilitation. Since you have to cater to the community at Matera and together with them find solutions of what can be improved and how it can be improved. I’m guessing that it will involve a lot of listening and trying to figure out what are the real problems at hand. The second skill that I’m imagining you’ll develop is offline community building. There will be a need to build a functioning community around the UnMonastery in Matera where people can meet each other and try overcome the challenges faced by the people there. So that would also involve community outreach, to the Matera Community at large.

My current interests are revolving quite a lot around programming and learning to do this better as this skill both seems to be so valuable in this day and age as well it have had a personal lure for me for quite some time. I would still say that I’m pretty much a beginner in that area. But I’m picking up the skills through various MOOC and thus self-educating that way. So in a way I’m looking for a place where I could get an opportunity to develop these skills more in-depth.

My pre-conceived ideas of what the stay at UnMonastery would be like doesn’t really fit with what I’m looking for. At least that’s how I perceive it myself. So I’m reaching out to you to ask you what you think it will be like. What are the skills you think would be helpful and what kind of skills would you develop as a result of participating? There is always the black swan element, but it would be interesting to hear some kind of ideas around this.

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That’s very personal!

Hi Jonathan, welcome back. I guess Ben might have thought hardest about this issue, but my guess is that skills development is going to be very personal. Too much, really, to generalize. Even facilitation – certainly an important skill for the unMonastery is not necessarily going to be highlighted in any individual unMonasterian. I know the uM team has devised a partition of activities in internal, interface, outreach; facilitation is mostly in the interface part. Some unMonasterians will do it, some wil not. 

In my understanding, it works the other way around: you submit a sort of application, in which you say what you want to do. Then, if you get an invitation to join, you will be able to devote a large chunk of your time to your preferred activity. Did you understand something different?