Small update + tentative calendar for the Lab

EarthOS Scifi Economics
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We spoke to DG REGIO, C-KIC and Fondazione di Comunità Messina (ping @giacomo.pinaffo) . We agreed the following:

  • The main funded activity for the Lab in 2020 is going to be a sort of incubator of alt-economies. Ideal participants are people that want to be ecosystem engineers in their local economies; they aspire to rewiring the whole local economy in a long-termist, human-friendly, low-carbon way. They could be working for a public authority, or community foundations, for example.
  • The incubator’s goal is to build capacity and shared vision in about 20 ecosystem engineers for local economies. The alumni then go forth and, together or separately, use capacity and vision to interpret mainstream funding streams for regional policies (example: the European Regional Development Fund, or the Just Transition Fund) to realize the vision. The incubator’s path to impact is in the policy, not si much in making new policy streams but in using well the existing ones.
  • Most of the incubator’s work is done online. We use the format of well-prepared webinars. Each webinar features an existing or fictional local alt-economy (ecovillages, community foundations, post-capitalist business hubs like Calafou etc.). Each consists of a 10 minutes pre-recorded video interview (also used to promote the webinar) + a deep Q&A with the protagonists of the experience being featured. Videos to be produced by @estragon with my content supervision (and, in practice, a lot of low-level editing work from me too).
  • This work culminates in a fundraising event to be held in Messina in the fall (subject to the lifting of travel restrictions). FDCM has generously agreed to fund a small number of writers’ residencies for econ-SF, which we should announce as soon as possible. I want to explore with @nadia and @hugi the possibility of making the residency more participatory by adding a BBU-type experiment, if we can find someone to pay for it. Let’s have a call, guys?

Tentative calendar:

  • May 25th: application to the DG REGIO citizen engagement call submitted. Edgeyrders runs alone here.
  • May 25th: application to the COSME call submitted (pending verification on eligibility).
  • May 29th: first video ready, featuring the Messina experience.
  • June 11th: first webinar live.
  • June- August: further webinars production (about four).
  • July-October: further webinars live.
  • October (pending travel restrictions): fundraising event in Messina.

Also please take note @andreja.

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This is a call that Jakob should also be in, since the BBU methodology is a shared work of ours. I’ll talk to him about the idea.

This is a program I’m personally very interested in joining for the benefit of learning for the Blivande experiment. Is there a way for Blivande to be included in the lab?

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what’s BBU experiment?

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@hugi, as per our recent board discussion: you are my brother-in-arms, and there is no one I would rather have in our initiatives. And by the way, at least provisionally, the same goes for Jakob. Let’s make this real!

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Babel Between Us. Our idea here is to use the methodology from BBU of having sci-fi authors write fiction in the forum according to the methodology developed in Babel. It allows for a very free-form style in which a big group of writers can explore very different ideas and then have those ideas feed into each other. It will be a lot easier to show what we are talking about at the end of May when we will make the first batch of fiction public along with an ethnography and SSNA graph of that fiction.

Happy to hear it! :slight_smile: I have even started bringing up Fondazione di Comunità Messina in the Blivande context lately, especially their “four pillars” values.

I can update on this at our tech update call next week.