Hi, I can help with adapting the announce as well as social networks infos about the online summit for the Polish users. I have ideas and contacts for pre-event introductions and networking. I would like to work on documentation, data analysis, summarizing and presentation of the anthropological research in form of synopsis which allows to learn from others’ past experiences. Please consider me for the deployment of the actions as well.
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Hi @everyone
My name is Asli Telli and I live in Germany at the moment as an exile academic. I’m a member of Academics for Peace Network, advocating for Peace Front in Turkey and Europe since 2011 (Academics for Peace | Front Line Defenders) and also initiator of Mapping Funds (www.mappingfunds.com) through which my research team maps freedom in academia. I recently co-initiated diverse_precarious network; we are contributing to “hypothesis” knowledge hub on lack of diversity and precarity of knowledge workers: ***Dissent in European (and beyond) higher education*** | Academia
I’m excited to hear your online summit plan and would like to contribute, possibly with a session on the conditions of higher education, knowledge workers as well as students during and beyond corona times. Hope to continue the conversation. Keep up the great work:)
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Hi and welcome @atelli 
Had a quick look at the mapping funds initiative - Curious to know how did you come to work on this, what sparked it off and what challenges you have been/are coming across along the way?
Re the summit: Yes it would be lovely to have you do a session! Starting with the mapping methodology and exploring how it can be applied to making visible existing support for new forms of livelihood generation. Presenting the results of your findings in the domain of academia, but zooming out to a broader perspective.
You make know that edgeryders started out as a research project on how youth in Europe where coping with the transition to healthy and satisfying adult lives in the aftermath of the financial meltdown. It started out that way but it was clear even then that the young were canaries in the coalmine- the precarisation of growing sections of populations at large. So we took an open approach asking how people, anyone who wanted to participate, were coping with life. How people were trying to make a living, managing our learning, trying to build healthy relationships with others and with ourselves and… practical resilience. The diversity of participation lead to a number of things coming out of this including an experimental initiative in Italy called unMonastery. The diversity I think was due to the zoomed out perspective we took, starting from topics and challenges that matter to everyone. This could lead to novel perspectives, and
collaborations across a number of fields and disciplines… what do you think?
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Checking in here concerning the Summit Program
Concerning:
I will dive a bit more in some of the topics within this discussion frame:
- Types of mindsets to overcome the crisis within the craft food industrie: “le capital sympathie”, minimizing losses, business as usual, going social
- Personal approach: breaking apart each piece of the business, cutting back & not wanting to restart the machine.
Personal approach
Context: starting food business that is taking off, envy of growth, rolling out new opportunities & “professionalization” of the whole enterprise. Loss of 95% of the revenue once the covid crisis goes full throttle.
Now: looking into a much more artistic / social organization structure of the project. I don’t want to put food and business in the same basket anymore. Food projects should be possible within a social approach. So i’m cutting of most of my growth potential, selecting just a few gigs to be able to pay the costs. Cutting back on the loop: more demand → more investments → more costs → needing more clients → more demands…
P.S: i will continue to edit this post, don’t know how to make a draft
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Hi Asli, I think it’s a good idea to start from how you conceptualize ‘precarity of knowledge workers’ - I am curious if all higher education falls into that category, or you have zoomed in on specific types of teachers.
Before our scheduled call later today, I would invite you to look at this conversation we had with @seh_notts who is supporting teachers to adopt digital formats for their work at the University in Nothingham, but who also spoke of the difficulties in eLearning for both teachers and students. In that conversation and others on culture, it became clear that everyone is in a crisis, but arts and humanities are in an even more precarious situation. Do you have any distinctions betweek fields or types of workers?
Talk to you in a bit!
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Hei,
I have created a wiki stub session for you and also added what we have so far - the summary will need to be changed, but you can expand there with all the details coming in.
Can you keep the points which you think the discussion should go into? Those not so important add them in the comments, or discard?
That will help us when we invite new people.
A good date for this event for me is the last week of May, how about for you?
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After taking some time, reflecting on how to enhance the results of OCI Lab edition one. And observing the outcomes of initiatives that have been taken to fight against the COVID 19 crisis.
What is OCI Lab ?
OCI Lab is an online incubator program supporting social entrepreneurs through a combination of online Labs, Webinars, peer to peer learning sessions and One on one mentoring session.
We aim to improve the OCI Lab’s current process ( participants selection, matchmaking project leaders, and contributors).
During the last phase of OCI Lab edition 1, we had conducted a partnership study to develop our activities and build the basis of strong partnerships, mainly in Tunisia.
We will share with you shortly the approach we followed so that we can replicate the study to establish meaningful partnerships outside Tunisia.
We ( OCI LAB TEAM) will share with you shortly the next steps.
We are currently working on the process analysis and improvement of the first edition and on developing the activities of the second edition simultaneously.
Hi Zmorda! For peopl who are new to the term OCI Lab, could you explain what it is really briefly?
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Thanks for the background info and ideas on how to find intersections @nadia We’ll keep the conversation through the draft session thread.
Would be nice to have a stream on the regeneration of meaning in tech work
The situation:
In tech it is mostly Bullshit work that gets paid (patching shitty techn or building new shitty tech). Meanwhile we get situations like this: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-worlds-email-encryption-software-relies-on-one-guy-who-is-going-broke. @matthias can wax on about this :))
Also: Lots of discontent misalignment in tech between the values of the workers and the incentives of their employers.
@MariaEuler I know you posted something about this somewhere but cannot remember where?
I feel like @johncoate could also provide some historical context on this…
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RedHat is a good example because the OS is public domain and what you pay for is their support.
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are you referring to RedHat as example of bullshitization of jobs in the tech industry or something else?
No, sorry - an example of a profitable business that uses open source but doesn’t rip it off. Was in support of your comment. Profitable businesses that emerge from common effort that does not exploit or rip off that effort can be hard to find. It has been the case for decades that someone would build some nice add-on to an OS, often unpatented, and before they could turn it into a business, MS or Apple would incorporate it into their OS and the creator was SOL.
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Have not yet done a proper post about it, but am planning to do so soon.
We discussed that during the last open source calls.
I think we can set up a good discussion around this and generate interest with it.
Do you think we could maybe even try to invite Graeber? Seems to fit the scifi eco vibe. And the bullshit work issue seems to fit the livelihoods.
will start a post about that 1. paid duck taping vs unpaid creating and 2. about the technical the issue of how to get paid on the internet soon as a stater point for that summit conversation. (@erik_lonroth is very passionate about that topic )
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A community created business might be Craigslist. In the early days there was an asynchronous forum that Craig himself tended, and pretty obsessively too, that included feedback about how to improve the service. I suppose Craig could have cooked up some sort of scheme to kick back some money to the community, but everyone always seemed to feel that the service itself carried enough benefit just by the way it was designed and operated.
By offering every classified as free except for companies offering jobs and real estate sales, the service was architected to send value from business back to the community. It was, and is, maybe along with eBay, the ultimate killer app. The massive news industry stood by helpless and watched revenue flow from them over to Craig, even while he was giving away that which the paper charged high dollars for. Advertising a yard sale was not a trivial expense. And then it was no expense at all. No competing with that.
Also, most people don’t know that Craigslist actually started as an email list to his friends of events in SF that he thought were of interest. He was a programmer but also had a range of cultural interest and a love of nature. After the email list got too big he switched it to a very early and simple web page, which he then built into greater sophistication. Now it grosses a billion dollars a year. He was one of those people who could build and maintain his own prototype until such time as he could hire others to help him. Amazon was the same that way and so was eBay.
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I should note that both eBay and Craigslist were invented by people who had used the WELL and saw the power of the possibilities.
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We could try…