Synthesis of Stewardship discussion in Assembl

Workspaces LOTE4 “The Stewardship”
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As part of the small project to test the Assembl tool within the Catalyst consortium, we are publishing 3 synthesis (once per week) of the LOTE4 stewardship discussion.

This is the first synthesis of the LOTE4 discussion regarding “Stewardship: definition, challenges and resilience” using the Assembl tool. For this synthesis 74 posts and comments imported from Edgeryders discussion have been used. If you go to the following link, you can browse the synthesis, the table of ideas, read the main ideas (in the idea column you can find extracts with key of the posts and discussions of the Edgeryders content regarding these themes).

Stewardship: definition, challenges and resilience

Living on the Edge 4: The Stewardship (LOTE4) was our fourth annual community event focused on the concept of stewardship: “we believe the ability to come together to take care of assets in an unstable context is a key skill for surviving and thriving in the future”. The discussion was animated around the definition of stewardship, its challenges and the way to build resilience.

Extracts from comments and thoughts from @Ben

  • Definition of stewardship 

There is no single definition of stewardship, it is a fluid concept. Stewardship is the act of taking care, preserving, maintaining, the “gardening of an ecology”. Stewards are working towards the common good. They are creating new social architecture, in order to enable collaboration and getting the best out of each individual. Stewards challenge the hierarchy (they promote a decentralized, lateral architecture) and challenge the models based on ownership. Also the process of stewardship is as important as the outcomes, as well as the way decisions are taken are more important that the decisions themselves.

Extracts from comments and thoughts from @danohu , @Noemi , @elviapw , @Patrick_Andrews , @Bembo_Davies , @Ben ,

  • Communities and stewardship

Community (as a gathering, as a feeling, as a platform) is the core pillar for stewardship concept. Communities, and not individuals, are seen as ideal stewards. This is connected to the idea of shared responsibility, distributed consciousness, trust. If community is understood as a platform, it should not be just a platform, it needs to serve people. Communication is vital, between peers, between communities, on politics and policy level. People need to be dependent on each other.

Extracts from comments and thoughts from @katalin, @Patrick_Andrews, @vgratian, @Ben, @rmchase, @mariabyck

  • Challenges of stewardship methodology and how to build resilience

One of the main issues about stewardship is gathering knowledge that is dispersed, thus documentation is key. Documentation is also important to share the knowledge thus insure the resilience of the community. But then how do you share the knowledge within the community, without imposing it as a rule? Problems can stem from the creation of umbrella models to address problems that are universal.

Resilience is achieved through heterogenity: people with complementary skills that reach out into different networks.Resilience is also achieved through communities rather than single persons: a single person can burn-out quickly and  lose motivation while working for the benefit of the whole community single handedly, while in a community the burden is shared, and stewards are interchangeable.

Stewardship is a daily work and requires a lot of commitment, acting as a steward requires self-sacrifice and even transgressing rules. The risks are manifold for achieving impact, from mismanaging expectations or resources (not enough eyeballs), to loss of reliability (achieving growth by compromising) or even burnouts (‘temporary ownership is an aspect of precarity’, notices one of the stewards). It is easy to lean on stewards, and once you start stewarding something, everybody expects you to do a lot more. We need to better support and reward stewards.

Extracts coming from: @Noemi , @elviapw , @danohu and @Nadia

  • Precarious conditions of stewards

Stewardship is a daily work and requires a lot of commitment, acting as a steward requires self-sacrifice and even transgressing rules. The risks are manifold for achieving impact, from mismanaging expectations or resources (not enough eyeballs), to loss of reliability (achieving growth by compromising) or even burnouts (‘temporary ownership is an aspect of precarity’, notices one of the stewards). It is easy to lean on stewards, and once you start stewarding something, everybody expects you to do a lot more. We need to better support and reward stewards.

Extracts from comments and thoughts from @Nadia, @Noemi

Conclusion

You can browse the synthesis, the table of ideas, read the main ideas (in the idea column you can find extracts with key of the posts and discussions of the Edgeryders content regarding these themes).  You can jump in at any point of the discussion, and create new posts with comments regarding previous ideas, or new ones. We are very much looking forward for your inputs.

Next week we are going to publish a new synthesis of the LOTE4 discussion regarding the topic of new emerging themes.

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Second Assembl synthesis: Emerging themes

This second synthesis of the LOTE 4 discussion is focused on new emerging themes.

  • Stewardship as a way to respond to state's failure as well as to market failures.

Nation states fail to take care of various assets, from public spaces and places in cities to digital data. Governments are at odds when it comes to making honest projections for societal well-being, in times of ageing populations and shrinking state budgets. Care systems are increasingly deemed unable to cater to the needs of tomorrow’s elderly populations, many of whom are today’s unemployed, migrants, or poor. Good stewards are aware of the state’s failure to take care of certain public assets, and that is why they decide to take up this task. At Edgeryders after Lote4, we’re starting to envision a system of care by a community of hackers, armed with cheap, open source tools, which would gather most promising bottom up solutions such as new types of care homes as intergenerational co-living spaces, open medical technologies as alternatives to the Internet of Things.

Stewards are also trying to correct market failures, not only state’s failure. The LOTE4  debate explores why the market failures arise : because of “imperfect information” according to JimmyTidey, or externalities according to Alberto, and how to correct them and how to overcome them. One possibility would be to use markets when they work well, and not to use them when they offer market failures. In this case a model based on stewardship would work much better. According to Matthias, it is futile to try to correct market failures with more inclusive pricing.

  • The rise of the sharing economy and its limits:

Sharing economy is a start, but communities should look beyond that and share other assets, such as ideas, resources, etc. The boundaries between community sharing and commercial sharing are blurred, as shown by the experience of the industry titans AirBnb or Uber. As an example of stewardship, the sharing economy is indeed creating social benefits, but its transactions go beyond cooperation and the staggering amount of personal data collected on platforms is powerful and to an extent threatening. Can newer collaborative environments, like swarm economies or non-monetary ones come up with fairer social contracts for their communities?

  • Reflexions upon monetary transactions, it's underlying values, alternative systems of value exchange and reputation systems

Some of the stewards seem to be ready to give up the monetary transactions and use other means to obtain the things they need. There are alternative systems of value exchange that can provide a more sustainable option (crowdfunding, to abandoning monetary currency altogether, bartering, reputation systems).  Money does not arrise because barter is complicated, but because reciprocity is complicated. Iamkat notices that, because there are many things for which we cannot directly barter, without money we need much stronger personal ties to foster enough trust for exchange. A perfect example of it would be MakerFox, a platform enabling network bartering. Perhaps we need to separate unhappiness with value/wealth distribution and the concept of money, says Robin Chase.

  • The importance of overcoming the limits of technology in order to realize true stewardship

Technology is not always inclusive, thus creating digital platforms for stewardship might create actually the opposite effect than the one that it was initially thought for. Platform tend to become centralized and there is risk of members serving the platform and not the community.  Those wishing to help others learn to be stewards need to carefully balance their goal --removing barriers to entry by creating new platforms – with the possibility of inadvertently imposing systems that create new barriers to entry, says Elivapw. This is why it is important to make the communication as independent as possible from any grid, acknowledges Nadia.

For this synthesis, posts and comments from the following Edgeryders were used: @teirdes, @NicoBis  @Bembo_Davies, @SteveClare, @jimmytidey, @elviapw, @HKaplinsky @Matthias, @Nadia, @Alberto, @Noemi

You can read the extractions and the full posts at the following link. Next week we are going to publish a new synthesis of the LOTE4 discussion regarding stewardship case studies.

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Useful, but maybe not mobilizing?

A good synthesis is always nice to have. As I read this, I find myself nodding agreement (“yes, that’s right”, “I remember that coming up”); but then it is not clear to me that this should prompt me to dive back into the discussion. It feels like it’s over; I am pleased with what we have learned together, it feels like a job done well, and therefore not one that makes me want to reopen it. I know Jean-Michel and the Assembl crowd have observed cases in which publishing a synthesis has rekindled the conversation, but this does not seem to be happening here. Maybe it’s just me; maybe it’s that the conversation peaked over six months ago and we have since moved on as a community.

If I had to point to one single most important finding, it would be the one about successful stewardship bringing about the demand that the steward does even more. This might be a point of failure, a source of unsustainability.

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Agree

I was thinking that Alberto’s view on externalities is misrepresented here, but as he says, it seems rather difficult to reopen the whole discussion here.

Signed up for Assemble, I’d love an about page to tell me more about the thinking behind it? Is it like a meta-forum on top of the forum?

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The theory behind it

Is that summaries are mobilizing. When you post a summary, people restart the conversation, and they actually move it forward. So. in principle, it does not really matter if you use it as a forum or, like in our case, a meta-forum. In practice, I think they designed it more around the forum idea.

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Assembl - a collective intelligence tool

Hi Jimmy, Alberto,

yes, I agree with the difficulty to engage on a topic that was discussed 6 months ago. I am preparing the document with the feedback regarding the tests that we are making and I will include this point in it.

Jimmy, Assembl is a tool to animate discussions in a more elaborated manner than in a forum. It’s main purpose is to be used directly. Here is their website where they also present the thinking behind :slight_smile: It is more than a meta-forum people start a discussion on a specific topic, while the moderator selects ideas, makes synthesis to animate even more the discussion.

The problem was, how to engage the Edgeryders community on another platform, creating user accounts, etc, etc. So we decided to actually import the discussion directly to Assembl, and enable people to benefit from the tool, even if they were not registered.

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Looks extremely interesting, will checkout more…

Don’t know why I didn’t think of going to http://assembl.org/ to check out the web page.

Jimmy.

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Third Assembl synthesis: Case studies

This third synthesis of the LOTE 4 discussion is focused on case studies.

Throughout August-October 2014 several Edgeryders community members set out on a physical journey to discover and collect first-hand data from various countries on existing stewardship projects and initiatives.

Three areas were discovered, each based on the locus of projects:

  • physical stewardship,
  • digital stewardship
  • community stewardship.

•           Physical stewardships are primarily public assets like buildings, water, transport infrastructure. Examples of physical stewardship: coworking spaces like Casa Neutral, community gardens like the one in Cluj or Marseille, book bartering, community pools and other community owned sports facilities. There are also examples of startups regarding phyisical stewardship, like Riversimple, producing hydrogen cars for lease.

Concepts related to this type of stewardship are development, overcoming poverty, public housing and communal living, hackerspace, ownership, holistic approach, eco-friendly

•           Digital stewardship regards online surveillance and data protection, the open software movement, the Internet of things. Examples of digital stewardship are: Digital Stewards and Data Coop, who are stewarding digital data, Ushaidi, InSTEDD, Crowdmap which are mapping platforms, Makerfox, bartering platform, CoderDojo, a coding school, Paesaggi Lucani, storytelling platform.

Concepts related to digital stewardship are: data, mapping, platforms, documentation, cooperation, alternative economy, open source

•           Community stewardship concerns the sharing economy, peer to peer services. Examples of community stewardship are Metalab, open space for technical and creative projects, Let’s do it world, cleanup initiative, Mz Baltazar’s Laboratory, a female hackerspace, Spithari project, an open eco community, The festival of solidarity and cooperative economy. Concepts associated to this type of stewardship are: decentralization, documentation, challenge: sustainability, participatory decision making, platform, alternative economy.

•           There are stewardship case studies that are digital, physical and community stewardship case studies. Example of these cases can be the Common Libraries, allowing people to co-design new library features, Islington Mill, an open community and art space or Unmonastery, a co-living and coworking space in Matera.