If you want proper robes, there was an ecclesiastical supplier we used to know, who did a rather nice line in habits, robes, and cloaks. :))
I’ll chase some quotes if anyone is interested…
It’s not about legal right or not. And it’s not about me copyrighting the logo. It not about IP RIGHTS. unMonastery is about creating and trying a different paradigm. Don’t victimize yourself Alberto. Just because it’s CC doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to print it on whatever. The unMonastery logo been kind of freely used but I’ve been interfering in other situations where I think it was used in a non-beneficial way. Somehow acting as the graphic profile and guidelines that haven’t been formalized. This I’m not doing for my own interest. I want unMon to look good in other peoples eyes.
The problem with the t-shirt idea for me is that they try to drag and present unMonastery as something that is far away from the VISION. The question is… Why do you want to do that @Alberto ?
I hope we all can agree on that the logo of unMonastery is there to be used for the BENEFIT of the project. Giving away soulless t-shirts to volunteers is just not along the line here.
“nameless members”?
I also agree with Ola that the combination of T-shirts and the unMonastery narrative are not ideal at the moment.
My reasoning: Because we are trying to create a different culture around work, meaning and humanism and aesthetics are an important tool. We need to not get too close to the corporate communications with the unMonastery visual narrative. The approach towards design, production and use of unMonastery wearable artefacts I feel is more in the domain of functional art than tech event swag. Plus I despise the startup rhetoric and don’t want the unMonastery to be associated with that culture.
I also agree with Alberto that there ought to be some kind of visually distinct and easily identifiable garb. I just don’t think something “good” enough can be developed for the event. Rather I would use produce booklets/Nametags similar to the ones we produced for the futures knowlab with different colour stickers on them for particiapants, session leaders, etc. It worked very well for the knowlab and also solved a lot of practical problems (schedules, where stuff is happening, session information, important contact info, participant bios etc). We have the design but would need help with producing the print file to send to the printers.
I think it is important to remember what it is we are doing, why we are doing it and the spirit with which it was initiated: building infrastructure to support alternative responses to systemic crises, p2p. And collaboratively creating the means for more people to be able to access and build on it.
That infrastructure is technosocial. The unMonastery is one part of that infrastructure. However it would not even have happened had we not created the other infrastructure on which it and other projects rely. Creating the conditions for this unMonastery prototype to even happen before most of the people in this thread came into the picture took a huge amount of effort from some people, and small efforts from many generous individuals.
Without those contributions we would not even be having this conversation about T-shirts or anything else unMonastery related. That infrastructure is a platform and shared commitment to build sociotechnical infrastructure that makes us stronger and more capable by enabling us to collaborate and learn from one another, p2p, across the globe. Pooling, growing and making knowledge, tools, contacts, skills, collaboration and resources accessible to people all over the planet. Not just a priveledged few who can travel with ease all over Europe.
I would have loved to have had 1-4 month residency with a bursary to work on using some of my training as an engineer on one of the challenges, doing something meaningful. But others did not do the boring, unpaid, often unseen work to create that opportunity for me to make use of. Or put their personal professional credibility and trusted relationships on the line for that to happen.
This work that for most only makes sense to contribute if we feel we are part of building something together, as a community. Your dismissing those people as “nameless members of a 2000+ platform” is both disrespectful and counterproductive if you want to see the unMonastery idea spread, thrive and develop as common infrastructure built by and accessible to many more people.
I would ask that we reframe this discussion towards thinking about how we can use artefacts to make people meaningfully feel part of a shared whole, not how to keep some inside and some out.
sorry
I apologise for using the term “nameless members”. I guess the avatars are markers for me - wanted to underline that a physical community of 7 works differently from the network of 2000 the platform nurtures, and marketing strategies need to reflect that.
(I know the history of unMonastery, having just spent two months reading all unMon related stuff on the website.)
Yes. Developing working practices that bridge them is tricky
But I genuinely believe that if we can crack it, everyone stands to benefit. One aspect is solid documentation and as much documentation around design and operations of the “physical” projects as possible. As a lot of the crucial knowledge emerges in discussions where we are thinking about how to do something, we try to push for a “working out loud” culture where we communicate in writing on this open platform.
What you refer to as “marketing” (I prefer outreach and community building to that term and all it involves) also depends on bridging online and offline effectively with working practices and content. Bridging the different fields of knowledge, discipline, cultures etc better equips us all to do these things well, and helps us develop the intellectual frameworks we need in parallel with the physical ones. If we can get a tradition going of people posting well-researched and well written posts from 1st hand perspective with deeper reflections around what we are doing and what we learn along the way. Like Alberto’s post from the visit to the Benedictine monastery in Mursia. Or this post by @lasindias. I am trying at my end with posts like this one (which also draw in new people and perspectives into the conversation).
If we can deeply embed this kind of working practices into the the DNA of the unMonastery and all initiatives that come of out interactions between people we bring together through our work everyone stands to benefit. Right now and for some time the drumbeat that has been connecting these different threads is coordinated by Edgeryders @Ola. I don’t see it happening elsewhere because coordination work is hard and incentives are aligned against anyone wanting to do it. It’s important that people are aware of and careful to acknowledge the value of this work if we are not to undermine an important and in many ways invisible feature of the infrastructure. One way is to understand and accept the need to make visible the association between Edgeryders efforts around coordination and community building, with the outcomes of our shared efforts. This also matters because no one would give a lone individual or small group of people without a “reliable” organisation to back them access to many different kinds of resources. But if we are smart about how we use our collective online communication we can create that credibility much much faster than any one of us could alone.
artefacts
Let’s not mark ourselves with the logo, but with a way of acting towards others.
I propose that during LOTE4, people of the unMonastery (anyone who feels they even just like the idea) carry a small stone, which they use each time when having a conversation. (Probably people are aware of this tool, but here is how it works: the person who holds the stone has the right to speak (with intention), the others listen (with attention), and speak at their turn when holding the stone.)
Meanwhile I will look at the textile situation when back in Matera - an unMonastery green, 60x150 cm piece of light, pleasant cloth for each unMonasterian has been talked about. People can make a wearable item of their choice from it. It lends itself to be a scarf without alteration.
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I like this suggestion
because it reinforces the idea that we can make something from what’s immediately around us, use it with people, and anyone can adopt it. It’s also likely the most fun option - which is important, since we are all working very hard.
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++
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maya Angelou
Yes
That is certainly true.
Community
Nadia: I also agree with Ola that the combination of T-shirts and the unMonastery narrative are not ideal at the moment.
+1.
Nadia: Creating the conditions for this unMonastery prototype to even happen before most of the people in this thread came into the picture took a huge amount of effort from some people, and small efforts from many generous individuals. //…// Your dismissing those people as “nameless members of a 2000+ platform” is both disrespectful and counterproductive .
Think all of us been doing sacrifices in our personal/professional lives. I guess behind Edgeryders is a whole network of people. I see Edgeryders/LOTE of more of a meeting place for a community that the community itself. Think were all connected beyond ER. Maybe it’s playing the words, but the difference is important to me. It’s not about prestige into who is the originator of things. Think everyone had their gain in building or associating itself with ER / unMon.
Being “connected” beyond being within line of sight.
…Not about prestige. It’s being aware of what is not always visible. Just being within line of sight is not being “connected”.
When we did workshops this spring in Armenia, Egypt and Georgia everyone kept pointing out that a key problem was lack of collaboration. It turns out people who you would think would be connected because they work on similar or related things/care about same issues, live in the same city, are part of the same generation etc didn’t even know of one another, let alone collaborate. And a large chunk of that reason is that it takes a lot of work to create contexts which people find, and where we come together, interact and discover what we have in common. For that to then coalesce into action/collaboration requires a lot of coordination and “open” community building which people very busy don’t want to do unless they see immediate benefits to their own projects.
Actually you and I are a perfect example. We went to the same school at the same time and lived in the same city at the same time for many years. In all that time we never really interacted let alone worked together. We find ourselves here because a context was created which had us interact around topics of mutual interest. And opportunities built for us to meet and spend time thinking and working together. Edgeryders has played a large role in this and continues to do so. This is not about branding. It matters because even though putting resources into bringing people together is clearly so valuable you have to work and fight for it continuously. Let’s not undermine our ability to do more of this by downplaying the role of network weaving and coordination when it has been and is important. We need to continuously acknowledge and highlight the importance of that work and those opportunities so they are made accessible to many others. And so the people who do work to create them are not disincentivised by lack of acknowledgement.
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The nature of social capital is to be invisible
The reward of being at the center of the circle is only picking up the empty beer bottles in the morning.
I learned 20 years ago that a network of specialists was the form hyper-empowered by the internet; in the 1990s it was mailing lists.
Over the years I’ve sunk maybe a third of my life into building and maintaining networks. I do that (and have the time to do that) largely because I didn’t build a nuclear family - no kids hauling on my arm when I’m trying to nerd something. I didn’t choose to do this instead but it’s something that was available to me because I didn’t have kids.
The vast majority of that captital is rightly invisible. It’s the ability to mail any one of two dozen people and get £500 or £5000 worth of specialized professional advice because we have history, and because over time they’ve started to understand the difference between a scene where I’m present, and one where I am absent. A very substantial chunk of ER’s culture, and most of the core team, come from the work I did as an engagement manager on the first ER project. Because I’d filled my life with people who get things done and have the potential to do more, when that network integrated into ER it became a very substantial part of the infrastructure of the project.
But the nature of this kind of work is to be kind of thankless and invisible, because the reward is the caliber of people you get to spend your time with.
It cannot be monetized, lionized or rewarded because then the field becomes contaminated with people who are doing it for the money or the power - political actors - rather than the genuine conviviality which Ivan Illich is such a fan of. It has to be done for the love of it, and the love of it has to be its own reward.
I have taken money for running networks three times, for Hub Westminster, Limewharf, and EdgeRyders. In each case, it bought me a slab of time to spend with my friends, and a chance to make enough noise to meet some new friends - I owe Limewharf a permanent debt of gratitude for being the venue where Leo D. showed up, for example - we’ve all greatly benefitted from that, but me most of all because I made a new friend.
But the price of running as a largely demonetized actor is that, while you have the integrity to act, you don’t have much money. If we were a real wealth-and-power network, we’d never know if the people trying to get close to us wanted to be our friends, or wanted to be in the loop of people we faciliate access to money for. We’d treat each-other as people treat each-other in Hollywood, or in finance. Now I am not against money, indeed I’m a little fonder of the stuff than I probably should be, even if I’m not willing to compromise for access to it. But I do think a lot of the equality and integrity of the EdgeRyders space comes from our relatively limited access to funds: you can do this work because you love it, but (so far) it’s not easy to maintain a middle class standard of living doing it. Everybody involved is either too poor or too busy, and mostly both.
The conclusion I draw from that is this: EdgeRyders as a company is really hard work. EdgeRyders as a community is a lot easier, but then we all have to go and get day jobs, rather than getting posted to exotic locations to help out the UN 
The strength of EdgeRyders.com (vs. EdgeRyders.org) has always been that EdgeRyders.org motivates people to get involved, to resolve their differences constructively, to cooperate rather than defect in the long-iterated version of prisoner’s dilemma which is so often a part of life in business. Because of the community feeling (which there are much better words for in Dutch, German and Swedish than English!) we’re incentivised to keep everybody in the boat, even when we feel like throwing them overboard.
Business and business decision-making eats social capital, the fabric of community, like a harsh abrasive. That’s why we need to pay people so much to work in areas like finance, or Hollywood - those lives are lives dominated by distrust, power-gaming and unfair rewards for throwing your compatriots under a bus. For this reason, and amid all the pressure we have to make Matera an event which helps to ensure that ER has the ability to pay people to keep the show going, I want us to remember that the only real asset WE have is the community, our social fabric. There is no money to speak of - there’s just enough potential to make it seem like careers and world changing projects might start here. But there is a very real and special thing, and we need to be aware of it - only celebration really gets to the heart of what makes this space of ours special.
If success finds us, we must not become TED. We must not become like the Theatre, with its star system. Some will be famous, some may be rich, but if we lose what we have in the process, we’ll all be so much poorer. And there’s the paradox: to be paid for social captial creation changes our motivations in ways which tend to kill real, authentic social capital.
I think we can find a way through this, but it’s next year’s task, the thing to work on after Matera, when we know roughly where the big moves are. Does that make sense?
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Spot on.
Very well put Vinay.
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I agree
Wow - that’s really well put Vinay.
21 comments on T-shirts!
And 6, of which 3 my own, on a thoughtful post on meeting a Benedictine superior that it took two days to write, three to journey to, and several months to organise. Seriously? My editorial strategy is all wrong!
Obviously I don’t care as much about this stuff as you do, and I have no wish to upset people doing valuable work (even when they don’t have the same compunction about me). As a tribute to the community spirit Vinay mentioned, I’m backing off. No unMonastery fleeces are forthcoming.
However, a word about licenses is in order. A license is not some legal gibberish that a lawyer told you to put on your website. It is a social contract. An open license, says: here’s something I made, come play with it! You are free to do as you wish, you will have essentially the same rights of access as me, its creator, because I trust you, whoever you are, even if I have not met you yet. Its purpose is to draw new people in, not to ensure a stable dominant position of the people already in. We have copyright for that, and it works.
When you suddenly change the social contract, people get hurt. If you don’t change it, but don’t embrace it either, and treat it as some boring detail that the cool kids need not worry about, people are at least wrongfooted and feel cheated.
A social contract is no joke. Where did you, Ola and Ben, get the idea that invoking it was a “businesslike”, “unemotional”, “inappropriate” response, contrary to “the vision”? This stuff is important to a lot of people. To Sam, who generously gave us the first batch of unMonastery videos during LOTE3: he spent a year living his life using only open source tools and techniques, going to considerable inconvenience. To Matthias, who generously built the Edgeryders website and runs it daily, and assembled a 800+ page document containing open resources on everything from learning Spanish to vacuum drying with a microwave oven. To Rysiek, who generously mobilized the Polish hackers to take up the fight against ACTA. To Asta and Amelia, who generously fought the fight in the European Parliament against the copyright lobby. To Simone, who generously co-started OpenStreetMap – without it, unTransit would have been impossible or illegal, because Google and Bing maps are not open. To Piersoft, who works to open building ownership data in Matera as well as mapping his city – and the two lead to a map of unused assets, which can be used by all because – you guessed it – it is open. To Marc, who spent his time in the unMonastery building an open version of something that already exists, the solar tracker, but is closed, and so when it breaks you can’t fix it. It is important to the whole open source and open data movements, both well represented in Edgeryders – we fight for stuff to have certain kinds of licenses and not others, because different licenses encode different worlds.
On this, I do not see myself back off in the foreseeable future. Open is the only way I can even breathe; Edgeryders is going to take open very seriously as long as I am involved in it. Anybody who wants to have a discussion about this in Matera is welcome (not a session, though, not worth it. Just over coffee).
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What we have here is a bike-shed problem…
The difference between designing a nuclear reactor and a bike-shed, is that nuclear reactors are dangerous when they fail, so few people feel qualified to comment on the design, but a bike-shed is relatively easy to build, so everyone will put their oar in, if only to feel that they’ve made some contribution.
Hence the numerous comments.
The range of topics that the comments discuss, however is directly relevant, as it is how the Edgeryder’s will be presented to the public, and what we are commiting our personal investment of social capital to, when we choose to join Edgeryders.
As for the licensing issues, an open license ,CC et al, is both a social contract AND some legal jargon ( not gibberish). The legal jargon is purely there to re-enforce the existing social contract in a way that makes explicit how people are supposed to behave, and helps avoid future conflict because the quid-pro-quo’s are explicitly laid out in a manner that is enforcable within the existing legal jurisdictions.
The GPL and the CC licensing regimes, are a couple of excellent hacks within the legal system.
They are important because they help protect us from the bad actors who would end up ripping us off. Over 30 years experience in the creative industries has taught me that there are a lot of sharks out there, and setting up the protections necessary, and making them explicit, and legally enforcable, means that 95% of the scumbags and psychopaths will go looking for an easier mark.
It’s also good to see the transparency of this conversation. Usually this sort of “airing dirty laundry” takes place in private discussions. It’s one of the strengths of the Open Source movement that we can address this in a public forum and come out feeling stronger for it.
It’s interesting to compare “People Wearing Start-Up T-Shirts” to “People Wearing Band T-Shirts”, as they both act as identifiers for a particular form of tribe, but are doing so for very different reasons.
Katalin’s idea about the stone is an excellent idea, as using a Mudra rather than a Mandala gives a very different flavour of experience. By it’s very nature, it is explicit in how it changes the way you think . The act of creating your own personal rituals like this is a very effective tool.
Also, compare the London Hackspace, and how they’ve created a simple set of logo’s, and how different members of the hackspace have extended them into their own creative work.
Excellent conversation.
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Thanks anyway
Billy Smith, I never got around to thanking you for the positive contributions and “oh, why not?” spirit. I am afraid the discussion got a little intense and your contributions were not duly taken into account as a result. Apologies! I look forward to buying you a beer, in Matera or wherever we next meet.
NP… :))
Always happy to help.
Most of the infrastructure that i’ve got direct access to is here in London. I’ve got other friends in other cities that can help out in similar ways, mostly in Europe. We’re a network of independent musicians that were performing distributed manufacturing before this internet stuff got started. ( Get off my lawn… etc.etc.etc. 
)
Sadly, i won’t make it to Matera. I had brain surgery last year to remove a tumour, and i’ve ended up with focal epilepsy. They’ve been trying to find the correct combination of medicine to stabilise the seizures for the last 15 months, but they’re still not there yet. Means that i can’t really travel unaccompanied. It’s very annoying, but i’m alive to complain about it… :))
Give me a shout when you’re next in London.
tDCS
I’m not giving any medical advice whatsoever, just wanting to … ehm, just mention that there is tDCS, a DIY-able treatment approach which can affect epilepsy as well: “researchers in South Korea published work on a pattern of electrode placement, called a montage, used to treat children with epilepsy” [source]. That’s already all I have read about it … I was just amazed what people will try in a DIY manner.
Hope you will fully recover!
Amazing
FYI, Nassim Taleb in Antifragile defended an entirely empirical + evolutionary approach to knowledge. Example: many religions advocate fasting. Ostensibly the reasons are devotional, but it turns out there are physiological advantages. Taleb’s point is: if there were none, those practices would have been wiped out long ago. His idea is that practices that have lasted a long time must be on to something.