++
“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.
1 Like
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?
4 Likes
Spot on.
Very well put Vinay.
1 Like
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).
2 Likes
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.
3 Likes
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.