Hi Alberto,
so here’s the key, to me: getting people together for prolonged thinking on deep topics is usually very expensive or impossible. Part of the reason my own main activity, the hexayurt project moves so slowly is because we don’t have much money - all progress is decentralized, volunteer, and “it’ll get done when it gets done.” I tried once to get around this, with the idea of Guptafest (the name was a joke) - a nine-day conference in Cloughjordan, Ireland. The idea was that we’d all come in on Friday night, with the following schedule:
Friday night, arrive
Saturday, Sunday: meet, greet, discuss the big ideas and the topics of discussion
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday: work your day job 9-5 so you’re “working from home” then, each night, have a dinner where we pick one of the topics and discuss.
Saturday, Sunday: finalize conclusions, and prepare a report on the event, and then leave to be back in the routine for Monday
The idea was to have a chance to think deeply without interrupting people’s flow of paying work, a chance to pack in just a little more.
Now compare to the Unmonestary. It’s a month, two months, three months. It’s a chance to think at length, with the same group of people, with a few coming and going, on something. For me, I’d try and arrange to have some of the very smart software people I know get together and do some work on Free Software for Enterprise Logistics - figuring out on maps and spreadsheets how to manage resources for events like Burning Man (fun) or natural disasters (Work!). That’s not a topic there’s much work on, we’d be starting more-or-less from scratch. The NGOs doing that kind of work do what everybody else does: excel spreadsheets. The military use billion dollar ERP systems. There’s nothing inbetween. Doing a project like that, in the initial stages, requires face-to-face meetings, discussions in front of whiteboards, real thinking about the structure of the job. “What are we trying to achieve?” is often a much harder question than “how are we going to do this?”
So to colocate a team to start a project like that, at the moment, requires a ton of money - flights to a location, somewhere to say, room and board. It needs people to clearl their calendars, too. By the time it’s all done, you can’t really afford to give away the software you wanted to make Free Software in the first place, and you might as well have started a company. It’s not The Way.
And that’s why we need spaces like the Unmonestary. Cover the basic costs to buy the time to create great things to put into the Commons. It’s a way of building big, complex things in the Creative Commons pool, rather than simply constructing more outright-owned artifacts just because independent hackers couldn’t afford a hotel.
It might sound strange, but the difference between open and closed is often as simple as a workshop space.