We care for communities- so how do we share the load of keeping them going?

[nadia]

“Edgeryders set out to find what issues - economic, social and legal - need to be addressed if we are to build and inhabit a world of commons.”

Ela posted a summary of what she had learned during the FCI series on Edgeryders, and in the follow up phone conversation we got into something that has been at the back of my mind since I organised the MC For Makers event in Berlin last summer. It has to do with the challenges of building communities of active participants around appreciated initatives, and keeping them going. Especially in contexts where the protagonists are doing so on a largely voluntary basis, or on a speculative one…here goes!

So, last summer Ela and I co-organised a workshop in Berlin called Mc For Makers:

“Super Duper proud to be able to be putting together what is turning out to be a kick ass, seriously wonderful, fun, useful, facilitated by top notch people, you’ll leave with new concrete knowledge and skills, meet people you never would have otherwise Effing AWSOME Conference and workshop. Seriously, you DON’T want to miss this. If you’re somewhere else, travel. If you have other plans, cancel. This is the shit.”

And it was. FUN. A lot of Fun. People did the preparatory work and came from all over the place to participate in an intensive one day workshop. And from what I can gather it was highly appreciated.

“ It was awsome, thank you very much!!! Elo Hyde”

I think a big part of the reason as to why it turned out so well is that it was the result of  a collaborative effort of a diverse group of really inspiring people ( some of whom, like Peter Troxler, are here in Edgeryders). I have lost traxk of how much love and attention to detail we put into preparing the workshop. And we made it free of charge, funding it from the ticket sales for the more commercial conference and exhibition parts of the event as a gift to the creative communities of which we are a part.

Which is why we were surprised when we sent out a follow up e-mail after the workshop asking people for feedback and thoughts for the next round. No response. And at this point I realised that I was going to be a lot more selective about how to be generous with my time and energy in the context. I also started paying a lot more attention to how I behaved as a community member.

Collaborative efforts of the kind we need to do things like caring for commons or achieving socio-political change, or even just throwing parties often  have the contributions of dedicated individuals over long periods of time as a driver. So how do we acknowledge these contributions, value and nurture the skills involved and support the protagonists of existing and new initiatives? How do we build good healthy communities where people share responsibilites for keeping good things going?

[lyne_robichaud]

It has to make me grow

The feeback loop… (Euh, sorry to ask, does this really exist?)

Exists or not, I do not really care. I do what I have to do. Others can do what they want.

Perhaps the feedback loop exists, but in my environment, it does not really exist, except for very rare individuals that I can count on the five fingers of one hand.

That said, this does not prevent me from making plans of collaboration. But I choose very carefully on what projects I get involved.

My criteria are pretty simple. I must feel passionate about the cause, and I must feel good with the people of the team. For instance, I might feel strongly about opengov, but if the people are arrogant, you can be sure I am not going to lift a finger. I let the arrogants do things their arrogant stuff, and too bad if I'm not in the game. (Since there are a lots of arrogants, I end up doing not much. But this is my choice.)

I noticed that life shows me choices. Lately, collaborative activities alway arise on the same day, and therefore I am forced to decide on a direction. I follow my heart. Even if there is a super mega hyper collaborative event going on somewhere, I can choose another path.

It must be something that I know will make me grow, where chances are I will learn something. I am ready to reach for the moon to give my 300% for a project, but it has to bring me something.

I have no expectations from people. I have no expectation from anyone. Most of the time, I give 20, 30 times more than I receive. But it does not matter. Because life accounting has a weird twist. Maybe I give a lot, but Life gives me back many graces. I reached a state of bliss, which is actually extremely rare. I receive (happiness). Priceless…

[chara_oikonomidou]

Keeping a community alive

Hello Nadia,

thank you for bringing this mission report just the moment when we are talking and brainstorming about how to harvest all this experience of the Edgeryders.

First of all to understand better what happened with MC for Makers, why you think that people didnt interact and didnt feedback afterwards? what is your main point of happening this? I completely agree of being selective to which projects you get involved and it has to be done regarding what you get out of this in relation with the effort put. Although I am really struggling of achieving it… I need more practise I guess to distinguish the "good"ones from the other ones…

You say that you want to pay more attention on how to behave as a community member. Do you have a more precise plan on your mind? how were you before?

I think to keep alive a community if something is over it is a quite difficult task… It takes time, energy and effort! I think social media are a good mean to do so. Most of the people are connected in one of them so you can keep socializing with them and keep them close to each other by sharing interesting information on them.

[nadia]

Raising expectations and embodying the ideal

I think part of what we did wrong was be too “professional” and approach it as service providers. The project was one that I made space for in a very commercial context. One in which the expectation of the attendees was to be consumers of knowledge served by academics and business profiles- what is sometimes referred to as the dog-and-pony show

I think we did a very good job of building real participation and engagement from the facilitators by involving them in acually designing the workshops from scratch on a shared google doc and via skype chats (chats work waaaaaay better than video or calls for this kind of collective brainstorming). The workshop participants we only involved in a way as consumers towards the end of the process. Part of this was due to the sheer volume of work involved in organising the 250 person conference and exhibition with a tiny team. Part of it was just lack of awareness about what we wanted to happen after the actual event! You know, too myopic.

Mm, I think ethics spread. So say someone is putting a lot of work and energy and making a contribution to something I am working on and generating extra value for me. First of all I try to give gratitude in public, acknowledge their contribution. Also I keep my eyes open for opportunities that come my way and try to share them with that person, whether it’s paid work or the opportunity to get visibility for the work they are doing. If I know they are trying to get into a space or context I’ll try to help if I can, even if that takes time to do.

Mm the hard thing about using certain proprietary platforms is that I don’t necessarily trust them. FB changed the terms of service just as a friend’s initiative that was heavily based on it started to scale. It’s a private company and you’re not paying for the service, which is problematic for me…but you’re right.

[alberto]

Channel inertia?

This may be my own “everything is a network” bias, but communities are people somehow connected. Can we agree on that? If so, then it is safe to state that they will learn to connect to each other in a certain way, and that there will be a certain reluctance to shift from that channel to another. So, I meet my friend Vincent at the climbing gym, and I phone my sister regularly. Of course I could phone Vincent too, but I don’t, because, you know, he is the climbing gym guy. Interacting with him in the context of the climbing gym now comes naturally to me: we know that we will take turns in securing each other, that we will speak mostly English but occasionally French, that it is okay to shout suggestions to each other when we are up there. I could go on, but you see where this is going. It’s like a river that digs its own bed; a dramatic event (an earthquake or a major flood) could alter the course of the river in principle, but it really takes something big for that to actually happen.

So, MC for Makers had a narrative of being a great meetup in Berlin. That’s the context . Email, not so much. This is why, insofar as possible, I try to “fold communities onto themselves”, to use the normal community channel to plan the next step, to collapse into the same space the planning and the execution. A great example of that is Wikipedia: log in and go to the community space. What are they writing the encyclopedia with? A software called Wikimedia. What are they using to coordinate, write guidelines, raise funds, organize parties? Wikimedia again. Easy.

I guess this leads to what I am going to call Cottica’s Conjecture:

Online communities are intrinsically more sustainable than offline ones other than at the small scale

Because online coordination/communication is just orders of magnitude cheaper.