What's the trade-off between the current day-to-day tasks and the prep-work for LOTE4?

Workspaces LOTE4 “The Stewardship”
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I’ve been looking at the activity on this website and most of the recent activity is aimed at  the LOTE4 unconf.

I’ve been unable to find much going on for the day-to-day running of the projects.

There seems to be a mis-match between the level of activity relating to the unconference, and the level of activity for the existing projects.

Granted that LOTE4 is an important event for the group, but i find it concerning that there’s lots of work going on for LOTE4, and not that much on the practical daily activities for the individual projects.

It could be that as a newbie to this community i’m just looking in the wrong places, (which is another issue altogether) but i’m worried that concentrating on the unconf is meaning that we’re losing focus on the regular work that needs doing.

If anyone can help me with this, i’d be grateful.

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Fair point

It’s a legitimate point. But really, I am not seeing a conflict. LOTE4 weaves quite well into what people are doing: Kiderwind, for example, emerged as a project as a result of @Marc working on his solar tracker in the unMonastery; LOTE4 is only a waypoint, in which the group gets some help from Leo and others to make a step forward with the software. Similar arguments can be made for most – probably all – hackathon tracks and conference sessions: they are all weaving into one project, sometimes more than one. Some sessions feed into the unMonastery, as a container of projects, and/or Edgeryders itself, as a community of projects. In other words, the conflict disappears if you focus on LOTE4’s content instead of its organisation.

The tradeoff is always the same – and this is the 4th LOTE, we’ve been there: getting together in real life boosts everyone’s energy, but takes time and effort. So far it’s been worth it, but of course you are right, it’s a struggle. What would you suggest?

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If i had an answer, i’d be implementing it already… :))

We’ve all come across this situation before. If you’ve ever had a deadline to meet and had to deal with the final rush to get things done, then you’ll know what i’m talking about. I remember that anti-pattern, both from teaching and from being a student… :))

I also realised that this pattern of applying pressure/stress is a very effective form of control.

The Situationist’s called it “The Spectacle”. By creating artificial constraints on the supply of the essentials, you can create an immense amount of activity with people running around in order to survive, as a way of keeping them too busy to look up and see if there’s a different way of doing things. Hydraulic despotism.

And here we are, as a group trying to find new ways of doing things, and we fall back into the same patterns of behaviour that we should be trying to move away from… :))

And this time we’re doing it to ourselves… :))

If anyone has suggestions for more effective way of getting things done, i’m open to idea’s…

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Hmm… no :slight_smile:

What would the essential being artificially constrained? Here the thing is:

  1. What we don't build ourselves does not get done.
  2. A small group of people is willing to act as a first mover. This anchors the process and avoids it degenerating in a waiting game (when everybody says "I'll go if others go").

We (the small group of initiators) have a venue, and some people willing to show up. We have the energy and the interest to talk about certain things we are passionate about (me, for example). Anything else people want, has to be built. Of course, people can decide to take it easy and free ride, but rises a fairness issue.

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Ok.

When i originally posted this, there were only three events in the schedule. That has changed ever so slightly… :))

And i hadn’t found the work that was being done on the Kiderwind hackathon.

It’s looking a lot more functional now.

As for “the essentials being artificially constrained”, that was purely in a situation where someone was using these constraints as a form of control, hence the “Hydraulic despotism” comment. Read up on the energy economics of early China, or Sumer and Akkad, for some horrible examples of how this anti-pattern can last for centuries…

I’m assuming that we are intending to make something completely different, rather than having “The New Revolution” become “Business-As-Usual” with just a different set of faces in charge… :))

In this situation, the only constraints that we’ve got are the amount of time and personal energy that we have available to put in. That and the current physical constraints that we have by virtue of being manifest in THIS universe, rather than a universe with a different flavour of Planck’s constant.

Working from the population ecological Point-Of-View, that you have to live within the limits of the “strategy of the least”, meaning that whatever resource is the minimum quantity necessary to survive, that resource becomes the boundary condition that is the frame of reference that we are working within.

Working from the axiom the “Efficiency is the intelligent route to laziness!”, we need to optimise the way we do things, to get the most effective long-term results.

Doing that successfully, without compromising our basic principles, will be the trick to achieve.

If our limits are time and personal energy, then we need to use our time effectively, to get the maximum results for the minimum effort.

eg. When i signed up, it would have been useful to receive an automatically generated email that would say “Hi, Introduce yourself here, tell your backstory here, here’s what’s going on in the short-, medium-, and long-terms, here’s a list of projects, with the project time-lines, with help needed on these tasks, for the short-, medium-, and long-term tasks, and here’s  how you can start with your own projects.”

We’ve got some of these things already, but they aren’t easy to find, and they haven’t been explicitly documented.

It is possible that i’ve been looking in the wrong places, in which case please accept my apologies, and point me at them… :))

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Maybe some improvement…

…could come from @danohu's hackathon track, which is exactly about improving Edgeryders. This user experience stuff is also great, as it can be used to involve people with little or no programming skills. Not sure whether you are planning to come for the hackathon (or indeed at all!), but if you are you might consider joining us here; and if you are not, you could leave Daniel some suggestions.

I am relieved, however: the amount of time and energy we have to put in is really scarce, not artificially so. I guess this means we dodge being seen as “hydraulic tyrants” :slight_smile: