PreSummit
Weekly Report #6
Katalin Hausel
On the first weekend of May 2015, those currently most involved in unMonastery work met in Athens: Ben Vickers, Bembo Davies, James Lewis, Kei Kreutler, Lauren Lapidge, Luisa Lapacciana, MK Jaffer, Juliana van Hemerlyck, Jeff Andreoni, and myself.
‘Operation Kansas’ was prompted by a gradual but noteworthy degradation of our ability to support and enable each other’s activities within the unMonastery. It was proposed that this perceived misfiring could be due to a lack of shared and articulated purpose of our work. We came together with the commitment to sit in our working circles until we could distill a collective vision that would define clear and achievable goals.
The day before the gathering officially started, we held an Open Dinner in celebration of Senait’s Kitchen, a community mobilisation project with unMonasterian Jeff Andreoni as primary agent and organiser. We invited several key people from Athens Development Agency (ADDMA), a European funding body which unMonastery hopes will deem us worthy of support. Even though they will no doubt read this reflection of my personal impatience, here is my impression: the ADDMA talks have been going on for months, without any concrete commitment on both sides, and with a tangible laziness on behalf of the Athens unMonasterians to pursue this possible avenue to secure our future. It was an obvious starting point for the conversation to commence: what do we want from ADDMA, what projects and plans shall we present to them, what is the overall goal of the somewhat limp negotiations? The discussion around stakeholders including individual unMonasterians, invisible stakeholders like The Future, and potential funders, was a good warm-up exercise for the days ahead.
The next day we started the proper preSummit at a mediterranean villa used as a small church. Starting with morning practice and morning circle, we tried to have a conversation about what brought each of us to unMonastery. Lauren and Jeff told us they were unMonasterians before even unMonastery existed, and that they expect to be supported by the organisation. Ben articulated his attraction to monastery life, the dedication to work, and the inevitability of breakdown of life as we know it. I presented my story, somewhat different from everyone else, not coming from a desire to radicalise life, but to normalise it, to enable life structures that allow people, including myself, to work in times of displacement or crisis, which I also view as an unavoidable part of our times. I found this conversation extremely useful, although we did not quite manage to go around and hear everyone’s point. It made transparent the inevitably double function of the unMonastery: the infrastructure to support each individual inside it, and the individual work that gives meaning for the infrastructure to exist. We moved on to giving ourselves large, inflated fictive titles, in pairs, which then were edited by the group. Last, we tried to define the unMonastery as something that is open, and identify some further characteristic to ensure openness, which led to the breakdown of the discussion, probably because we were too exhausted. Articulating a shared well-defined vision of what unMonastery is for this particular group remained elusive.
The second day of the preSummit we talked about roles and responsibilities. Jeff identified himself as a client of the unMonastery, inasmuch as he wants the infrastructure to work but has no interest in the specifics of it.
Here is our list of ROLES and RESPONSIBILITIES — the team of unMonastery Athens:
- Jeff,
- Role: Firestarter / Super Nova / Mercury
- Responsibilities: Fieldwork, Coordinator, Project Starter
- Katalin,
- Title: Her Endurance, Reformer of the Fundamentalist Ethics of the Materan School of unMonastery
- Role: unAbbot, unAbbess
- Responsibilities: Engine, Facilitator, Scribe, Articulator
- James,
- Role: Project Collaborator,
- Responsibilities: Resource Management, Strategy, Technical, Hands on technical
- Luisa,
- Role: Psychiatric Warden, Hug Meister, Calibrator
- Responsibilities: In-House Quality Control, Carer of Wellbeing, Fieldworker, Devotee, The Whip
- Lauren,
- Role: Instigator, Scout, The Hook
- Responsibilities: Recruitment, Connector, Scoping, Hunter Gathering, Opportunist
- Juliana,
- Role: Eco Warrior, Horticulturalist, Keeper of the Empress (kitchen), “The normal one”
- Responsibilities: Outreach (meeting and matching random strangers), Projects
- Penny,
- Role: Analyst, Reflector, Mirror
- Responsibilities: Scribe,
unMonastery Athens Away Team
- Emkay,
- Role: Diagnostics, Funnel, Cartographer
- Responsibilities: Social Hygiene, Role Keeper, Dictionary/Glossary
- Bembo,
- Title: The Cardinal
- Role: On Call Shaker
- Responsibilities: Scribe, Shaking
- Kei,
- Title: Experimental Researcher, Secret-Future-Builder and Remnant-in-Hiding of the Eternally Fallen Vanguard (To Be Continued), or The Key
- Role: Theoretician, Futurist, Remote Resource
- Responsibilities: Injecting exploration, Perspective, Speculative Engineering,
- Ben,
- Title: His Benevolence (Formerly the Martyred and Intrepid Phoenix of the late EdgeRyders School of the unMonastery, “still breathing #ok”)
- Role: Mentor
- Responsibilities: Mentoring, Fundraising, Avatar of Stakeholders, To serve
Thinking about roles made it apparent that everyone present is willing to anchor their personal understanding of what unMonastery is to a deep and specific commitment to the unMonastery Athens project — not to the generic concept of unMonastery, but to enabling this particular iteration to succeed. This may be one of the general insights from our meeting, that each unMonastery is and should always be specific to a place, people and time. The universal idea cannot act as a shared purpose. The ‘we’ can only be found in practise.
Identifying roles also made it clear that people who have no interest in unMonastery beyond wanting to be enabled by it, do not have to sit in the circle as we were trying to discuss what structure to create for unMonastery Athens. Jeff and Juliane left to go to a permaculture festival and seed swap event, while we continued the conversation in the circle. In the end, we have written down some key points, each of us, and put them together, without editing, in 17 points.
Commitments of unMonastery Athens:
The usefulness of the list is outside of the scope of the list itself.
WE COMMIT TO:
- Openness and accessibility, openness and integration with others, sharing and replicating the work, sharing the work.
- Tools of:
- - remaining calm,
- - visceral added value
- - listening to each other
- - sitting in circles.
- Realistic expectations, taking considered, pragmatic action.
- Sustainable systems to live by, living sustainably, let nothing go to waste, frugal abundance.
- Personal development and learning.
- Structure, stability, and routine as a way of living in common.
- Being explicit about commitment.
- Share and work to a vision, and the knowledge of how.
- Processes of care, ensuring each others well being and safety, awareness, group mentality, humility, deep interpersonal respect, vulnerability, collective wellbeing, desire personal well-being, taking care of each other, recognising and sitting with our contempt (interrogate our grievances).
- Acknowledgement of the collapse and the political climate.
- Respect for culture, community and human tradition; to open source and to recording everything.
- Commitment to cyclical (scheduled) process of reevaluation.
- The survival of the ‘we’.
- Camaraderie, collaboration, listening to each other, supporting each other; those inside the unMonastery always working in good faith; mutual group and personal support.
- To knowing that we do not know.
The individual contributions were put together in an unedited form, as we have no idea what will prove important. We don’t even know how these can be put into practice, what level of responsibility each unMonasterian needs to take in order to support each other, and whether these are sufficient to enable everyone’s work.
Instead of a shared vision, we agreed to work together to build unMonastery Athens, — to focus on the instance, rather than the general concept — and took on specific and well defined roles. We developed a vocabulary to understand our personal organisational responsibilities and interests(unMonastery infrastructure, client, the roles). It remains an experiment, to see what this strange personal, almost emotional connection within the group will evolve into. My impression is that our inability to articulate a vision is less due to a paralysis of the conversation and more to a reluctance to be too ideological and generic on the one hand, and a fear of oversimplification on the other.
Since then, unMonastery Athens spurred itself into activity: we pulled together a list of ongoing activities:
We decided how we will present unMonastery at Commonsfest Athens: after a brief introduction to the unMonastery history and concept, we will form two groups, two round table conversations to cover the following topics: Strangers, Mapping and the Commons, an idea generating workshop to imagine scenarios where being a stranger can be a useful contribution to the commons; and OSCEDays, a pre-hackaton workshop involving numerous local organisations working around the concept of open source circular economy.
We will launch athens.unmonastery.org today, the plants on the balcony are growing, we are working on plans for unSummit and a surprise proposition for the next Living on the Edge conference. It would be a stretch to say the future is clear, but at least we seem to be able to harness our own energy in a more synchronised way. New people are coming soon, paths prove to be clearly impossible or still trackable after all. It is not that things are moving towards something more concrete: it is more that we all agree that this is unMonastery as it is for now, a practice, a somewhat still haphazard way of living and working together. The experimentation continues.
