unMonastery Athens

unReport #5

Katalin Hausel

I missed last week’s report. It could have been just one sentence: holding my breath.

It did seem like a point of fracture is to come within the unMonastery. To disclose the outcome, as it is not a detective novel: it is not what happened. Through the unpredictable, graceful ways of sitting in a circle, we located an indiscernible understanding of unMonastery that holds us together, resisted the temptation to try and define it, and crafted a (near) future for our endeavours. We all agreed with Jeff, that there is something here. There is something here.

The idea for the preSummit came about in a hangout back in March, where we found ourselves once again dropping the subject at hand and sinking into generalities, snatching the word from each other instead of listening. On Ben’s suggestion, we launched operation “Kansas” and decided to set a date to meet face to face and identify a path that will lead us from the current state of chaos to a more ordered unMonastery operation. The same idea had been brought up by Cristiano a couple of weeks before that — all evidence pointed to a much needed open conversation among the core.

unMonastery suffers from an organisational inertia. We had a big directors’ meeting (including everyone who worked 200 hours a year on the project, and/or pledges to do so) scheduled for May 1, so we should have had our ‘visioning’ meeting before that, but instead, unSummit was postponed.

A detailed description of the outcome is to follow this weekly report, so I will not go into the details. What was personally surprising to me, is that using two tools (‘Trusting the process’ and ‘unHack’) we managed to distill a practical outline of what unMonastery wants to do in Athens, how that can be done as a group, what roles and tasks we each take on, and what set of rules that Athens unMonastery is committed to. We did not come up with a general vision for unMonastery — instead we decided that each iteration needs to have its own. We did not write the Protocol, but we personally pledged to commit to a set of rules, applicable only within the scope of unMonastery Athens walls.