Ben Vickers: The Story of unMonastery

www.unmonastery.eu
www.edgeryders.eu

video under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
CC-BY-SA Sam Muirhead

HOW DID THE UNMONASTERY IDEA COME ABOUT?

The idea for the unMonastery

has now been going for 16 months.

It came about in a session

at the first unconference in Strasbourg.

It was a room of about 30 people

who came together with the realization that,

in order to continue to do the work

that they were doing and not burn out,

not become alienated,

there was the need to build a strong foundation

or what I refer to as an infrastructure

on which to do that work.

Because although people refer to things

like the sharing economy

as a great evolution or paradigm shift or whatever,

despite how great we may think this is,

in our experiences with it,

it doesn't really cut the mustard

when it comes to actually feeding outselves

or paying rent and stuff like that.

So the unMonastery evolved from that conversation of

what we need is a physical space

because none of us really use that much money,

funding isn't necessarily needed

for a lot of the stuff that we execute on

because it's skill-based, it's code-based,

the tools are normally free

and if they're not free we can probably build them.

What we do struggle with is having

property and space in which to do those things.

So that was the kind of natural conversation

that evolved that led us to say "Let's start a set of spaces".

WHY "unMonastery"?

The reason why we adopted the name "unMonastery"

is because we wanted to create a space

that doesn't necessarily have a fixed purpose

but is kind of multi-use

so when we thought about the different kinds of spaces

that have existed throughout history

we thought about the monastery because of the way

they have never really had this fixed purpose:

that they would brew beer,

there was scripture,

there was prayer and worship,

there was a completely different set of actions

that were executed in these spaces

which seemed to mirror the way in which we wanted

to construct a new space

and we looked to other existing structures

such as hackerspaces

and thought there was something incredibly useful and powerful

in those kinds of structures

and particularly their spread.

But one of the things we struggled with is that

hackerspaces don't necessarily have a civic or social contract

with the communities in which they are based

and generally serve the individuals,

whether it be hobbies or personal projects

and things like that.

So the monastery seemed like an interesting model

because it had the same kind of silo approach

that the hackerspaces have

but also has

this kind of social contract and interaction with its community.

Since coining that term as a group actually

if you begin to look at what the monasteries were doing

in the early seventh or eighth century

you begin to realize that maybe the name should have been

REmonastery, because the contribution

that monks and monastic life made to communities

in terms of building the infrastructure and things like that

is actually a lot of what we're attempting to do.

HOW DID THE IDEA BECOME A PROTOTYPE?

So after the first conference the idea did stick

but we didn't really get very far in its development

and we continued to have conversations,

and write documents, and try and think:

how do we get something like this off the ground?

and it wasn't until the 2nd conference in December of last year

that we all sat down, we were like

"Okay, of all the things that we've spoken about

this is the project that we're most committed to".

And in the space of three days

we worked together to formalize some of the structure

of what the space might look like.

We mined the metaphor of the monastery,

begun to think about what would monastic principles

look like in this sense,

and built the website, created the logo,

put out an initial call for applications,

that asked quite a lot of complex and difficult questions

of anybody that wanted to apply,

because we saw this is like a real pledge of commitment.

Five or six edgeryders came forward and said

"yes I would fully commit to this project,

were you to establish it somewhere".

And coupled with that we have Alberto Cottica,

who is one of the the founding members of Edgeryders,

and he was working with Matera 2019

in the [European] City of Culture [2019] bid,

and it was only in this context the we had the opportunity

to offer this as a potential model

and Matera was interested and said yes

and so that's kind of,

in terms of necessity of realizing the project,

how we end up in Matera.

But I think it's really important to understand,

particularly when I came here for the first time,

that it's an incredible place

but one can't describe to other people;

and the generosity

and the way in which the community

here has interacted with us

makes it seem like

it almost couldn't start in any other place!

WHAT'S THE FOCUS FOR unMonastery?

Edgeryders originally developed within a policy context,

so the unMonastery does have a policy slant.

But [it] is much more focused on constructing a model

that can create meaning and can create a safe space

in which to articulate that meaning.

But in the present moment there are a set of problems

that the unMonastery has kind of been constructed to solve

by combining them.

So the 3 primary issues that the unmonastery is focused on is

- high unemployment, particularly on the part of

skilled people graduating from University

- a massive amount of unused housing stock,

and commercial stock, throughout Europe

- and with the onset of austerity you see

the rolling back of states service provision

and the need to plug that gap if we're to continue.

And then there's 2 other things that are less primary, but that's

- brain drain from small towns and cities to capital cities.

There's the desire to roll that back in some way,

and unMonastery is very firmly a model

that can only be used in the context of small towns and cities,

and never be placed in the capital city

because it's just not appropriate.

- and the last thing is a particular focus

on creating resilient processes, infrastructure,

and ways of working that can be sustainable

in the event of future and existing crises.

So I think those things are really fundamental

to what the unmonastery essentially is

WHAT'S HAPPENING HERE IN MATERA,

AND WHAT'S NEXT FOR unMonastery?

The unMonastery project has been

quite a heavy thing to carry

because there hasn't been any money involved.

Edgeryders is already

quite a precarious distributed network of people.

At the second conference, when we really knew

that we were going to do it,

I stepped forward and said that I would facilitate

and administrate the project

but that would not mean that I was in any way its sole owner

or that I would get to make specific decisions

and I've tried to extricate myself

as much as possible from that process.

So this is probably the first real opportunity

since that moment

to come together again as a community

and to feed in all of the things that we've been thinking

and roughly sketching out online

since that conference in December of last year,

and really solidify what the challenges are,

punch holes in the existing model,

and figure out how we can make something like this

effective in 4 months

because it is only really a prototype,

so there's a lot to build, and construct, and agree on

before we actually turn up here in February.

So the things going forward is

establishing clearer roles for the people

who've stepped forward to be involved in the project,

to accept a series of applications

that have been made meet the criteria of

[addressing the] challenges that exist within Matera

and I think also what has arisen out the last 24 hours

is the need to keep this building alive

between now and February.

So there's a stack of other things that need doing

but I would say that's probably the list of priorities.