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.