Who:
Sylvia
Lars
Sharon
Seigo
Gien
1 Introduction Round
G: New kittens
S: Described the Maker Walk
L: Switched ‘Actions’ to ‘Howtos’
2 Update on recent DocuDays
SP introduced the Maker Walk documentation that I documented during the last Docu-Days.
SR & GW met about the document night previously.
3 Global Video Reporting
LZ set up the global video reporting for 2017.
4 Strategic framework
SL: We need to review whether or not we want to be a social open enterprise. Sylvia making suggestions for a better process for the SF development. I still think that we need to decide what we want to be in five years’ time, as this will decide everything that goes in there. How we fnance ourselves, how we operate, what do we want to be…while still maintain our fluidity? We should decide what kind of structure that we want to have.
Lars: What would a scenario be for OSCEdays in five years time. Sylvia?
Sylvia: I like the idea of non-profit, social enterprise or coop
LZ: What is it about? Selling products?
SL: Yes, selling products, services. But about social impact rather than an economic one.
GW: A company or a cooperative?
SL: A cooperative – a company is usually for profit.
LZ: Is the social enterprise not for profit as well as social impact?
SL: You can make money but not make a profit. It doesn’t mean that you are not making money, which is what a coop is about.
LZ: Do you see where this Coop would be registered?
SL: We need a registration point. But we will have members all over the world. You need a HQ for registration purposes, because the decision-making body will still be BoST. We cannot be a Foundation because they are very restricted (they can’t sell products / services)
LZ: Do you have an idea for a product?
SL: We can go back to becoming this marketplace through our platform. Knowledge-creation, people who think about OSCE all of the time, this is also something that we offer. If we become an organisation we would be more structured about this. We would still do events.
GW: I’m writing a book right now to discuss the model that we are proposing…to work with a scholar named Jose Ramoz. He developed a concept called cosmo-localisation. It’s all about leveraging the internet to spread knowledge in the commons and download designs locally. Our variant is to have a commons franchise…it’s a franchise in the sense that it is a brand. Anyone can participate. Initially the innovation community, all the OSCE designers can participate. There is a global library of designs. Anyone can use those designs wherever they are in the world. We could set up the global eco-shop. OS reconfigurable modular furniture. Lars would like to open one, because he’s part of the innovation network you get all the knowledge from Gien to set up your own eco-shop. Maybe there is some nominal admin fee, but it’s mostly free. You get to share in the library that we co-create, we can all make a living from it. You don’t have to scrounge around. I spoke with Jose Ramos. We need a digital collaboration platform that’s effective for knowledge sharing. Gabor is hosting an OSCEdays in Hungary. He is nearly finalised his digital collaboration platform. Roberto (A’dam). I have a video recording of what it would look like. I would like OSCEdays to finish the program, then we can all participate. I’ll play the video so that you can get an idea.
Gien shares screen: Envienta & Bee Collective
SR: Sounds grandiose. I’m not sure I’ve got a solution set as well formulated in my head. It’s not dissimilar. It needs to be something that allows people to access knowledge easily and make impact locally. I don’t know what platform that translates into. I’m missing some action / impact, it’s not easily navigated. It needs to show results. That’s what I’m keen on, but I’m not proposing a solution. If I was to bring my friends into this world, I would need to show them some exciting solutions. How do we deliver that. It is around what’s starting to happen now in terms of better documentation, maybe we are doing things that we need to translate into documentation more frequently. Maybe we build up a library and it becomes a library. Gien has cool ideas about the governance approach. My view would be that we need to occupy a middle-ground. It’s great, but it’s not like other people aren’t doing something similar.
LZ: OSCEdays is providing knowledge that people can apply locally. EU funding would be more like a research-type organisation that creates this project about knowledge sharing, less so about products.
SR: I’m not about the shop mentality. I see some difficulty. The benefit of the shop is that you can sell globally. I’m not 100% clear on how the shopping would work, it’s not just about delivering practical solutions on the ground but also knowledge sharing.
LZ: I met Sharon and there was one question: do people really go to the forum and follow the steps of some documentation. Is this something that people do?
SR: Unless that person is very invested then I’d say not. I designed a vertical aquaponics and I went to Youtube. It needs to be more solutions focused…
GW: That’s the cosmo-localisation
SL: When I envision the shop, we can connect customers with providers. I want to build a shredder. We can connect someone in Lima to someone in Berlin. We will build it under our organisation and if he builds more and sells them we will have a fee. Everything must be OSCE. It must comply with OSCE. Another option could be for cities to open shops under our banner. It’s very important that we can convince that this is not just theoretical.
GW: You are talking innovation community hubs in each city.
SL: Yes. And then we also get feedback from the localities. I made it with better materials. Next time we have the better materials being used.
SL: We are not going to become Walmart. What would set us apart is allowing us to define what a CE is in reality. And we already know that many of the cities work on something practical. We wouldn’t be a shop primarily. It would be a point of exchange for various different things. We stay as we are which has weaknesses. People don’t know who to make a commercial connection with.
SR: I agree with SP about the campaigns. There is a big focus towards making. Anything we can do to decrease resource use in the home I think is good. Helping organisations to campaign for that and using less.
LZ: I see myself mostly within what Seigo and Sharon said. I like five year’s vision. I see OSCE as a fast moving and fast changing entity. I like the way it is evolving now. Everything I like about the OSCE is manifested in the Make: Circularity poster. It is the perfect OSCE product. We produce it and it has already been taken up by many people, Suez, I help people here in Berlin. I shape their vision towards OSCE, not a lot, but a little bit in the direction we see things going on…maybe the next project could be a campaigning project that are possible to do now with the resources we have and the knowledge…so slowly developing things further. At the moment, we don’t have an organisation and this is limiting. We have a number of moonshot projects, that I think we would struggle to fulfil now. If we think there are projects, that there is a really cool project, then we would need an organisation. We merge and go with the flow and the real potential in OSCEdays.
SL: Strategic framework is about having a long-term vision. Either we don’t need it or we do.
LZ: We shape constantly within this five-year. I think this is a five-year vision.
SP: I think that this is something that could be captured within a five-year document.
LZ: Now OSCE is quite a different thing to what it started out as. New possibilities popped up and I liked that. For example, there are open platforms with products on them, then what would we do tomorrow. What would we need to do?
GW: We simply have this as one project within a whole host of projects, it is something that we open up to the community. I think it makes sense to have a long-term vision and we need real projects that have measurable impact. If those take off then those would stimulate us to take the next logical step.
LZ: I also think that those are the products that we want to see in the World. Or more sophisticated repair companies coming on board. I think that if there is a person who is able to set up that project, then I’m not sure that they would want to use the OSCEdays brang (?) Do we want that everyone uses our platform? It is risky, what if we lose interest, go broke. There are so many platforms. I personally think that is good. Decentralised solutions are stronger. How we can inspire this decentralised movement.
GW: I have thought about this idea about platforms, it’s not necessarily what I would want to do. I think it’s about encouraging diversity. We have many different organisations that are federated. We are not trying to be another platform. We add value to everyone’s projects. One area where we could be better is, we don’t have enough global collaboration on projects. We lose enormous potential for synergy between city projects. The driving idea is to facilitate collaboration between countries. I don’t think we encourage it enough on our platform. We need to take practical steps. We need to help them more. We have all this resources all over the World. People are becoming less interested. It’s petering down. We’re not fully leveraging it. We looked at this idea. We need to lead by example. We need to lead by example. I need the modular reconfigurable furniture. Lars, I know you’ve done some modular furniture.
LZ: This is also how I see it. I think what made this explode in the first year is because of buzzwords. Then they ran some local events and then they realised how difficult it was to run a local event. I think it’s good to go back to a smaller group of people who are interested in doing them together. Maybe we set a subject and exchange the documentation that they already have. What I learned ‘who of you used a YouTube to repair something’? It is not very well known that this is what you can do with the Internet. Perhaps, we can create this awareness through small examples. Sorry, Gien?
GW: Why don’t we, amongst us, including those who aren’t here, why don’t we just list all our projects and see if we can help each other with a project. We’re the geeks. We’re the ones who are giving our free time to do this.
LZ: I think that’s a beautiful idea.
GW: Make a list of projects that we are doing and see how we can help each other. Otherwise, we are reinventing the wheel. I don’t know a lot of what you are doing.
LZ: I love this. It helps to create the synergies.
SP: Said something.
GW: I agree.
LZ: I disagree.
GW: How about we make a master list of projects and mark those that are moonshot projects.
SL: To summarise, I think we need to allow things to develop organically.
SP: I still think we need an organisation.
SL: My fear is that we will lose good people if we are way too fluid and changing all the time. Or not focusing on some clear and deliverable objectives. Let us see. As you can all see a lot of people from BoST are somehow away. I don’t know where the balance is between very flexible and creative and being more structured for the kind of work that we are doing. We should strive to find that balance.
LZ: The problem of OSCEdays is that we don’t really have something. It was an interesting question. This made people interested. Then, global events were a big thing. Now there are no projects and content. We had this chance to find some people that are interested. I say that what we have been we can’t become anymore. Now let’s find some more projects to see how we can contribute to the World. I don’t see how we can make projects without funding. Lots of people are working on mapping, maybe there is something in that.
GW: I think that one-day intensive workshop is a great idea. I think we are skimming the surface. We can bring in experts to help us. Maybe experts on forming different types of organisations.
LZ: I met a lot of bands who never rehearsed. E.g. now we have this poster and we developed it together, maybe we could sell it on the website. With real projects let’s see how it develops.
GW: Maybe that wasn’t the answer. Sharon keeps bringing up DAO because she has an intuitive sense of it being useful. We need some sort of five-year goal to keep us focused.
SP: I think there is a misunderstanding about these things being exclusive.
LZ: I agree.
GW: I agree.
SR: I think that we can start to use Loomio to help build momentum.
LZ: What would happen in Loomio?
SR: It would allow us to work more realtime.
LZ: Why do you think it will happen more in Loomio rather than on the forum?
SR: If it was on my phone I could do it on my phone.
LZ: I ask because that the other day Sharon said to me that the forum is problematic. So I am totally open to all of you telling me what is wrong with it.
SR: I don’t see it as a massive problem. But I think it could be more user-friendly.
LZ: We have a lot of open ends now. Do we set up a Loomio? Schedule a strategic meeting? One-day intensive workshop?
GW: What about the weekend? Some people work on the weekend.
SR: I think it’s for those who want to be there.
GW: Yeah, but let’s advertise it as ‘one-day workshop to decide the fate of the OSCEdays’. We should discuss what homework we need to do before the workshop.
SR: Is this the best format? I’m not sure it’s the most efficient way to do things.
GW: In the meantime we can think about better alternatives.
LZ: Six hours is too much. We don’t have anything else to discuss in the BoST calls. Should we discuss this in the BoST.
GW: It should be structured.
SL: You mean to work 3 x 2 times over BoST calls.
LZ: Yes, we have nothing concrete to agree on today. Maybe it’s good to have a structure. Can you moderate the call Gien and provide us with some structure to have the call.
SR: I think that not everyone has the same idea about vision and mission.
GW: I think we need to clarify everyone’s different views. Maybe everyone can write a one-pager on their vision.
SL: Just add it in another colour. Everyone should write each heading if they have an idea they should put it there. Organisation / Objectives.
SR: In my experience we can’t have certain organisations unless it aligns with the vision / mission. At some points it is unwieldy. I don’t know if having 16 pages of different missions and visions is going to be helpful.
SL: We shouldn’t look for it outside the document and is a useful place to aggregate.
GW: For each of us to articulate a vision from our perspective will force us to think. Let’s keep it short.
SR: Yeah.
LZ: So, we all add another paragraph to the document. I think we could start a new document.
SL: No. One it would be unfair on other people that have already done the work. I didn’t read it all, I just focused on the main things that are relevant now. For example, legal matters are irrelevant now.
LZ: So the consensus is that everyone adds something to this document.
