schmorpel

Mess up and mix up in market limbo

On Monday, instead of getting the last bits of gear for the event organized, we suddenly found out we are in major trouble with the site owner. Early on, after he already had agreed verbally to our event, I had sent him a text message to inform him of the support of the council and our event date. He (as I found out now) didn't like the way I did this and decided to simply not respond, but I booked it under 'Didn't say no, will follow up later..' and forgot about it all while we were getting busy with other details.

I got yelled at on the phone about not having his final authorization, which is not a nice experience for someone who is already really phone-phobic on the best of days. I believe I could make out 'we still would like to help' and 'agreement still on' between 'THIS IS NOT DONE LIKE THIS' and 'AN EXTREMELY UNPROFESSIONAL WAY OF HANDLING THINGS' and a lot I couldn't really understand. It reminds me that this project is to build a future where you don't have to beg to people who have more properties than they can care for. But as things are, I had to admit I should have followed up with him, had to write a very polite email describing our event and project in detail.

At the same time me and bf had to agree we don't really like the idea of having to make the site safe. It's a bit of a nightmare in more spots than we had initially realized. Also, the lack of tree shade and natural surroundings seems too off-putting for quite a few of the market people, and we also have had feedback that people would like to have regular markets.

So we've decided to take the market serious as its own thing. I composed another email to the council asking for a better spot (the prime recreational spot in the area). Said we would like to talk about regular markets, and could have an association in place tomorrow to more easily formalize any support from them. We've also, just for ourselves, lined up a few other alternative sites. Something will turn up. We had a talk about the anxiety that comes with all this, and concluded we still lighthearted enough about the whole thing, and will just stubbornly continue to organize, apart from Monday when my period doomsday coincided with the sudden site trouble and I spent the day crying about a range of different matters, as expected.

After a few anxiety-filled days with a market floating in empty space (while still receiving registrations for stands), we got answers from both the original site owner and the council. Council wants to meet us again and make us a proposal. Get the wedding party started. They did not tell us what the proposal is, so now we enjoy a few forced days off, slightly nervous, but we welcome the opportunity to imagine in more detail what we want to dream up here - markets, coop, a permanent space for both projects ... after talking to so many different people out there we now know more about what would be interesting and helpful for people, and what we would personally like to be involved in.

We went to a meeting of another group wanting to set up a cooperative. The question keeps floating in the room: start with one larger cooperative or several small ones? Knowing that it is difficult for most people to work together even in small groups (I explain it with the fact that we all are re-learning how to work self-organized in community) I tend to favour starting with smaller groups. For now, we all seem to be studying, learning and stretching out feelers in different directions to find out what each person wants from a coop, which doesn't always coincide. It's good to find this out before sitting in an already existing coop together, so I tend to prefer wanting to meet more people and different combinations of smaller groups during the next few months, to find out who vibes together, which isn't always obvious. Taking it slow but steady in this phase, learning together but not stubbornly insisting in walking towards one or many coops right now, we might end up with a reasonable number of stable coops with the right people working together. Imagine the positive boost for a region where more and more people work together democratically and self-organize.

Highs and hangovers of event organizing

The surprising success so far (nobody has stopped us, we did not get arrested yet, event keeps collecting registrations) and the sudden shift in our lives from hermits to socialites is taking its toll. And that is something I was less prepared for: when your plan is working and that you are creating something you are now co-responsible for this something. Before, while you are just spinning something out of nothing you do not carry the weight of the already existing.

As a person with a cycle I will have at least one PMS day of doom per moon. As my little monthly doomsday approaches, it leads to the above philosophizing, some agonizing and to me writing poems, and I start realizing how it starts to be more difficult to keep track of all the stuff I'm doing and that I urgently need a day off. Luckily a friend has invited to some adventure that involves walking lots of kilometers, so off I go for a half a day, which is usually a good recipe to get my feet back on the ground.

Next week will see us busy renting a generator, meet people about music, transport, other support, hopefully get stuff delivered to pre-assemble our compost toilets, keep collecting registrations and start cleaning the place - we don't really trust the council to do this well or in time so we decided to be prepared and pro-active. I'm trying to get the school involved, maybe have some art done by the kids during the market and bring more people in, and it looks like someone has arranged a meeting with the director next week. Back to school, ugh, but I'll happily make that sacrifice if we can fill the heads of kids with silly ideas.

Now with the market growing I start having ideas of exposing my shabby little machinery collection - the ram pumps, a solar oven, which adds another two days of work to the preparations. Probably won't have time for all that.

More people are coming out of the woodwork about creating cooperatives, which is excellent, and also leads to more, sometimes difficult to organize, meetings.

Events and markets

We've hired a bouncy castle (bf insists it's crucial for any event, I suspect he just wants to get a good bounce himself), went to the alternative fair and second hand market two towns away and distributed flyers (and got more good food, some chili plants and some good bits of talk in the process). We met the local organizer of that fair who recently came to local fame by chasing the police off the market grounds and tearing up their notes when they got too annoying taking people's identities. An approach to keep in mind.

Ideas

I have set up a meeting with a small group of people who might create a special corner at the event where ideas, wishes, inspiration for a cooperative and community center can be gathered. Incidentally: as in my mind a gradual shift from community center to cooperative happened, someone dear and close has objected to anything too business-focused, and they have a point. Where on one hand the beast having some outside legal structure would make a lot of things more easy - on the other hand the inside form of support and solidarity must be remembered, and remain the inner core of this. Edit: the small group is growing larger. Looks like we are having a full on meeting about the community itself.

Meeting

The small-ish group of people (or local witches' coven as bf preferred to call it) gathered (more tasty food) and a lot of positive energy towards the event was generated, messages sent out, support organized, it was also the first time I had occasion to present a somewhat coherent version of the whole project idea (not just the event) to a few people who all seem to be the competent, not easily offended, practically-minded types who could actually pull off something good. Whatever that might be. Someone asked me how I would feel if all that came out of the event were more regular events in the future, and no coop. I said I would consider it great, that I'd be happy with anything more than what we've got now.

Someone else reminded me of something important I must not forget: if I want people to join a cooperative I need to explain what a cooperative is. And that will force me to actually understand all the intricate details of how coop accounting and employment and decision taking works. The last person to arrive today turned out to know accounting for normal (non-cooperative) companies in the country and is really motivated to get involved, it will be super-helpful to have someone ELI5 me the terminology and concepts!

I had a lot of questions about the money today. I'm actually dumping some of my savings into this (as a somewhat unusual investment in the future). Not horrible amounts, but I don't really have an income right now and just set a sum aside and decided to make this event happen. I suspect some people might think I'm secretly rich, hope to be able to clear that up. I also hope that some paid work (or better, work within a coop setup) comes my way after the event, to stock up the savings again which are for buying our own small homestead. If we blow too much on parties it will be a really tiny homestead lol.

Backend

I've decided to create an instance of Agora to connect people interested in cooperative activities. It's the result of quite a few different self-hosting experiments around different collaboration online services and fediverse platforms. For the people I am trying to serve the Fediverse would be too much at this point I think, so a collaboration platform with a simple news board, file sharing, forum, chat (which I might remove as it will get mixed up with the forum) and neat email functions so send group emails.

After many painful attempts at conversations with people who go visibly dead inside when a technical term like 'server' is mentioned, I realized it needs to be very very simple. The somewhat retro look of Agora might actually help the users find their way around. Then again, someone just added me to yet another Whatsapp group around discussing sth sth cooperative, only that by the nature of Whatsapp I can't see what has been discussed already, so we might as well start at point zero, and that's where I go dead inside o_O

I hate big corpo social media with a passion, so I'm happy to start assembling a few people on this tiny Agora...

I only needed 9 users (incidentally the amount necessary to create a cooperative) to have the first disagreement. Anyway the platform will be more useful when an actual cooperative or other groups are formed that want to coordinate things. For networking to get new people to join it's not really useful, but I like to know that it works before it's needed.

People being people

In the background, some drama around a food buying group organized by another budding coop further away took place, and there always seems to be someone who ends up offended. Well. I've also been added to a messenger group of yet another currently offended party of the surroundings, and of course will try to make them un-offended and involved in the event. I'm curious if I meet anyone on this interesting adventure who manages to push my buttons, it's been a while since I've been offended. Being neurofunky seems to help, mostly I don't even notice when people are trying to be mean (and I might realize it weeks later but by then it's just funny).

Good vibes

All in all, a lot of good vibes are being generated. Yesterday I walked into the local builders shop, our potential neighbours, to drop some flyers, and they were positively enchanted, and will hopefully help out with some material. This evening, people were beaming, and thanking (?) me (??) schmorp, a simple bog creature (???), for creating this initiative!

If you are a lonely bog creature out there reading this: maybe you find it in you to try and build something for your community. Maybe they really enjoy it! What would you like to see thriving? Dream it up, and make it one step at a time! (DISCLAIMER: For some things, one step at a time can mean years. If you are a very young bog creature you might have to start small, or first learn a lot of things. But if you just proceed honestly and stubbornly, seeds will fall and grow!

If you have tried several self-hosting platforms like the above, please share your experience.

I have so far only tried Yunohost and I'm quite satisfied. It does help to read French, sometimes solutions can be hidden in French forum topics.

Coop Cloud seems to be docker-based, as far as I understand, and I just never managed to wrap my head around containers and why I should use them. Not sure though if Yunohost does container stuff in the background that I am not aware of?

I've just started to use my Yunohost installation for some small scale collaborative stuff so I really hope it scales (to probably not more than 100 users) and keeps running smoothly. Starting to host common stuff is a little more scary than just fucking up my own private files.

Connecting with the community

This week we have been starting to reach out to the local foreign community, both personally and on social media. As home butchers, punk rockers and fairly old farts we don't have that much overlap with many of the younger folks who are mostly into yoga, spiritual stuff and vegetarian food. But everybody loves to get together on markets, and everybody is affected by the overwhelm of general dystopia combined with trying to build something better in a foreign country. People do want to build some form of community.

So just by going out there and meeting people (involving food always helps to make things more enjoyable!) a lot of things are happening already. We are eating a lot of cake. We gave away quite a few of the many trees we left to sprout over winter. Hope people care for them and plant them out! We also were gifted seeds, plants and good advice. I met someone again who had kept Harold, a long-forgotten sourdough I once made, alive over 4 years - it brought me to tears to get some of that fucker back and bake good bread again! A solar oven, built during an earlier project attempt, might resurface at some time and a better follow-up model be built.

Why I now believe wholeheartedly that even the tiniest push towards better is always worth it, no matter how weak it seems to be? All this grows on seeds that were planted in the past, where somebody went to some effort to create a world with more kindness and more diversity. A welding workshop for girls I attended when I was 12, organized by some feminist youth worker group in my city. A non-religious temporary tea temple on a beach and the most simple spirituality being a freely offered cup. Human decency in places where I was told it couldn't exist. Seeing someone daring to be different, and taking courage from that. Making a sourdough, and giving it away to someone. Someone choosing to run a decidedly hopeful Lemmy instance.

Whatever you can do, even if its immediate impact seems too small to matter, will matter. Maybe it takes 40 years to reach a noticable size, but it's never lost.

Next steps: I expect a lot more cake in the next weeks, and have invited a few people to discuss cooperative ideas.

Now we need to take care of the practical things for the market. We didn't like the mega-corporation attitude of the toilet rental, so we decided to be cheeky and will set up compost toilets on top of IBCs. If somebody wants to cause a stink because some law let them bring it on. We are also planning a pre-party to clean the space and build the toilets.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/28517038

Web browsers were very limited compared to today's offerings but still very extensive when compared to other applications. Now, browsers on desktop are at a point where they're equivalent to an OS in scope.

This frustrates me as it's led to stagnation, where very few companies can hold their position. Firefox can only keep up due to preexisting groundwork and the large amount of funding from Google. Chrome had billions thrown at it to quickly enter the market.

The thing that kills it the most for me is there is no way to fix the massive amount of effort needed for a web browser. It's extensive because it has to deal with thousands of situations: image rendering, video rendering, markup language support (HTML), CSS support, JavaScript support, HTML5 support, security features, tabbed browsing, bookmarking and history, search engine integration, cross-platform compatibility, performance optimisation, developer tools, accessibility features, privacy controls, codec support, to name a few.

Now, for my unpopular opinion: stripping back a general-purpose browser to its core, forcing web redesign, and modularising the browser. Rather than watching videos in the browser, an instance of VLC would be started where the video will be streamed. Instead of an integrated password manager and bookmarks, we have something akin to KeepassXC with better integration. Markup documents and articles automatically open in word processing applications. I know this idea seems wholly impossible now, but it often crosses my mind.

Meeting the local council

Before the meeting I wrote another, slightly more detailed description of our project, ourselves (as vague as possible) and the event - all nice and harmless and aligned with the goals for sustainable development - sent it for a last minute proofreading to my kid, and printed it 30 min before the meeting (yes, printer acted up, I should have known better, but I managed).

Four people from the council were present, and they were really friendly and really tried to help. They would have preferred to just integrate our ideas into an event they are planning and not have to think about our separate event, but we just stayed firm, pointed out again that our important community project deserved its own event, reminded that we had this incredible space available. Not like they could have really stopped us. We ended up being offered the council's collection of stands, tables and benches for our event, and maybe a cleaning of the place. Plus, we get to promote the project on the other event as well.

Lots of events. What about the community center? In the last days I have been researching how to formalize our group-to-be and found someone who knows cooperative and association law and can give us advice, and I am reaching out to other existing groups for inspiration and advice.

Next weekend we will both promote the event at another market further away, and meet some people from the local foreign community to present our project ideas.

I'm confident this will manifest in some good things, and I'm also quite dizzy and surprised about the positive reactions so far.

Next steps: find more interesting participants for the event, promote the event, get the necessary equipment booked, start to outline the structure of the project with interested locals.

This thing is really starting to take off. Not bad for something conjured out of thin air and a 'For sale or rent' sign on an empty building!

Did someone say airship?

Setting a date for the introduction event and creating a buzz

We decided to set our date, designed posters and started publishing, mostly on FB and local groups on different messenger apps, despite silence from the town hall until today. I messaged the owner with our date. We also started contacting local people who we would like to invite, and set out requests for market vendors and artists.

This afternoon the town hall got back to us in a polite, but somewhat concerned sounding email, about 'clearing up doubts about our project and request for support' proposing a meeting next week! We are obviously delighted to be important enough to be honoured with a meeting, and have responded that 'we will happily introduce our project, clarify doubts and talk about support'.

We have already some artists and vendors, some associations wanting to present their work, and lots of people being very curious. Somebody offered us a translation and further help, someone else has been connecting me with potential organization structure examples our project could follow.

Best thing about all this: it's a community project and I feel very light about setting its seed and slowly sharing it with others. I am usually very anxious around other people and having to speak, scheduling stuff, having to present things ... and now it's just fun and I am so curious as to where this leads to.

Today we visited the local town hall and asked who to speak with about the initial fundraising and people-raising event. I quickly threw together a paper with the basic data and a wish list to try and get their support. Took only a few minutes and someone came to talk to us, said as we are on private grounds we need no licenses other than an insurance, and to email a formal request for support to the president.

Can't say that I really thought the town hall people would downright stop our event, but talking to politicians and public servants can be a little 'ew' (it wasn't in this case and many local people had advised us to go there and that they would be friendly, but we were nervous before). I'm glad to be able to present our important points about project and event in an email, anyways, which I find a lot easier than talking to people.

So it looks like this event is going to happen! Next step is crafting a beautiful email (currently in work) for the presidente!

Parallel to this work we have started contacting artists, possible collaborators, insurance company (266€ for the event, ouch!). Our date isn't really fixed yet, we plan for 2 months from here. I've started setting up a website, designed a crappy logo and wrote up some descriptions.

I'll document our steps, maybe it can be of use to you if you would like to build a similar thing, or you have good advice for us, because frankly we are making this up as we go. And also, it might help sort my own mind.

So I and my boyfriend get bored easily, and in our local industrial estate stands a huge, empty factory - for rent or sale, with a phone number.

We made a quick list of all the things that could and should exist in a community center and contacted the owner hoping to get him to visit the place with us and agree to allow us to hold a first event in the location.

Apparently he owns another factory, so I first spoke to his secretary, then waited a few days for him to make time for a visit. In the meantime we set up a rudimentary website with a first presentation and crafted sort of a presentation email. Not handling things in my native language, so it can take some effort to come up with sth acceptable.

Then the owner called back and wanted to meet same day, so we went there, three wonderfully unprepared odd people, and since I forgot my phone and the man was late I sent bf for the phone and kid for cake and stood there alone when he and his wife drove up in a big fancy car. I was probably about as clumsy and unbusinesslike as possible presenting our project - because let's be honest, there isn't much of a project yet. I remember some 'in person activism' advice I saw recently that started with 'gather your friends' and the thing is, I don't really have any friends?

The place is huge. On 2500m2 indoor area there's huge rooms, cooling chamber, probably around 150m2 stores of office spaces, another two separate large sheds .... plus 10.000m2 outdoor area. While visiting the place I ended up talking to the woman more and she was kind enough to ask me the right questions to make our idea understandable to her and she warmed up to the whole thing, and so did he. Bf and kid arrived eventually and did another tour through the factory while I stayed talking to the owners outside.

They did agree to the event, skeptically but then they don't have much to lose really. They suggested we should speak to the local council, and get back to them with the event plans.

So, we've basically started with the location because it's just soooo neat, and are now hoping to find people by organizing this event. If we get a large enough group of people wanting to use part of the space we might be able to raise enough money for rent or purchase. We are planning to create an association once we find collaborators.

It's stupidly ambitious, we are enjoying ourselves. If this place or approach doesn't work we'll move on to the next.

A group of friends is currently planning to approach the local council about getting to rent or being ceded some kind of facility to use as community space and find out about other support options that might be available for such a project.

While working with local government (or depending on them) has its risks and might turn out to be the wrong approach, we will at least consider it in the beginning - it might be surprisingly easy to get a space in this way, considering the many empty and abandoned properties where we live. Stepping in with a project the council deems support-worthy could really get us started.

So for that, I would like to design a small brochure or presentation with our ideas and find that rather hard. I have a list with what we would possibly include in such a space, but could do with some inspiration as to how to present it so it highlights how the community will profit from this project.

Has anyone ever designed such a document, or knows of one they could share? Or has any ideas to share? Successful recipes could and should be copied, documented, passed on.

So far, imagining loads of space and a factory-sized building, the ideal community space could have:

Space for Community, Collaboration, Cooperation

Compost and growing

Outdoor event space

Metal/vehicle workshop

Community Kitchen

Office and collaboration space

Wood/Electronics workshop

CNC/3D printing/Hacker space

Indoor event space

Storage

Mushroom lab