Community engagement using cats as metaphor

This came from a Friday evening casual chat in the OMI group discord, where we were wondering about how to retain members amidst different personalities, while attracting, and more importantly, retaining new members. We spoke about herding cats, and that you don’t herd cats, you throw some tuna where you want them to go – the tuna being the shared vision that people want to be part of.

But this wasn’t the full story, and fuelled by my most recent project iteration (blog forthcoming but this note pad has rough thoughts) and a bit of beer, I thought, it’s not just about tuna. So I shared my cat situation along with how I think this translates to community management. Writing it up sober, I still think it works well. Also adding cat-specific details for posterity.

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Notes from Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger

I mangle the quotes to tell me story. The gist is a true reflection but it’s not the exact words.

p4 – Both “our” world and the “mirror world” – the world of the conspiracy theorists, agree that post-shock states of discombobulation have been opportunistically exploited in many different contexts. Both groups have a (p24) skepticism of elite power. p53 – The words the mirror world use are essentially fantasy. But emotionally, to many people they clearly feel true. And the reason they feel true is that we are indeed living through a revolution in surveillance tech, and state and corporate actors have indeed seized outrageous powers to monitor us, often in collaboration and coordination with one another. Moreover, as a culture, we have barely begun to reckon with the transformational nature of this shift.

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The end of expertise: two routes with similar roots

.The idea for my metaverse project, peduncle, was born during the extreme drought in Cape Town around 2016, when a city of more than 4 million people were about to run out of water. It was a combination of climate change and mismanagement, but how we as scientists and engineers responded to it was, to me, equally inadequate than the people in power.

This threw me into an identity crisis about myself as a scientist and engineer – an “expert”. Someone shared Lesley Green’s article and I realised what I am dealing with inside myself is part of a bigger crisis: “the end of expertise”.

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Worldbuilding the real world: build good ruins – Part 2

Part 1 is here: https://indiebio.co.za/worldbuilding-the-real-world-build-good-ruins-part-1/

The first part concluded that we need to build from the bottom, that top-down, expert-led action is not enough anymore, that community work of everyday is the resilience we need to thrive in these interesting times.

When we pursue bottom up design and implementation, these still need to be guided by common principles that comes from a higher view – so yes, there is still space for urban planners, government, but it becomes more of a conversation. How can we imagine and visualise this, as a global community of communities? Metarkitex talks about public space in the digital world, and asks do these public spaces exist online? Are they accessible and welcoming to everyone?

Public space developed to a space where people can go without aim or arrangement

This post continues with clips from an interview with Vandana Shiva and Dougald Hine.

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Write-up, research outline try 2.

Here I’ve been trying to write a story with the headings, understandable to everyday people, assuming that the body will have the meaty academic content.

We are in crisis, and we need to act with some urgency.

There are two ways to act in crisis, and these are currently in tension.

The first way is to rely on traditional expertise, which is a “command and control strategy”, it is top-down. Experts say things and the rest of us do the things.

The second way is to do it ourselves, as a community, we just get in and do it.

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Meta-communities

I’m toying with names for this “brand” I’m creating, and maybe something around a curious little beast, or pequinha fera curiosa (PFC) in Portuguese. Fera to link with feral, but also to alliterate with FOSS. The newspaper idea I still have in the back of my head has Curvy Cavy as working title, and our virtual world project is called peduncle, with a snail-type mascot, also a curious little beast. I, too, am a curious little beast.

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