On Thursday evening, the Hard Pencil collective gave a cardboard hacking workshop at Winter Camp. The workshop did not require any specific skills but everyone could hack at their own level.

All the participants had to form duos and make an avatar. No, not your own well-known online representation but an avatar made out of cardboard and other materials. Hard Pencil had collected an abundant amount of various materials lying in a huge pile on the table. The major challenge was that you had to make the avatar of your partner within 15 minutes. This tight deadline was actually pretty nice because everyone just started grabbing materials and working with it, without thinking too much about the aesthetics.  It also embodies the idea of “to hack” as a clever or quick fix.

After our avatars were finished we sat into a round and dimmed the light. In a short meditative setting with our eyes closed we were asked to imagine our perfect working space. After a few minutes I felt so relaxed that I actually imagined my perfect “working” space as a big bed with fresh white sheets and a nice breeze.

We were asked to find another partner, talk about our perfect working spaces and then build one space would incorporate these ideas. Fortunately my partner James Wallbank had similar ideas and we envisioned a place that was neither inside nor outside. We decided to build a structure out of straws and use semi-transparent plastic to execute our ideas.

In the last part of the workshop all the ideal workspaces were put together to form a small community and all the groups were asked to describe their spaces.

The workshop was a big success and a lot of fun. Thanks Hard Potlood and all the participants!

After getting up real early I set out from Leiden and started my trip to the Studio K building in Amsterdam. I tried to fit in the best I could but didn’t know anyone, had no clue where to go and was really confused about what to do. Everyone seemed really at ease while I felt more like a lost soul. Being at Winter Camp for only one day thus meant I required a mission. I needed a reason to be there, to find my way in this big pool full of ideas and people. Everything I knew until then is that it was an event about networks coming together, about organizing a network and about sharing knowledge. These might be nice expressions but it didn’t mean anything to me. What does it mean to be a network why are people in a network? Those were things I wanted to know.  Read the rest of this entry »

“A crisis is risky and it can suck the lifeblood out of many.”

Gabriela and Jaromil started the plenary session with the following topics/points of discussion: refuse scarcity, celebrate the labour, publish unfinished and embrace modesty. The overall discussion topic of the plenary session was crisis. During a crisis, a network suffers from anger, distrust, being impatient, (growing) pains etc. It is a struggle which every single network has to deal with. As Gabriela indicated there is a typology of crisis and a typology of solutions but for every network a crisis can potentially be productive; through crisis you continue to grow, it is a mode of production. A good comment was made: ‘denying and hiding a crisis is the worst you can do in a network’. I think we all know that networks often are denying, hiding or even are not aware of their crisis, so there is a call to face it, analyse it, evaluate it and share it with other networks. A network could be preoccupied with maintaining itself and then there is a need to break down the ‘wheel’.

When we have come to the languages of networks “there is a micro-cosmos within Winter Camp.” Clearly there is a certain tension between “the techgroups and the non-techgroups (or the ones who are living in the real world)” (freeDimensional). The impression is that there is an overload of techy-networks at Winter Camp which makes it difficult to find common vision. All different types of networks are having their own language and it is undeniable that the influence of technology is getting more and more important. Networks need technical advice. So invite ‘techy’ networks to come into dialogue in order to benefit from each other, even though they speak another language. Don’t talk from our little boxes. Technology can be of really good use to make changes.

Another issue is that open source networks are often exclusive. They see themselves as open but they are a specialised network and specialisation often implies isolation. So it is for them important to translate their techy-language for other networks to understand. Because “the language of computing is not the language of networks.” The language of networks might be working.