a Postcard from south of the Dolomites
Hello friend,
I’m writing to you on my way to Bolzano in Italy, so north that it’s “practically Austria” according to Italian friends. I complicated a tricky sequence of trains and buses by sitting on the wrong train for three hours. It magically looped me back to Venice where I’d started… leading to highly discombobulating moments of realization and starting over. How strange that I won’t ever know where I’d been.
My current train is winding through valleys and vineyards, just south of the Dolomites. It's really pretty. It's also getting dark and hopefully I'll arrive before public transportation shuts down for the day.
I'm headed to By Design or Disaster, the annual conference of the MA program in Eco-Social Design at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. This year’s theme is Radical Care - the question is not only how to care practically today, but how to create conditions that allow all to care?.
Do check out the program and fall into the rabbit hole of beautiful projects.
This Postcard is about Cobudget. And money.
Cobudget is an open source tool that grew from the collaborative funding practices of various self-organized communities. In 2014 two separate platforms were built by Enspiral and the Borderland community (called “Cobudget” and “Dreams” respectively). In 2022 Greaterthan and Blivande decided to join forces and are now collaborating on developing the current open beta version.
I joined the project team last summer, keen to design instrumentation for different ways of organizing. I'm glad to work on an open source project, especially one with such a rich lineage and a fantastic team.
Use cases for Cobudget include: organizing festivals, running co-living communities, distributing membership fees, crowd-funding community projects etc. Intervening on how a group makes decisions about money is a sure-fire way to change their dynamics. Things get real very quickly when there’s money involved!
The product doesn't have much in the way of onboarding—we'll add a few Loom videos soon—but I wanted to put it on your radar in case collaborative funding was something of interest.
I'm also curious to talk about money with you! (Not something you hear every day, right? Heh.) In whatever form that may take, and only if you want, of course. I've been trying to unlearn money patterns and explore new practices and narratives. Finding ways to converse about money is part of that journey.
What comes up for you when you hear that...?
Celebrating projects by friends
- Fisher and Ana have re-started their free, online Liberating Structures events, which has an introductory and exploratory series.
- Alicia wrote a beautiful piece about overwork that weaves together personal introspection with academic inquiry: Reproducing Cultures of Overwork
- Nenad is organizing a learning experience for folks interested in the practical aspects of social permaculture: Designing an Inclusive Space
That's it for now!
Well, this feels like a lot... was the Postcard too long? Too random? Please reply and let me know.
Tomomi