Otherhoods: Some Thoughts After the Meta Ring

Guys,
We need a category for meta-magicians topics.
The “site feedback” I have used before is just not suitable for broader conversations about magicians as un-organization.

I’ll create a new topic to gather those together who are interested in working on meta / un-organizational matters :slight_smile: A ring needs to be formally formed around this.

Also, we need to process the notes from the Meta Magicians session at the Council of Prague. A lot of insight about how to self-organize and how to manage resources such as finances, domain names, and even the term “Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians” came up.

@wschwab does a good job in his post here to describe the spirit and content of what was discussed. It is not in order, but basically summarizes key points.

@jpitts,
would you move all the related topics (and other related texts) into the new category or anyone can do it for his topics?

BTW, I like the name “Ring-13” :slight_smile:

The tag #meta-magicians can be used to collect things anywhere.

“Older” accounts have permissions to edit titles and add tags / re-categorize.

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Notes are here:

William, thank you for this extended write up!

I think somewhere in here, @gcolvin’s non-organization got transformed – we’ve used dis-organization to poke fun at ourselves, but non-organization is the term we should be holding up as an example.

Greg pointed me towards the Rainbow Family as a non organization, and I posted about it here:

We are all non-members!

On decentralizing – yes, I think small groups can and should form and that’s how some of the noise is cut through – there are bridges between groups / rings etc and they bubble up to spaces that have more reach (but also noise), as perhaps this forum might.

Just to add this info here, I have attempted to document ownership of our “Infrastructure” on the Scrolls wiki.

It needs proper links to the various infrastructure, of course :slight_smile:

I think this is perhaps where we’ve ended up.

Is there even a brand to put in the public domain? There’s the UTF8 symbol of sparkles and … that’s it?

The most recognizable asset is the domain name, as owned / managed by @jpitts.

After having written this – @wschwab, I think this is pretty much where we are at today!

One thing is, we haven’t had people run with the wand and actually DO other things. We have some signs that a smaller group will create an event, and creating an event template may spur further action.

I still see not a lot of consistent doing, and not a lot of consistent “this needs to be done”. That is, I think, a side effect of a forum for long form discussion.

As I mentioned in this post on processing video – I believe these true “doing” items need to move to Github.

I’m most interested in this as well – a summer meeting that has a couple of days of everyone in plenary – and then time after for further doing in smaller groups – maybe with one more day at the end to summarize for everyone.

One week is a BIG ask and won’t be accessible to most people unless their day job funds them to do that.

To be clear, I wasn’t saying we should change our name, just a suggestion of an alternative name to use in some contexts where Magicians might not fly. We already have, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and seven uses of “technical” in our Principles. Engineering pe se is mentioned nowhere.

TaIking about the name for non-Orgs I do not mean to change the name of FEM (it is another topic).
I mean, we should find a good name for non-Orgs because it looks like some standard case for many other cases (like DAO is not only TheDAO) and it will make sense to describe it properly and implement processes around it.

A little Googling finds precedent for the use of both with similar meanings. E.g. the Rainbow Family and the International Academy of Nurse Editors call themselves nonorganizations, the process of unorganization is currently popular in management consulting, and Opus Dei calls itself an “organized unorganization.”

Our comments have gotten mixed up, sorry. I was talking about our founding name “The Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians” versus the many abbreviations and alternatives we use tend to use also–FEM, Magicians, Magi, etc. I suggested “Ethereum Technogists” might be good for expense reports and such, and more inclusive than “Ethereum Engineers.”

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As one can see, the trend (and the demand) is going to short names and abbreviations. People are looking for it. I am fine with “Ethereum Technologists”, but it is a long name. What could be the short name for “Ethereum Technogists”?

So would you consider Unorganisation as the good name and the UnOrg as a good abbreviation?
I am just thinking about disambiguation to UN.org

It’s a big ask, but really a small amount of time to get a lot of work done. IETF meets for a week three times a year. Standard C meets for a week twice a year. And so on. For those with no other support, some sort of charity fund could be started? And the fact that not all can be there is why we have streaming and a principle of finalizing most consensus online, not at meetings.

(For me it’s too small an ask. It’s hardly worth the airfare to get so little done, and airfare is by far the biggest expense.)

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Hmm. Which has worse English connotations, “disorganized”, “unorganized”, or “nonorganized”?

In the community, “Magicians” or “Magi” seems to have stuck as meaning us, and I’m fine with that. Were I filling in an expense report for a meeting, “Ethereum Magicians” would raise eyebrows, whereas “Ethereum Technologists” would not. Just plain “Technologists” would raise the question, “which technologists.” But mostly a personal choice, I guess.

“Magi” as short synonym to “Ethereum Technologists” will create confusion at least among newbies, IMHO.

I think we misunderstand each other. Jamie and I founded “The Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians.” It would take consensus to change that as our actual name. I’m just talking about the various alternatives, abbreviations, acronyms, and descriptions we use for various purposes. My only big preferences are “nonorganization” over “dis-” and “un-”, due to fewer bad connotations. And “technologists” over “engineers” due to greater inclusiveness and prior use in our principles.

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agree.
Non-Organization and NonOrg as the short form is my favorite too (as a general term).
Not least because UN.org is already taken.

In context of FEM, I am fine with “Ethereum Technologists”. But still thinking about the short name and differentiating to ethresear.ch, which is more scientific than FEM in my eyes.