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Make a jellyfish by 26 October, 2018

So thanks to the diligent, analytical and explicative brilliance of Amy Gibbo we have harvested from the sea (literally!) of Monday night’s IRL event a series of Recipes for Making Jellyfish! i.e. jellyfish models for our MozFest space – no interspecies experimentation required!

Please look at this here extremely fun document, put together by Amy, which explains a variety of simple ways to construct one

Then you can all go make one! Make one with materials that mean something to you or your community! Then we can have a truly diverse family of jellyfish models with which to strain symbolism to its breaking point!

And if you come up with your own way of making one (with , say, lights and engines and stuff) then let us have the instructions for building it and we’ll add it to the document.

Thanks all! Swim well. Swim free.

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Video conversation with Tiokasin Ghosthorse 

So, look. We did this interview conversation with the very amazing (and infinitely patient) Tiokasin Ghosthorse. Tiokasin is an elder of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation of South Dakota, an international speaker on Peace, and issues facing Indigenous peoples and the Mother Earth perspective. He’s a master of the ancient red cedar Lakota flute (which is goose-bump-stunning to listen to – we didn’t get him to play in this conversation but maybe next time?!) and is the founder of First Voices Radio in the US and Canada.

He is also a guest faculty member at Yale University’s School of Divinity, Ecology and Forestry focusing on the cosmology, diversity and perspectives on the relational/egalitarian vs. rational/hierarchal thinking processes of Western society. Which was what we were particularly interested in. Although frankly, as you’ll see, he’s a joy to listen to on any subject you care to bring up. I learned loads about the etymology of English words and how it affects our thinking during our short time with him.

Now unfortunately our being somewhat technoramuses (technoramii?) in the doing interviews world and me having massive thumbs meant that I accidentally stopped filming for about 5 minutes and managed to not record a beautiful segment about how the eradication of the bison from the grasslands of South Dakota had a profound effect on the water table and other really amazing stuff. For which I profoundly apologise. I’ll do better next time I promise but to do so I could use help and input from those of you of movie-making and uploading expertise. Cos I also filmed it on a phone which did it in HD and so its like the fattest file imaginable – running to about 9GB in all. So Vimeo laughed in our faces when we tried to upload it there. Anyway thanks to Carolyn Jane Davies who’s given me some highly detailed advice on how to compress it in future but other conversations about this from a technical point of view will be very welcome.

In the meantime I managed to upload it to Archive.Org which is actually a pretty cool site and it now seems to be streaming pretty well on there. So have a look if you like, and enjoy. Big big thanks to Tiokasin for his time and thoughtfulness and general air of calm and oneness with the everything. All the good stuff in here is down to him. The not so good technical aspects are down to me. Or at least my big thumbs.

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Mozilla Global Sprint

So we completed our two days of participation in the Mozilla Global Sprint on May 10/11 2018 (sorry for the delay in posting this but getting it all together nearly killed the both of us to near-death and we’ve had to lie still in darkened woods far from everythink for a while since). It was basically a series of workshops held at the Redmond Community Centre in London N4. And it was an amazing vibe with a real sense of collaboration and community and – dare I say it, yes I dare – fun, also! And we had an amazing turnout – even more so when you consider that it took place on weekdays – with just short of 40 people turning up in all, with a few more local community group members also participating…………

We’ve ended up with a bunch of outputs including some much clearer ideas about how to proceed with a prototype iteration of the Platform site. And more than anything we’re still marvelling at the time and energy that everyone brought to it………

On which note let us thank again all those who participated and made it such a blast……..I won’t be able to remember exactly what everyone did but in terms of the preparation for the day we’d particularly like to thank AS, CEW, MD, and CZ. Also huge bone-squeezing hugs to MK for being so utterly on it with the practical organisation and to ARL for running large parts of the first day; both contributions lightened a huge part of the responsibility and made me smile wanly from time to time from within the prison of my stressed-out mind. Similar gratitude and eternal warmth to MD for her workshop on Community and to C for seamlessly picking up where AR had to leave off. Big big shout out also to GLC from the Royal College of Art who pretty much single handedly ran day 2 of the whole thing…….despite the attempts of various of us to do the whole herd-of-cats thing on him!
And we-are-not-worthy-bows from everyone to A (again) and LC for helping out in the kitchen for so long on the first morning.

Above and beyond all that thanks so much to everyone for the amazing contributions you made to the workshop and for just giving up your time and brains and utterly baffling enthusiasm to the process…..so thank you so much to…CSK, TB, PS, CL, MO, CR, AB, GCC, DJ, BAF, EM, DP, NO, IJ, EE, JM, TF, DR, AB, D, AG and RB……

Thanks also to SM, for joining from Oslo for a while and for being passed around on the laptop like a baby. Oh yeah and for having, like, the most calming voice on the planet and that……..

Apologies to BJP (South Africa) and MV (India) for our failure to get hooked up with them in a similar way. You were missed and I hope we can get your participation in some way in future. We did manage to show some of B’s inspiring art pieces on computer and projector and we’d like to thank him very much for sending those to us……..

And most importantly, a massive, sky-filling, sun-obscuring, gasp-inducing thanks to everyone at the amazing Redmond Community Centre in Woodberry Down, and in particular (but not limited to), V, M, C and, in the kitchen, N! You guys were just fabulous and we literally couldn’t have done it without you. And thanks to Red Moon Roots community kitchen for dinner on the second evening…

And finally a little ripple of gunfire-like applause for Sophie Varlow for having the brass neck and general chutzpah to put this thing together from more or less scratch by button-holing everyone involved in it individually at various points on the planet over the last year without even any threats or intimidation but just charm, energy and some invisible secret power that no-one has tracked yet, not even Zuckerface hisself. Nice one Sophie! You can have a nap now. But not for too long………!

Oh and lest I forget, one last Qomolungma-size pinnacle of thankyous goes out to the all-seeing, all-knowing, never-sleeping, boundlessly generous, thoughtful, precise yet energetic, KM, our guru from the far-side of the Earth! We wouldn’t even be in the Mozilla Open Leader programme if it weren’t for the fact that K rescued us from the waste bin of history, dusted us down and has talked us through Everything – no, literally Everything, – every other week, despite his 17 jobs and mentoring of like, 5 other Mozilla groups, and running his own digital project and the fact that he lives in a time zone that is so far from ours that he had to limit himself to no sleep at all at the end of a long day and bend space-time around himself just to support us. And he’s not only been brilliant but he’s also sufficiently confident and committed to this Platform idea that we are talking joining up with his own project in some way (more to follow on that). And all I had to do to get this insane level of support and wisdom was poach a couple of eggs and slap them on some avocado and tomato just, like, once, about 6 months ago – amazing eh? Anyway – big salute to K!

Now. Mozilla are looking for feedback from Sprint participants and for updates to the article by Kevin Zawacki about the Commons Platform (see in a recent post by Sophie….) and we’d love it if any of you felt able to post some stuff about your experience of either or both of the days…….

Thanks again to all of you including those who couldn’t make it but have contributed along the road that got us here. We’ll be moving ahead with some focussed stuff designed to get us a basic site up pretty soon and we hope you’ll all be there…………..

Love, peace, ice-cream, and balloons…….xxxx

PS Photos of the Sprint will follow as soon as I’ve been through them and checked them off against the photo-consent forms that people either signed or didn’t……..👍