Hi all, seeing as I finally got the forum propped up, I figured this would probably be a good place to discuss some of the initial visions that we may have for this project. I know I have mine, but I think the vision for the project should be open for interpretation, so with that being said, I would definitely love for anyone else to chime in and share their visions as well.
@facestep.letdown, vhsdestroyer, and myself have already had some initial conversations via some voice calls on discord about the initial intentions for this community which are pretty simple. I’ll start by outlining a couple of the things that we talked about on that call, and then share some of my personal opinions for things I’d like for this community/collective to accomplish.
Our first initial call was really touched on a couple key concepts.
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This is an art sharing community first and foremost. It’s a place for people to share projects that they’ve finished and are actively working on. No specific medium, but I imagine Music and Video will be large topics as those are the mediums that most of the initial members work within.
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This community values open source culture and the freedom of information. A forum like this is only as valuable as the content that we collectively share with each other. With that being said, if you’re going to share a project that you’re working on, or have finished, be prepared to answer questions and talk about the methods that were used to create said project.
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The information and resources shared here on this forum should be useful in helping empower and educate our users in their respective mediums. The discussions and collaborations that occur here should also become the foundation of a network for mutual aid.
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The Community is a space for experimentation and exploration. So when participating here in the space, keep that in mind. Respect each others ideas and the work.
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Secret Teaching / Secret Spaces is an attempt at building a headless brand. For the uninformed, a headless brand is a brand that doesn’t have any central coordinator. Assuming you share the values and beliefs of the rest of The Secret Teaching, you can adopt the branding of project and spread the vision. This could be slightly risky, but the intent here is to spread cultural values through viral memetic methods
I think this feels like a pretty good recap of the things we’ve already talked about, but if there’s anything I may have missed from the called, feel free to let me know and I can update this post.
My Personal Areas of Interest
A couple of the concepts I spoke about on this call, and my areas of focus for the long term success of this community are pretty multi-faceted. I just finished up the book Humanizing The Economy the other night, and it has a lot of interesting insights into the history and concept of Co-Operatives as a powerful framework for fighting capitalism. Simultaneously, for a long while (since about 2018), I’ve also being doing a lot of research into Platform Co-Operatives, and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. After gathering and reading for this extended period of time, it’s been a big dream of mine to form some sort of community that is collectively owned by all of the users that are active in participating.
I think that by using a collection of art projects, it might be very possible to attract a substantial amount of users that generate content and data that can be leveraged for the collective well being of all the users who participate. There are so many interesting mechanisms for enabling the concepts of regenerative community economics that if utilized correctly, they could change the culture of how internet communities form, especially when combined with traditional cooperative principles like Rochdale Principles. I don’t want to go too deep into my views on this stuff, but I’m hoping to focus a lot of my artistic energy into the following projects, writing and recording music and making those tracks creative commons, capturing and sharing live music video content, and creating educational materials for how these emerging tool sets might collide with art to help provide a new social safety net for working artists.
Next Up
After having propped up this forum, I think my next big focus will probably be getting a skeleton website up, finishing and sharing some of the musical projects I’ve been working on, and applying for some financial grants for the live music video project I’m hoping to tackle. It is something that will probably require more resources than I have access to, and the Ethereum community has a substantial amount of grant opportunities for projects that are in the vein of co-operatives. I’m specifically looking towards the Optimism Community, and Moda DAO communities as potentially big opportunities for getting funding.
In all honesty, I’m very excited to be kicking this forum off and really excited to see the different visions for what we might be able to accomplish here. I’ve got a couple of other threads that I’ll likely start over the next week or two as well, so keep your eyes peeled.