The yunity heartbeat - what has each team done, what are they doing and what do they need help with.

WuppHaus Bad Dürrenberg.

Even though the WuppDays in Badue are over for now and the weather still is freezing cold in eastern Germany, the progress can't be stopped in the very first WuppHaus!

Especially the PR part of the project is steaming ahead as more and more media coverage is effected: We now have an overview page that collects all the self-published videos on YouTube, which could use some subtitles, there has been a new article published in a local newspaper and we get requests from various people who'd like to document our try to live the change we want to see in the world in the form of film or photo. So there's always more to be expected! 

On top of that Sebastian Striegel, who is a member of the parliament of Sachsen-Anhalt for the green party (Landtagsabgeordneter der Grünen) came visiting the WuppHaus and expressed big interest in our way of living, our vision and mission and granted us his support. We still get more offers from people who'd like to help out with their skills, be it from befriended architects or a wood expert, who came by to assess the quality of the beams in the house and tell us how to handle our serpula lacrymans infestation. The German WuppHaus website gets more and more filled, we now also have sections on what we need and what we offer in the WuppHaus and we posted an informative article about the outcome of the first big WuppHaus plenum, in which yuniteers and local contributors gathered to talk about the future of the train station. Paul Free is already planning the next get-together with other local initiatives and collects info on who to invite and what to do. And as if that wasn't enough, we now even found the confidence to invite Taylor Swift, all her fans and the fans of My Little Pony to join us in the WuppHaus! Let's see where that leads... 

WuppHaus Wurzen.

As we already mentioned in the last heartbeat, we found another possible WuppHaus location! Also close to Leipzig, but this time on the other side of the city: In Wurzen, in the East.

Since the first visit on January 5th a lot has happened and the plannings are already pretty concrete! A whole new space on the wiki has been created to give room to all the new information and planning for this second WuppHaus project. This time the houses are actually in a state that can be best described as ready-to-move-in! But therefore this time they are not for free...

As the approach this time involves money to actually buy the houses, a lot more accounting and bureaucracy are to be handled. We already have a rough financial plan, as well as a pretty intense discussion about the question if money can even be shared like every other resource or not. Because not all yuniteers think, that buying a house is a good idea, even if it's meant to be gifted to the movement afterwards.

Still, the planning is in full swing! There have been already a lot of meetings on various concrete topics (see the  - mostly German - minutes here), like distribution of the imagined rooms based on the nicely drawn layout plans, ideas on how to deal with the omnipresent issue of money, how to handle conflicts and much more. Of course there are pictures, a short concept has been articulated in German and if you want to participate, you're invited to do so!

WuppDays Planning.

Done

• Bodhi Neiser and Philip Engelbutzeder visited the potential location for a big event in Berlin in summer. The working title used to be 'WuppDays XXL', but it is probably going to be renamed soon.
• Tilmann secured a location for WuppDays #14 in Barcelona, which are about to start! Are you in the area? You can still decide to come by! 

In Progress

• Barcelona WuppDays' official starting day is January 24th. News regarding the event are exchanged in #barcelona on Slack.
• Paul Free took over the organization of the big event in Berlin in summer and is looking for people to help him.
  

Challenges/help needed

• As stated above, the Berlin event is going to be huge! So help is needed at every corner: Planning, organizing, promoting, securing food, etc. etc. If you want to get involved, please contact Paul Free, join #wuppdays_xxl_berlin on Slack or simply write us an email.

Structure.

In Progress

• We reopened the discussion about our primary objective. Up until now we used the one we decided on via syscon in April 2016, but since yunity changed a lot since that time and nobody is actively working on developing "the yunity platform" right now, we saw it necessary to revise that decision - or at least talk about it anew. If you want to participate in the discussion join #primary_objective on Slack.
• Janina Abels started restructuring the confluence wiki, to make it more accessible and easier to use. The main work now is to review the existing content and to then move and redesign the pages accordingly. She'll try to keep the phase of confusion as short as possible, but if you don't find what you're looking for in the meantime, please use the search bar in the top right... 
  The new layout will contain separate spaces for the different big subtopics in yunity - like it already is the case e.g. for foodsaving worldwide, WuppHaus Badue and Culture - but stringently implemented and with uniform layout.
• The efforts to make use of Taiga are still ongoing and we are still working on finding out the best ways to benefit from the platform. There is, however, still quite some confusion and resistance from people to actually use it. Well, we'll keep trying...
• The onboarding process is still in the midst of being redesigned, but the talking about it alone already led to more motivation to take this seriously, so that e.g. Janina Abels started writing welcoming messages to the new people who join Slack again and Arno Döpper does the same on discourse.

Challenges/help needed

• We keep having issues with the use of our communication tools. While on the one hand people complain about e.g. our Slack being messy and hard to keep on top of, there are on the other hand often situations in which people work on very similar things without connecting, because they simply don't know that the other person is doing something related. There are so many different tools in use for different purposes now, that even the most involved yuniteers sometimes have trouble to keep the overview. More structure and clarity definitely is needed!

Foodsaving Worldwide.

Done

• Joachim Thome held already two online meetings with people from Bilbao, who are enthusiastic about starting a foodsaving initiative. More calls are to come.
• Kristijan Miklobusec shared a nice long guide about the importance of community building and the positive experiences of foodsharing Mainz, who hold a brunch for their members every week. It still needs to be translated and put onto the wiki, though.

In Progress

• The next foodsharing Poland coordination meeting is to be held in Torun over the first weekend of March, and 20 to 30 cities already declared their interest in starting foodsharing as well!
• We received an email from a Czech girl, who thinks about starting foodsharing in her home country. Since there are already people working against food waste in Czech Republic, our aim was to connect them with each other. Since she now joined our Slack, we hope to intensify the cooperation! 
• There has also been a Belge guy joining our endeavor to create a world of sharing. The scope of his NGO The Green Bean, which is located in Brussels, in fact is not only food, but rather every resource imaginable. Still, foodsharing is something they are definitely also interested in!

Network Health.

Done

• Lara Earthling started a section on the wiki and a Slack channel for her endeavor to create a community health network. It is meant to provide an alternative way of treating common diseases and small injuries in a natural way, all following the paradigm of sharing and the wish to create a healthy community.

In Progress

• Knowledge of wild herbs and their medical properties is collected here.
• The research on existing health care systems is going to be documented here.

Challenges/help needed

• Do you know anything about alternative methods of healing or how a health network following the values of sharing can be established? Please let us know! In case you don't know how to contact us, just write us a mail and we'll forward it to Lara Earthling. 

About the heartbeat.

The heartbeat is a biweekly summary of what happens in yunity. It is meant to give an overview over our currents actions and topics.

When and how does it happen?

Every other weekend we collect information on a wiki page and publish it on Sunday or the following Monday as a wiki blog article.

Afterwards we add a nice abstract and share it on facebook.

How to contribute?

• You need to have a wiki account and editor rights. Ask us in #confluence on Slack if you need help with that.
• Talk to us in #heartbeat on Slack about the content, the layout or any other heartbeat related issues and ideas!

Other heartbeats

The yunity heartbeat - what has each team done, what are they doing and what do they need help with.

WuppDays Bad Dürrenberg.

Apart from normal WuppHaus developments, this time we had internal WuppDays in Badue! Over Christmas and New Year's a lot of yuniteers gathered in the cold but friendly train station, which - by the way - now has a fully equipped kitchen, a comfy sleeping room with mattresses, a heatable living room with matching sofas and a compost toilet with detailed explanations... 

Look at these new pictures capturing the new look and feel of the rooms!

Other challenges, which turned out to be easily solvable contained the following:

• The WiFi was enough for over 20 people with laptops and smartphones!
• Thanks to almost everybody bringing food we even had too much at some point!
• The sleeping spaces got warmer and even more cozy with all those lovely people there!

During the Badue WuppDays we talked about tons of different topics and questions, including the following:

• How can we make it easier for interested people to contribute?
• How can we effectively encourage people to contribute more?
• Which tools do we want to use to work together?
• What is going to happen over the next months?

As you can probably imagine, there have been a lot of different answers to these pretty vague questions. The first three heavily touch our general organizational structure and how we communicate and there is not one simple answer to any of them. What enlivens the discussion is also the question if we should sacrifice a certain degree of user friendliness and the benefit of being used to the proprietary tools already in use (like Slack and Confluence) for the sake of supporting open source software, which - of course - would be truer to our values. More on this topic can be read further down in IT-service and Onboarding.

When it comes to the question of what is going to happen over the next months, there have been three topics governing the talks:

• Going to Spain
• Getting two houses in Wurzen
• Planning WuppDays XXL in Berlin

Just to make it clear: We don't plan on abandoning the train station in Bad Dürrenberg! It's actually the contrary, because since we are so many people with different skills, interests and dreams, we think we now can do more than one project at once! Spain would be only temporary anyways - and as part of the FSINT/FSWW tours it's not even new... - and it could replenish the energy of the people wupping in the first ever acquired WuppHaus with all the nice sunshine and Mediterranean flair it would provide. Wurzen is just as far from Leipzig as Badue is, just on the east instead of the west and could thus serve as a base for the people working on rebuilding the train station, too. Berlin WuppDays are always great opportunities to recruit people who are not too far away to also lend a hand in Badue... 

And to erase every last doubt that we love our first house, just watch this new - and pretty long - video collage that collects snapshots from the WuppHaus for you to get a glimpse of the feel we enjoy there everyday. You can see the new order in the kitchen and food storage and the general spirit of communal living, that was established even further during these winterly WuppDays due to the big amount of people coming by.

Okay, now to the three above-mentioned points:

Spain: Tilmann arrived in Barcelona some days ago and the idea of having a Hackathon there or - more probable - in Valencia has been discussed weeks ago already. Now with the cold weather and warm spirit in Bad Dürrenberg a lot of people expressed motivation to flee the German winter for some weeks to go to Spain together. It would be to either set up a foodsaving and -sharing project or to connect to an existing one or preferably both. And a bit of holiday, too...  
So far nothing is fix, but we are working on finding a location for a bunch of yunity folks to stay at starting end of January. Cille already did some research and Marian Roselló Tomás also provides a lot of insights concerning Valencia, as she's a resident there!

Wurzen: Since Badue obviously is a long-term construction project and some of us feel the great urge to have a more functional, ready and - let's face it - clean WuppHouse at hand soon, the quest for other buildings had never stopped. Now we found a great possibility in Wurzen, where two houses are for sale. A handful of us are seriously considering using money to buy them and gift them to the movement. This would require setting up a legal entity like a Verein and set out in writing how we want to live together. Preparations are already underway, stay tuned for more updates on this topic!

WuppDays XXL: In late April we have the opportunity to use a huge compound in eastern Berlin for an assembly of people who are interested in yunity and the general kind of change yunity stands for. The planning just started, so it's not too late for you to join in! Just write us an email, if you're interested!

Foodsaving Tool.

Done

Thanks to Nick Sellen, we now have the fancy foodsaving.world domain, which currently redirects to fstool.yunity.org. If you have ideas on how to use this domain (e.g. more information, additional links), please write to fstool@yunity.org 

For a more general overview on other internet-based foodsharing projects, we have foodsaving.tech. This site is managed via GitHub, you can add content yourself by clicking on the "contribute" link. Nick Sellen or Tilmann will merge pull requests as they come.

The foodsaving tool itself also got a series of improvements over the last two weeks:

• Password reset: you can now get a new temporary password if you forgot yours. It will be sent to your verified mail address ( GitHub)
  
• Mail verification: to make sure that you enter the right mail address and can receive mails from the tool, we send you a verification code after creating a new account
• Password change: you can change your password on your user profile page, by clicking the edit button (the pencil)
• Groups can be protected via password. If someone wants to enter a protected group, they have to prove their secret knowledge first 
• Groups have a public and an internal description. The public description is shown before joining the group and could contain a link to a community website, whereas the internal description should provide members with the most up-to-date information (GitHub)
  
• Show a (big) loading bar when the page is exchanging data with the server (GitHub)
  
• Some hotfixes

New features of the foodsaving Tool

In Progress

• Processing feedback from users to fstool@yunity.org (Janina Abels Tilmann)
• Recurring pickups (Tilmann, Nick Sellen)
  
• Private messages and group chat (Andreas Langecker)
  

Challenges/help needed

• More translations!
• Getting direct feedback on planned features. Have a look at those issues, it's not necessary to understand any programming language to help us .
• Refinement of the color scheme. If you are a designer and would like to get involved, please drop us a mail at fstool@yunity.org!
  

IT-Service.

Done

We have a project on Taiga now!

There have been first meetings and talks about how to use Taiga and a core group of Taiga users assembled around Paul Free to organize the tasks popping up in Badue as well as the revision of the onboarding process in yunity via Taiga. More on the topic of onboarding can be read in the newfound chapter of the same name.

In Progress

Taiga is in the process of being implemented as an organizational tool in yunity. This task requires quite some creativity, since we need to figure out how to make use of its modules and features to fit the whole range of different tasks and topic present in yunity at the moment. Taiga makes extensive use of Scrum language and we still don't know to which extent we want to keep it or what to change it to, but hey... it's all learning by doing, isn't it?  

Challenges/help needed

A tool can just be as good as the people using it, and therefore a tool that is not used at all by people cannot work.
If you want to support our efforts to promote existing open source software and work together with us on yunity related tasks in an organized way, then let us know!

Onboarding.

Done

• An initial meeting was held in Bad Dürrenberg restarting the important topic of how to integrate interested people into the project.
• Paul Free, Janina Abels, Philip Engelbutzeder and Arno Döpper have commited to be accountable for this task.
• /wiki/spaces/ARCHIVE/pages/86966402 have been pointed out.
• An epic (that's like a main topic) has been created on Taiga.
• A /wiki/spaces/ARCHIVE/pages/86016141 has been created on this wiki.

In Progress

• The automated mails will be updated, revised and the whole process improved.
• The existing information will be restructured to make it easier accessible. This is mainly about the wiki.

Challenges/help needed

• How to set up automatically sent out mails with links, that somehow let us know if and which of the links got clicked?
• More people feeling responsible in this regard make it easier to not let anybody fall through the cracks... (Also for holiday replacements and the likes... )
  
  

Structure.

In Progress

Our team member Joachim Thome has published his Syscon full manual, version 0.1. It already consists of 36 pages, full of examples and how-tos on group decision making and resistance voting. And the sub-zero version number indicates that he intends to add more!

Here's a quote from the introduction:

Deciding, alone or together, is not a minor issue. We make around 20.000 decisions each 
day (Ernst Poeppel, 2008) and a lot of these decisions are made subconsciously out of 
habit. This means that the major decision making systems that we have learned, for 
example authoritarian decision making from our childhood and work environment and 
majority voting from our political education, have a major influence on how we decide in 
our daily routines and by that how we live our life.
This includes how we communicate with the people in our lives and how we resolve 
differences and conflicts on the social level.

Feedback can be given via our Slack chat in #structure or via mail@yunity.org.

Translation.

Challenges/help needed

• All the nice videos about the WuppHaus are currently German only, so any subs would be very welcome! You don't even need to join the team to help out with that, if you're very shy... Just read here how to go about it and find out here, which videos can be subbed... 

About the heartbeat.

The heartbeat is a biweekly summary of what happens in yunity. It is meant to give an overview over our currents actions and topics.

When and how does it happen?

Every other weekend we collect information on a wiki page and publish it on Sunday or the following Monday as a wiki blog article.

Afterwards we add a nice abstract and share it on facebook.

How to contribute?

• You need to have a wiki account and editor rights. Ask us in #confluence on Slack if you need help with that.
• Talk to us in #heartbeat on Slack about the content, the layout or any other heartbeat related issues and ideas!

Other heartbeats