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Selina (interview): Connection happened. And understanding visions of all the people. A few meetings but not very productive (due to diversity of visions). People came to the meeting with different expectations. We had a reflection of last tour in August. Collaboration cafe happened. I understand more and wanted to go deeper into it, but it will happen in the tours. Its important to be not fixed on idea for the tour and it was interesting at the collaboration cafe to see who came along. I am more enlightened now - to what is yunity and what the overal picture is. Vision: Vision is to bring people together, creating space for people to connect (circles). Time is important. Understanding, observation, awareness, listening is all very important. Personal growth is very important. To change the world we must start with ourself. To inspire people to do what they want to do - not nesccessarily be part of yunity. Many people in yunity are living the project - unlike a lot of projects. Plans: I want to go on the tour as soon as possible.
Taïs (written statement): I learnt that the tours were imminent shortly before joining the WuppBreak. What I had thought would be a 2017 deal was actually right about to start, for me it was then important to:
- make sure our different visions for the tour makes sense together
- establish strong basis for supporting foodsaving communities, which is :
- assessing what the software will be able to do and when
- the follow-up of work started months ago mostly by Janina, Tilmann and myself (MediaKit, contacts, ..)
I hadn’t had much time to prepare a possible meetings structure or agenda, in fact it felt like we all improvised on the spot. People left the first meeting skeptical, although I believe the first part of the meeting clearly indicated that our visions were very easy to unite, if not already one. Then we somehow drowned in tangled group dynamics. Some possible reasons I see:
- nobody was willing to take on facilitation (it becomes hard to find a neutral facilitator as the opinions gather around the “dreamers” pole and the “pragmatists” pole)
- impatience from myself, Janina (maybe others?) to get down to practical details. Maybe a bit traumatized from Rotterdam experience, with yunity tours meetings being extremely unproductive and confusing, as it became the place for new yuniteers to share dreams for hours on end.
- unwillingness from some to see the group divide
The daily tours meetings that took place with a co-created agenda were concerning the destinations, the MediaKit, and the software. I walked out of each of those with clearer thoughts about the tours. They managed to make developers motivated to work on the software (led to a dev meeting about narrowing down features). Overall positive and enabling us to work remotely on commonly decided goals. From the diversity of people interested in the tours, I gained faith once more that we, as a functioning group, have a lot to offer even without a ready software. I was first quite stubborn about not joining on tours if there was no software to offer but I’m now much more flexible on this.
My vision for the tour is well summarized here under “Priorities”. I want to identify which situation we would join each time, because the means and the goals vary for each of them.
(1) For the foodsaving communities, we could have focus on :
- the software, if they wish to test it. Then we would need people who know about it.
- community organisation. If and only if these communities wish to explore the different ways (preferably hierarchyless) they can organize themselves.
(2) For enthusiasts
- a well-done Media-Kit
- people aware of practical facts on how to set up foodsharing
(3) For potential foodsharing places
- networking people
- motivated people
At this point, I’d be interested to go to Copenhagen and Edinburgh. I would consider joining in big cities to try and find motivated people to start foodsharing there (3) (we talked about Barcelona, Budapest). Only when we have a system in place that I’m satisfied with (namely, a good software and a good MediaKit), I would love to expand the tours to every possibility that arises - and they do that quite a lot in yunity ;)