The yunity heartbeat - what has each team done, what are they doing and what do they need help with.
Wurzen Planning.
After the wh-y-unity meetings took place from March 12 to 19, it was finally time for the Wurzen plannings to start! The people mainly involved in this initial phase of concrete planning are Matthias Larisch, Bodhi Neiser, Douglas Webb and fr4nk 0nf1r3. Those are also the ones, who will be moving in first.
For two weeks now, the talks are going on and the people participating shed light on their expectations, fears and wishes, so that mutual understanding can be reached. They spoke about how to have meetings and how decisions will be made; they brought together their visions and goals, exchanged their opinions on drug use, as well as on concepts of how to handle items and property. The process will continue over the next weeks until the contract can finally be signed and the first people move in to Wurzen.
This process is meant to help us make the project a success, to form a stable community that can be as open as possible, where we can work on the house itself first, and very soon on other projects as well. Regarding the legal progress, we formed an association that will be registered next week, so that we can then create a bank account, collect all the money we need and finally sign the contract to buy the houses.
More detailed minutes from the meetings, which commenced on March 21st can be found here.
Freemarkets in Badue and Berlin.
Bad Dürrenberg: On April 1st there was a free market at the WuppHaus Bad Dürrenberg. It was a beautiful, sunny and relaxed day. Not many people showed up, probably due to bad advertising and some confusion regarding commitment to the house, but the ones that came had an exceptionally good day with lots of opportunities to connect and play.
The WuppHaus is in an interesting phase at the moment. There are questions around money use turning more towards its favour as less yunity people are involved and some locals, especially Mandy and Mike are getting serious about the building. People want to support each other in their wishes and dreams, and - as always - communication is key. 
We will see where all that leads.
Berlin: On Friday the 31st of March there also was a freemarket in Berlin: After a big event to build compost toilets at the Wartenberger Hof in Berlin, it was held to celebrate the finish of the joint efforts. Even though the location in Höhenschönhausen is not what Berlin people would call 'central', quite some people showed up and even after the official end at 7pm, there was still a campfire going on, with a handful people planning the Humus Festival, enjoying each other's company and building even another compost toilet.
Foodsaving Worldwide.
Visit our tool on foodsaving.world
In Progress
- Joachim Thome and Janina Abels arrived in Bilbao and started working on kickstarting foodsharing there together with Unai Gaztelu. Updates are reported daily on the wiki page linked, so stay tuned!
- Nick Sellen is carrying the torch for the foodsaving tool team, while Tilmann is absent. He recently created an issue to discuss possible rebranding of the software, so that existing groups don't feel as if they joined another organization, when starting to use it on foodsaving.world. Any input on this is welcome!
- Nick Sellen also came up with the idea to have a blog, that collects any relevant info from the world of foodsaving - be it more or less commercial - to create a resource for interested people. This blog just started, but we hope to fill it with valuable information soon!
- Isabella from Malo recently contacted us with some questions on how to use the foodsaving tool. We had no idea that the cooperations built for the very first WuppDays in October 2016 were still working! And now she's even using our software, isn't that a great development?
- Another update reached our ears from Stefan Simon, who was the driving force behind foodsharing Taiwan: Even though he is back in Europe for now, the Taiwanese initiative goes on and he even gives interviews via Skype to curious journalists! He plans on going back in summer, and then the project will probably expand again.
Challenges/help needed
- You are part of a foodsaving or -sharing initiative? You happen to know a lot about any aspect of the subject, like a specific platform, project or kind of approach? Maybe you even feel like writing inspiring blog posts..? Please contact us, so that we can make foodsaving.today the great resource we want it to be!
Done
In Progress
- Dominik came up with the idea to create a template for local groups to use, when wanting to create an individual homepage. This would allow for more individuality - also doing more justice to the new association structure in foodsharing.de, which basically makes every local community their own association, be it registered or not - while at the same time maintaining a somewhat common look and identity.
- There also is the idea to create a better mobile app, that would facilitate contacting specific individuals using push notifications. If this would be a native app or a mobile-friendly web app is still discussed.
- Lorenz Sieben expressed interest to implement Doctrine ORM for the backend. He would like to investigate the codebase a bit more first, then discuss proposals to integrate an ORM. Lorenz is a little unsure of his time commitment though
Culture.
Done
- Makka Cosa wrote a nice song called 'Sharing Kultur', that is inspired by yunity and foodsharing. He recorded it for us and it is now accessible on the wiki.
In Progress
- Bruno from Gothenburg told us, that he recently presented the idea of saving and sharing resources to more people in his city, who all were excited about it. Apart from an already active foodsaving community, there is a project called bicycle kitchen, that saves and repairs bikes from the streets, and according to Bruno they'd also need a sharing software at some point, since the interest in the topic is huge. They even have support of the city officials, and as it seems Gothenburg is fighting waste very actively!
To keep interested people from the wider community updated Bruno suggested to create #gothenburg on Slack, where he will share the news from now on. - Janina Abels wants to write pages on more parts of yunity culture, like hitchhiking, dumpster diving, functional living, plate licking and hygiene bottles. At some point she'll hopefully get to it...
Challenges/help needed
- Or do you want to help out with writing about above-mentioned topics? That would be highly appreciated!
- Also every other cultural aspect, that you see as relevant to yunity can be elaborated on! Do you have any ideas? Let us know!
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
