Notes on the first neapolitan meeting

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The image above is a photo taken at the ex-asilo filangeri, one of the Neapolitan urban commons.
It is a neapolitan way of saying which means: "every head is a court". This article is the first of a set of posts about an hopeful fruitful interaction with a group of neapolitan activists interested in experimenting with bonfire.

As we’re approaching a new phase in which bonfire is not anymore a chimera among few devs, but it’s starting to come together as a nice tool, some of us are anxious to make raids in the analogic world and spread the big news: bonfire exists!

Today I visited Naples for the first time after the beginning of the pandemic. I met some friends and discussed about how bonfire could be useful to their communities and practices and how communities and practices can be useful to bonfire.

There’s many reasons I always thought at Naples as the first place to discuss a possible bonfire adoption, all of them rotate around a single yet powerful concept: contamination.
In my experience as a developer, contamination is one of the most feared and therefore dismissed aspect when building a software. Speaking of bonfire, being able to respond and adapt to contamination is its core value proposition. Needless to say, Naples is the shangri-la of contaminations and I am lucky enough to have friends who navigate this ocean of contaminations and contradictions in a superb way.
When I cite Naples i'm referring to participants of the urban commons network. Activists that most of the time cross different places, communities and initiatives. In front of the oldest restaurant of Via dei Decumani, we started wondering about the possibility of lighting a few bonfires in Naples.

Below a list of not exhaustive topics we brainstormed during the day:

Suggestions for next extensions #

Current bonfire extensions: Social, Kanban and Offers/Needs - even if still under development - caught the eye because in a way or another they answered current needs of different communities.
Nonetheless during our conversations two new extensions were cited several times as worth to note.

Federated calendar #

It's hard to coordinate initiatives among different communities and organize events that do not cross existing ones. At today, this requires lot of chats and schedule changes at last moment. Having a federated calendar would allow activists to have a general view across everything that's happening within the network. This would greatly enhance the activities planning and coordination.
The calendar should span across different levels: it would allow users to view all the activities planned in the wider network and zoom in/out to specific area/communities, as well as filter for specific topics or date range. We didn't investigate further how such federated calendar should work, but it's all good food for thoughts.

Federated governance #

How to take decisions and how to implement a governance system that reflect the community vision was also briefly touched during the brainstorming session. At present some experimentations were made using Framavox and loomio - mostly as a sentiment analysis tool when discussing new proposals.

Where to go next #

During our chats we didn't pretend to answer any of the questions that arose - neither It was the scope of this post. We agreed to meet again in a couple of weeks - bringing more minds to the table - and keep the discussion going as well as start playing with bonfire.

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