Rescue plan
From espians
On Friday I went to RichMix to meet up with Guillem, but ended up meeting up with William and Mamading mostly. During the discussion, I understood for the first time the situation of the 24 weeks project after 3 weeks of confusion, excitement and drama. I was aware that Tav had disappeared to Barcelona, and left responsibilities to various people who didn't consider the responsibilities to be their own and in some cases found the allocations presumptuous and damaging to their reputations. What I didn't know is that Tav has signed a memorandum of understanding with RichMix which indicates that Esp Metanational LLP has promised to deliver a "Learning Centre" to RichMix at the end of week 12 including refurbishments to the value of £50,000 (the figure isn't actually in the MOU, but it has been verbally agreed). In addition, Architect's TV (more than a simple redesign of green.tv) has been promised to the architects firm who adjusted the design brief for the learning centre in order to incorporate tav's plans. William is doing a great job of managing the situation with the various parties involved so far, but if something by way of progress isn't demonstrable soon the chances of the RichMix part of the project continuing for much longer seem slim.
I am assuming that no-one has any clue where this £50,000 is coming from at this point. Am I right? If that is the case it seems to me that the project needs to urgently find funding. I can't help thinking that Tav has done a really stupid deal here since £50,000 is much higher than the rental value of RichMix for the period, and after all the place would be empty if it wasn't for the 24 weeks project. Given that I am the only other legal member of the illustrious "Esp Metanational LLP" this gives me some personal concerns too. However, without Tav around trying to be a leader and stifling self-organisation, there is the feeling that something exciting could come out of this project if it gets past week 6. I am very inspired by many of the people involved and think it would be a huge waste if nothing came out of it. I am therefore making some suggestions for a rescue strategy for the project. Clearly, I haven't been deeply involved in the project up to now, so maybe what I have to say is misunderstanding the situation. Maybe everything is under control and its just me who sees a likely collapse in the next weeks? I don't intend to become deeply involved in 24 weeks directly, however I would like to see the project succeed and I am happy to collaborate with the participants currently involved.
Here are my main suggestions: 1. If 24weeks is to really put the effort in to raise £50,000 for hardware and refurbishments, then walking away and leaving the centre at the end of 12 weeks would be really stupid. Better to suggest a profit share and ongoing creative control of the space. It won't be possible to have a Learning Centre delivered by week 12 to the value of £50,000 so the deal with RichMix may as well be restructured asap. I think the team should be straight with RichMix that Tav has f***ed up on the negotiations, but that there is a real opportunity for the people there to create something exciting and new which will benefit everyone. 2. Since Tav has left without giving anyone access to the accounts and I am the only other legal member, Esp Metanational LLP is an inappropriate vehicle for business, it would be better if the active participants in 24 weeks created an organisational structure which they feel comfortable to be members of and which they are equally responsible for: e.g. 24 weeks LLP? 3. I know of a few funds which it might be possible to approach for money with quite a quick turnaround (1-2 months if you get very lucky) - I have included them in the attached map, in case anyone is interested. 4. I would strongly suggest coordinating software development efforts of 24weeks with the Hub, Large Blue, Telecommunisten, Must TV etc. There is a huge amount of potential synergy between all these projects. The Hub currently, has two software development projects which are being actively pursued, one is in zope2 and the other in turbogears. I plan on porting both to Zope3 in recognition of the fact that the component architecture really does allow a large amount of code reuse. It may not be the plexnet but it is certainly the best thing I can find for building anything larger than small standalone web-app's. Zope3 has the additional benefit of having twisted in front making it relatively simple to be scalable real-time collaboration apps. The diagram attached gives a broad idea of the kinds of apps I would like to see getting built. At the Hub, we'll almost certainly be contributing 4 developers (including myself and jhb) to create free software (GPL) covering some of these areas. If we could coordinate our efforts around this we could create something truly amazing.
I hope you find my diagram interesting. I don't claim to know everything that is going on with the project nor did I aim for completeness, but for me it represents a rough plan of where people might focus their energies in order to make 24weeks a success. I would be happy if other's would edit it to better reflect their viewpoints - unfortunately that is only possible if you are using linux and have 'dia' installed. That just emphasises the need for collaborative mind-mapping tools :-).
Yours hopefully,
Tom
