Today’s post is a catch up on skills exchange/gift economy activities. There has been a lot happening in this area over the last couple of weeks, and I want to capture the process and order before it disappears. It feels important to document this stuff – i.e. the mechanics of how actions, conversations, collaborations come about – because it reveals that these things are organic, dependent on open-ness, goodwill, risk and basically just trying things out.
The last time I posted on this was the meeting I had with Bradford creatives Ivan and Georgia Mack, a few weeks back – an exploratory conversation around shared interest in sharing and gift economy projects. We talked about gift circles as a flexible, real world way of sharing skills and resources, but also about experimenting with Twitter hashtags to explore the social media possibilities. Here’s an excerpt from Ivan’s blogpost on Wur Blog http://wurblog.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/twitter-gi…
It’s important systems of gift giving are grounded in real world interactions between people in the same place as they help to build a sense of community. We wanted our gift circle to be
a:local
b:not web based but ‘real’
c:non hierarchical
d:minimum administration and hackable
e:no values placed on gifts
Plans are afoot to make this happen in the real world by meeting and talking and sharing, but we also realised that we might as well experiment with co-opting existing media to this end. The only risk is that nothing happens and we move on. With this in mind we propose the following tweet structure and hashtag for bradford skills exchange.
OFFER: (insert skill here) #BDskillx
NEED: (insert need) #BDskillx
The hashtag has so far has limited uptake in people using it to actually exchange skills, but what has happened is that is has generated interest and conversation on twitter from people within our creative networks which has led to the beginnings of a ‘real world’ collective.
I recently did a skills exchange with Bradford based photographer Adam Simons in which Adam gave me a refresher session in manual camera use in return for some advice about exhibiting (blogged here on Wur http://wurblog.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/pints-and-…)
Last Thursday on Twitter, Adam, Ivan and I were talking about the best place to get film developed – this then sparked a discussion with other Bradford creatives joining in – about the possibility of setting up a collective dark room- which we could all run and use together. The enthusiasm and excitement for this idea was palpable, so we decided to fix a date for a meeting as soon as possible.
So six of us (@simon cantrill, @impgalleryanne, @bpmonkey, @SkylightSwift and @adamsimonstweet and @jeanmcewan ) met last night for an early evening drink to talk through the possibilities.
We all agreed that what we want a is sustainable model , a darkroom which we can run as a collective which is permanent, accessible and affordable. We talked about various options for spaces within and outside Bradford city centre, and some possible sources of equipment. We agreed that we would begin as a collective of six , set up a space, and then look at how we might grow – in terms of other members, and workshops and other projects. We’re going to meet again soon to make some decisions about space and to get this thing off the ground as soon as possible. Exciting.
