FediForum, Johannes Ernst - Brainstorming Unconferences & Music Community Possibilities - The Lorenzo's Music Podcast (Transcript)
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Tom Ray: Hi, I’m Tom Ray and welcome to another episode of the Lorenzo’s Music Podcast. And this is a show where I talk to musicians, people who make things for musicians and with a focus on open source, Creative Commons and the Fediverse a lot. And because these are things I’m interested in. And today I have someone who is involved in the Fediverse and I want to speak to them as a musician because I previously spoke with Andy Piper about Oggcamp and I’ve been really interested in the idea of unconferences. I love unconferences, I love conferences, forums about open culture. But I feel like there isn’t one for music. And I want to know more about them, how they work and how they get started. So today I have someone who is doing that. Why don’t you introduce yourself and tell the people who you are and what it is you do?
Johannes Ernst: Sure. well, thanks Tom, for having me. you know, we might have more connections than you even thought. so I’m Johannes. I’m, originally from Germany. I grew up in a place where the grandfather of Mozart installed the roof of the church, tower. and so there’s a ancient musical history now almost turned a musician, a classical musician though, before I decided to be an engineer, which I thought was. Had the better business model, which was probably true. but so I relate to music as well as technology. So I’m an engineer by background. I’m an entrepreneur. I also end up, herding cats. as I think of it, which is really a community management kind of functionality. And I’ve been doing this for a very long time. It was just an odd combination of things to do. I think in the context of the fetiverse, a, long time ago, over 20 years ago, in the heyday of blogging, you know, remember blogging, where everybody set up their own website and said this is my place on the web and here I am and I’m going to publish to the world. Like any of the big publishers, I can do this on my own and I’m going to write whatever I feel like writing about. And, and we built. At the time I was very involved in this kind of thing. we built a whole bunch of technology around it. So for example, that I could leave comments on your blog and we could sort of talk to each other, your blog against my blog and you have these common threads around. And that was about the same time as Facebook and the likes got started. except that of course, they sort of won this in a way that they took all the oxygen out of the room. and this whole idea of blogging by and less, I mean, it didn’t go away, but it became less sort of a mainstream, kind of, phenomenon than it had been for a few years. And then, of course, decentralized social media platforms sort of took over. and, you know, when Elon Musk, bought Twitter, I and so many other people said, hang on, this might actually be the best opportunity we’ve had in almost 20 years to sort of restart this and say, you know, we have learned a few things. I mean, 20 years ago when a bunch of us said decentralized platforms, they are going to fail in a variety of different ways, and they will be bad for people. People look at me or look at anybody and say, what the heck are you talking about? It’s so cool I can connect to my friends. but pretty much all of the downsides that were, I think, on the horizon for the people who were in the know 20 years ago have come to pass. And a lot of others, you know, I don’t think anybody was thinking that Facebook would be implicated in genocid, you know, things like that. So, all of these things have come to pass and a whole bunch of other things have come to pass. and, all of a sudden people understand that now that there’s a problem and all of a sudden there’s an opportunity. And this is where the fedi works comes in, where the OpenSocial web comes in as a set of technologies that lets us connect with each other without some meddling middleman in the middle, direct, without an algorithm, with a Mark Zuckerberg model, business model, and all of these kinds of things. And so to come to the context that we hint. So I’ve started basically When, Elon bought, Twitter, I thought, okay, there might be an opportunity here, because there is a bunch of underground technology that’s still around. how do we grow this? How do we make this more of a mainstream thing? And I figured the first thing you need to have is a place where the people who work on this can meet each other. and so your fedi Forum was created, basically, that was just the idea. Let’s have a place where people can find each other and talk to each other, and we don’t know what they will talk about and we don’t know what comes out of it, but that place is needed. And so that’s what’s the first fedi forum. And we’ve been running it ever since. So in a couple of weeks we have I think the seventh fetiforum coming up. We’re doing it online because our community is global. the people care about this, pretty much global. There is no particular geography involved. Just like music, it’s a global phenomenon. and so I’ve been running this and as an unconference, which is really the kind of event structure or non structure that encourages people who feel passionate about something to connect with other people who feel passionate about it and learn and teach. Ah, each other and come out of it saying wow, I learned so much. and I made so many new connections and there’s something happening here. And I think we’ve been rather successful doing that with fedi forum. And I can take no credit for the model. The model has been around for like 40 years. as an unconference model, I’m not really an unconference organizer either. I just fell into this because I saw a need for my particular community. and there’s unconference. If you look all over the they’re usually a little bit, not as prominent as the highly promoted big shows. but they exist in all sorts of places.
Tom Ray: Well, and that’s what I like about it is because it does give an opportunity to people who just have an idea or have something where it’s like, oh, there’s an idea but there’s something there. Like it could be something more. Or to see the popularity of people who go in the unconference model. I want to hear that, I want to be part of it. And the discussion is also a back and forth. It’s not just a. Here’s the bunch of CEOs that are going to talk at this conference and you know, then hold up a new phone and go look what I’ve created. You know, it’s actual ideas. And sometimes that’s all they are at first or they’re just yeah, they’re just minimum viable products or something like that.
Tom Ray: And now. So I spoke with Andy Piper about an unconference before and I love that format and I really do. You’re doing it online now. Tell me how you organize something like that online. That’s one of the things that I’d really like to know because that is an easier way to. Easier. It’s an easier way for people to participate is what I mean. Because there’s no travel involved or having. But that also takes out one of the elements which is like you have a board, excuse me, a board that you look at where people show ideas and you brainstorming breakout into rooms. So how does that work with an online forum like fedi Forum.
Johannes Ernst: So do your listeners know what unconference is or should I spend a minute on explaining what it is?
Tom Ray: Feel free to explain it as well for those who don’t. A lot of them will, some of them might not. Let’s err on the side of people might not know. So yes, go right ahead please.
Johannes Ernst: Let me tell you about my first unconference a long time ago. So I was used to academic conferences, where you have a bunch of papers submitted and there is a selection committee and they read them out and then you get, oh, get to give a talk and then you get up, and you basically read your paper, go through this and then if you’re lucky there’s maybe five minutes of question and answer at the end of the session and then every goes back home. And this is a model that works for certain things, but it’s sort of the exact opposite of what an unconference is. When I went to my first unconference they said oh yeah, and tomorrow we’re going to unconference and there’s no agenda and we’re going to figure it out. And I was thinking what the heck, what are you guys working this is? No, but it works beautifully. Well and the basic idea of an unconference, whether it’s in person or it is online, is that people come to the event and they ask themselves what do I care about? What are the subjects I really care about? Not just what do they present to me. I’m not just a consumer. What is the things that I care about, what are the topics? And some of them I go like, you know, I have this thing that I know that might be of interest to other people and am I going to talk about this? And that might actually be just something that occurred to you in the shower the day before. It doesn’t have to be full fledged. it doesn’t have to be a paper and well researched and the presentation and slides and all of these things. It just has to be a subject that you care about or the other, the other subject or the other way around. I have a question. I always wanted to know something about this. I had some questions around this. I wonder whether there’s other people who care about the subject and might know something about it. And then when the unconference opens, usually you need to have a facilitator because without a facilitator it probably, would disintegrate real quick. But the facilitator will explain the rules, of the game. But you making the agenda on the way it basically works is that people who have a topic raise their hands and get in line and then they announce the topic and say I want to talk about subject X. And then the pick is lot in the, there’s different schemes that people do and how they get assigned to a room or an online, online space. But basically you get, get assigned or you pick a space that you’re going to do this in a time and then by the time, by the time the time comes around, you end up ending the space and anybody else who is interested in the subject shows up. And then what can happen here is if you’re very well prepared, sometimes people are, then they say, I have a slide deck. Here’s 10 minutes of slide deck. And I’m going to run through this because I want to present this in some structured format or it goes the opposite way. And it says, okay, I have a question. And the question is what the heck is the fedi worse? Or how does it work? Or anything like this.
Tom Ray: It can go as simple as beginning entry point, level, type things is what you’re saying.
Johannes Ernst: Yeah, it can be all over the map. There is no. This is one of the beauties about it which is that there is no shame, there is no expectations as to where you are. You can go in the highest level expert, detail that you might want and that will attract certain people in the event and not attract others. Or you can start at the very, very beginning where there is some very basic questions and it will attract other people, but it will attract the right people in that room for that particular subject. And what tends to happen in conferences is that almost anybody who thought they had a plan for the session, like 45 minutes or an hour or whatever it is, this is what I’m going to do. It disintegrates very quickly because people talk to each other and the conversation goes in some directions that you didn’t expect because the people brought in their knowledge and their interests. and very often you go like, I thought we were going to talk subject A, but we really ended up subject B, which I didn’t even know existed. And now I learned so much about subject B. And while I didn’t get a done you know, it’s something that was really good. And if you take notes, in the sessions, as we encourage people to do, or m many people encourage to do, then you can publish it to other people who might not have had a chance to go to the session and build on that the next time you do the event. So I’m giving a lot of detail here, but it is I think the way people come out of unconferences. If they’re done well, there’s also ways of doing unconferences badly. But if they’re done well, people come out of it very energized. They come out with I’ve heard people say, oh no, please don’t do fedi forum for three days. I can’t do this. This is too strenuous. Two days is way more than I can basically already process because there’s so much there, which is very different. A usual conference where you usually sit there and you’re like these guys keep droning on on things that really nobody is interested about. right. I mean it happens in every conference, on some panel. And you’ve heard all of this, I can read your press release. I don’t need this, you know. But that doesn’t happen on conference because it’s a person to person interactive format. and so that model can be moved online. there is ah, apparently an entire little industry that does this. it’s harder to do online than it is offline. and I’m very grateful to my friend Kalia Young who pioneered that format that we’re using for fedi Forum, basically online during the top of the pandemic, for an on conference that has run for over 20 years now called Internet Identity, workshop. And they were trying to get it online and they came with a format that works really well and by and large just copiness.
Tom Ray: Oh really? And what is that? So how does that, how do you go about that format? one, what is it built on? I guess what’s the backbone of it? because it would be mostly be videos.
Johannes Ernst: Correct. So there is a question about what’s the right venue, online venue for doing this. And the truth is that the right venue doesn’t exist. There’s only approximations. no, it’s simply the ideal venue doesn’t exist. So there is versions of how you can approximate this. But the basic structure you want is you want to have a video channel, that is sort of the plenary where everybody arrives at the beginning and where you explain how this whole event is going to happen. But you do common activities and then for example agenda making is ah, when you make the agenda everybody stands up and says this is what we want to talk about and how it gets scheduled. This is a, this is a common activity where everybody needs to participate. And then you have breakout rooms essentially where you know, where as many as you want depending on how many people you have in the, in the in the event that you can basically somebody can say you know I’m going to be in space C at 9 o’ clock or some such thing. And then what is very helpful if these breakout spaces have some other tools beyond the video such as a back channel chat and note taking is I think the most important one. Some people do votes in there and do moderate Q and A kind of stuff. There’s a lot of stuff you can throw at it. but this is not really all that important. I think the important part is that you can break out into different spaces and there’s a lot of fear of missing out that people tend to have in on conferences where there’s like three or five parallel sessions all of which are interesting to me. Which one do I go to? and so what tends to happen is that everybody has this all the time. and so if people take notes in the sessions then you can go to one session and not feel completely left out on the others. It’s also encouraged behavior. I should say this, which I make a point every time at fedi Forum because it sort of breaks societal norms. there is encouraged behaviors to leave sessions and join on less sessions if that session isn’t for you. We have been sort of taught that this is impolite that you get up in the middle of an event and walk out. I was a very long time ago when I was at university, I ah, was some kind of student ah, ta and I told them I don’t want you to be here if you think that I’m not telling you anything interesting here. So if that is the case I want you to walk out. And the first time that happened that was actually kind of a shock to my ego. Here I am at the whiteboard and doing all these formulas and da da da. I’m feeling really good about myself, how smart I am. M and half of the class gets up and says bye
Tom Ray: but you gave them the opportunity. But it’s better because you know, otherwise they’d be sitting there and you’d find out later like, oh, they hated
Johannes Ernst: it, you know, yeah, it’s not good for them. It’s also not good for the other people in the room because if you have, you know, 20 people in the room and 15 of them are really bored, the. The atmosphere, the. That you create in that room is going to go to the other five. If these 15 people were to leave and only five were there, you could have so much of a better conversation than with the. With the other dead wood around it. That’s not interesting.
Tom Ray: So psychologically, it’s one of those weird things too, where it’s hard not to focus on the people that left at first. And it’s weird to get around that. It’s kind of like, say you have a newsletter and you have people that sign up, and every time you send out a newsletter, somebody unsubscribes and like, maybe it’s one or two people, and you’re like, well, why did they unsubscribe? They’ve been a subscriber for, like, five years. What? And it’s like, no, think about the many other people you have on that list who are following because they want to. Don’t focus on the ones who went like, ah, you know what? I’m sick of this.
Johannes Ernst: Right. I mean, I think the mindset here is different in the sense that if you are, let’s say, giving a talk and you’re broadcasting from stage the way we are used to in big conferences, then one of the things you’re trying to optimize is get your message to as many people as you can. Right? You’re trying to get everybody in there because you want to blast your message out to everybody, whether they want to hear it or not. Right? That’s the idea. The unconference idea is very different, which is you’re trying to connect to the people who really care about your subject.
Tom Ray: You’re right.
Johannes Ernst: So it’s a very different mindset. Let me say something here, which I have seen. I have participated in far more conferences than I’ve ever run. So I’m not really an organizer myself. I’m far more of a. As a proportion, I’m far more of a participant than an organizer. This is just something that fell into my lap, and it seems to work. but I’ve seen many conferences, and some of them, work really well. And you have no idea exactly why they work so well. And some others, have turned out to be complete disasters. and it happens. And it all boils down to the facilitator. So, I would recommend for anybody who wants to do on conferences to get themselves somebody who has at the very minimum, participated in a lot of different conferences, preferably get a facilitator who knows how to set this up in a way that doesn’t derail. and it’s not so obvious what this facility exactly does, but I have seen the difference that it makes. Ah, and so I would really recommend, this, ah, has to do with not just the organization, but the entire atmosphere, the emotional. As musicians, we sort of know this, right? You’re creating sort of an emotional sphere, around what you do. it’s not just that you’re playing through notes. You’re creating an emotional space that your audience and you are in. And it’s just like that. You’re creating an emotional space, where then the kind of conversations happen that you want in the way you want. So for example, people will disagree with each other, right? I mean, it’s the whole point of these conversations that they disagree with each other. How to disagree makes a gigantic difference to how well the event works and whether people. And if you have competitors in the room and it happens, right, Are they going to fall into the, attack each other from the stage kind of thing that you see very often at normal conferences, or are they going to constructively acknowledge these differences and maybe come up with some things they can do together to move the entire sphere forward? And that depends on the emotional context that’s being said. it doesn’t happen on its own. so for example, at fedi Forum we have had a whole bunch of projects that have come out of fedi forum that nobody planned going in. Well, it basically goes like somebody says, I want to talk about Subject X and somebody else shows. Some other people show up who also want to talk about Subject X. Nobody knows exactly how to solve this, or how to proceed, but they’re having a good conversation and it’s a highly qualified conversation because only the people care about the subject. They have thought about this and all of a sudden they say, you know, we could do this, this and the other. And a project has been born, right? Let’s meet again next week somewhere. And we’re going to do this and you can do this and that, and it sort of moves forward. And all a sudden you have a kind of project that is very, you know, that is, that is, It’s not a part of an organization. It’s not part of some you know, it’s not some working group of some kind of entity. It’s just a bunch of people who want to do something together because they decide this is the right thing to do. And, if I may, sort of make a broader comment here, it’s. I think, you know, this is the kind of thing we need worldwide, where a bunch of people on whatever subject get together and say, this is screwed, we going to have to fix this. Let’s just find each other and start working on it. as, opposed to waiting for the UN or whoever it is.
Tom Ray: Well, and that’s kind of the same way. not in a conference way or. Well, it’s hard to say. I want to say it likens itself to open source in a sense where if somebody doesn’t like the way that the project is going, they create a fork and build off of that in a different manner. And that’s kind of like the breakout or no, maybe nothing. But still, these things start from a discussion. It’s hard. I, I get what you’re saying. For some reason, I really want to, like, connect it to an example, you know.
Johannes Ernst: So, yeah, it is. I mean, there’s lots of examples. you just have, you know, in the industrial society, we have sort of been taught that this is not how the world works. but it used to be, you know, I mean, if you in your village and you look and you notice that the, the creek through the village is silted, I mean, what will you do? You got to go to your neighbors and say, hey, the creek is silted. We have a problem here. We need to fix this somehow. And then, you know, I mean, you’re not waiting for the city council that might not even exist in your traditional village, right? You just find a bunch of people and say, do we have this common problem? What are we going to do about it? And then you do it. Right. that’s the way it works.
Tom Ray: Far more colorful than mine. That was, I love that. That was poetic. That was like you just wrote a short story.
Johannes Ernst: But we have to be so trained that there is somebody who’s in charge of things, and we have to do it the way this particular thing works. In all sorts of society. We have been sort of almost disabled. We have been given away that sense of agency, that sense of power. We can just do things. And it certainly relates to open source. I mean, open source is sort of the thing where somebody writes a piece of code and says, because I can just write this. And somebody else says, oh, that’s cool. I have an idea. I’m going to improve this. And this is actually there’s a parallel here because if you look like the large open source projects that for example have a lot of commercial support as well. It’s not like there is a joint venture with a CEO and then they’re assigning engineers to it and there is a top down plan how they’re going to do this. It’s not how it works. It’s a bunch of engineers in the companies who said we really ought to be doing this and they get involved and then they drag the management around and say, you know, I need so much time for this. and then your good things happen because the people on the ground who had opinions how this was supposed to work and were qualified to do something about it connected with other people and other companies and others and they just did it. Right. I mean this is how a lot of progress works. And the unconference format is sort of in that vein. I mean it’s not related to coding. There’s unconference and all sorts of things. I just got an invite for a, I’m in the San Francisco Bay area. I’m just going to invite for a bioregional conference on figuring out the various ecological projects related to the San Francisco Bay Area bioregion. There’s lots of things. I was in a conference years ago that was talking about how to get democracy back. there is lots of things you could do. Now I’m not entirely certain what the topics I would expect in a conference for musicians. but I think it has to probably be steered a little. You know, there’s this old quip that I remember. I don’t remember who it was attributed to, but this musician was asked who he most likely most likes to talk to. And he says oh, bank directors. He goes why bank directors? And he says oh, bank directors always want to talk about music and I love talking about music. When I talk to musicians they always want to talk about money, right? I don’t like talking about money. So, so, so there is this discussion about you. Now where exactly does the, the conversation go? and maybe there’s some expectation setting that needs to be done. That not. The conference for musicians is not all about money or, or you know, whatever but, but yeah, you know, it can be done.
Tom Ray: I think a lot of it would be and thoughts on it. And I spend a lot of time in different discourses, and discord, rooms and Things like that, where people are talking about what can be done. How can we get away from people owning streaming? How can we improve payment of streaming? I think a lot of it would be that. And for regular music conferences, everybody’s just going to show you how you can make something to go viral or, you know, that’s what those conferences always are. Or how to present your stuff to a record label. Nobody needs any of that. Most people figure out how to use their social media better, and before anybody else is going to teach them to do it, those people are learning from the people that are doing it, who are successful doing it in their own places. I think it would be more because of stuff like. And this person spoke at your. At one of your fedi forums or presented there? I believe, yes. Ben Pate from Bandwagon, who actually was using that as an example for his language that he built Emissary, and he just happened to build a band camp Alternative, which right now that is the only option. And everybody thinks, not everybody, but most musicians are like, oh, just use Bandcamp because you really own it yourself. No, they’ve already been bought and sold three times. Nobody knows what’s going to happen with Bandcamp. You don’t own it yourself. It’s a Twitter. It is. You know, at any moment it could be, hey, your music that’s on here, we own it now because that’s part of the contract you signed when you signed up. You know, stuff like that, you never know. And going back to how you originally stated it with the blogs, things like that ruined some of the stuff that people are going, you know, this wasn’t that bad and it was a smart idea. We self owned blogs, we self owned the RSS feeds that made blogs. Then everybody went like, well, everybody’s just posting it to Facebook anyway, so just use that. And then we don’t have to spend money on this. Things like that. Anyway, sorry, went off on a little rant there, but that’s. Now you can see like, these are the things that I think could come up for musicians at a conference like this.
Johannes Ernst: So it’s been a very long time since I’ve been a practicing musician, and a lot of stuff has happened electronically that didn’t exist at the time. I was. But it strikes me that as a musician, the model where you hand over your music to some record label that then basically plasters this over the world, which is sort of what a lot of people sort of striving for the top end of the. Of the scheme is really not one that really relates to what you’re trying to do as a musician. I mean in most positions I’m sure there’s the conquer the world plus the world kind of, you know, people in music just like everywhere else. But most musicians aren’t doing that for that reason. They’re doing this because they have something to say. and what do they have who they have something to say to? Well, it’s not even just say to, but say with. It’s a thing. It’s the connection between you and your audience. Ah. Or your fellow musicians. It’s a social thing. And what you do there depends highly on the kind of music you do. As I said, I had a classical music, background. So I’m a huge fan of chamber music, where you have a small number of basically musicians making music together without the central authority. It is very beautiful and you can bring your audience into this. Now if you apply this kind of stuff to the Internet, then the logical structure for this is that you have, for example, you do your rehearsals in public. for me, as a, ex practical musician, the rehearsals that the few that are recorded are always much more interesting than the performances. Okay.
Tom Ray: Because they’re talking about the way. What was the instrument of?
Johannes Ernst: I started on the piano and then, and then went into the violin. so the rehearsals are much more interesting because you can see how the people actually talk, think about this music and what works and what is good and what’s not. For me, I mean that’s much just for me. But this kind of thing is a great opportunity to create a community around the music. And I don’t think that the commercial platforms are any good at this, at least for me, what I’m seeing. And so there, you know, with Ben Pate’s project, and the various kind of project that are innovating in this decentralized social media space where we’re trying to rethink of how we interact online. I mean that’s really what we’re trying to do in the fetiverse, in the larger movement. We’re trying to rethink, and experiment with how do we best interact online. And it is clearly not just one post after the other that makes you angered in various ways, which is what the commercial platforms have turned into. How do we do this? And if you started from scratch and said, okay, I’m playing my instrument by myself, fine, let’s add one more person, let’s add, ah, two more people. Let’s add 50 people. What is the interaction I want? Because not just the music either. It’s not just the performance, it is the things around it. you might want to talk about why you care about this particular tune here or which particular recording from 27 years ago some musician did you were particularly impressed by and why. And you might have people in your audience who actually know more on the subject than you do. You know, there’s people who are experts on these things. How can we create communities? and the community is so overused, but how are we putting groups of people that can do these kinds of things and be really happy about it? and that’s the kind of innovation that we want to have in the fedi version of the open source web because now we have open protocols and we have a lot of the infrastructure that these kinds of things of innovation can happen. What we now need is the people who are actually in these particular communities, such as musicians around a particular thing and say this is what would be optimal for us. right. So as an example there is a company, a not for profit called a New Public. They are doing some innovation around local social media for local communities. Basically a better form of nextdoor. and they basically really went out there and said, okay, here’s our communities. We have the exact definition of what we want. Let’s really figure out how to make this work for them. And because there’s all these open protocols, they can innovate around us and build the things that are exactly right for them as opposed to the things that they’re trying to roll out for billions of people and throw the advertisements down our throats, all the time. And so these kinds of things are not possible. So Ben is doing with bandwagon and in various kinds of environments. And so if you have any people in your audience here who are software related, inclined, there’s a ton of opportunities to do this that we haven’t figured out yet. what exactly the business models for these things are. Right now the entire space is very badly funded because we don’t want to do ads and we don’t want to do so many things. We want to sell data and we want to. We haven’t figured out what the business models are, but it will get figured out. The whole Patreon, kind of model is really fascinating. the whole creative model is fascinating in the sense that a lot of people are willing to fund the kind of projects that they get joy from. and it has to be packaged up in a way that it works and produces a living for the people in that environment. But I think it can be done in particular if the software environment, the community environment is the one that is really conducive to doing that. And what we know from the commercial social media is just not. It’s pretty far away from what is ideal. So there’s a ton of opportunity. And the commercial people aren’t going to do this because they can’t because the size isn’t big enough for them. They want to roll the same software to a billion people. But this is not how our communities work. Right. Every musician, we don’t have only bands that, that are for a billion people. they don’t want to do this. They want to do something for a year for a community of people who thinks and feels like they do. And that’s the software, the size of the software we need for that as well.
Tom Ray: Well, and the, the other thing too is much like you were saying, the people who are building these things, there is a model that people are trying to figure out a better model to make them without advertising, with all that,
Johannes Ernst: without all that stuff. Stuff.
Tom Ray: And what’s super funny about that is when people make these things for musicians that are corporations that much, like Spotify don’t pay you a lot. Here’s the thing about musicians. We also don’t have money. That’s the entire thing. Musicians spend up to it like depending on whether or not they pay for software or use open source software or buy gear or go into a studio. A song that they’re, that even when they were available for Download was worth 99 cents and you probably spent well over a couple hundred dollars just to get the gear and recording time to do that song. So it’s the business model of being a musician is also difficult. We’re all just trying to figure out how to do this. And that’s another thing is we’re also not business managers. We make music because we want to be part of a community. And then after that it’s much like most of the movements. It’s like, well, so how do we make this work? We all definitely agree with each other. And having those ideas, you know, is how you do it.
Johannes Ernst: Exactly. And this is where I think an ad conference format is actually ideal. Right? Where you put a bunch of people in there and say okay, let’s figure this out. Nobody has a particular plan, but everybody has some thoughts about what may or may not work. right. And everybody gets smarter and there’s no competitive pressure in the sense that, oh, I have to keep this thing secret, that my competitor doesn’t know about it, because you all win if something comes to being, that solves the problem. That is very similar for everybody. Yes.
Tom Ray: And that also is the type of thing where talking about it openly is where someone else is going to say something that it gives them an idea. And even if that idea doesn’t spark how it goes forward, it could go, no, that won’t work. But you gave me an idea and this is what was m missing from what I was building. Like, the whole thing is just brain synapses going all over the room. And that’s what I love about it. Yeah. And, I want to ask you one more thing before we go here. Now you also have a company that focuses on the open web and open, you know, just the open web in general. Dazzle Labs. I only briefly looked at Dazzle Labs and I’m curious about that. Tell me about Dazzle Labs.
Johannes Ernst: So there isn’t a whole lot to say publicly. basically what we’re building a bunch of technology. We haven’t released anything really yet. technically Fedi forum is a project of, of the other labs from a purely organizational perspective on a legal perspective. But, what most of the public effort goes into is basically creating a market, meaning, that there is a thing that exists that can self sustain itself, that is big enough that it. And the reason I’m saying this is that, I’ve been around this whole decentralized social thing for long enough that I’ve seen several of the waves where it goes like, oh yeah, this time it’s going. And then it didn’t. Right. like, you know, whenever it was in the early 2010s or so, it was like diaspora. At some point it got a ton of, press, even Mark Zuckerberg invested in it. But it sort of flamed out and it goes up and down and I don’t really want to do a great big product announcements and serving customers, unless until that point where it’s clear there’s a market, because. So that’s where I’ve been essentially distracted from that lot. the primary thing into let’s attempt to build a market, which is why I’m doing fedi forum which is why I am supporting things like, there’s now an OpenSocial Web Award, that is out, for call for submissions till the end of the month. I believe it’s going to be it has like a €10,000, €20,000 in prize money, to be handed out in Amsterdam in June. and this is why I’m doing a developer network and this is why I’m doing all sorts of things to basically make this market work and then we can say okay, what are we going to sell in this market? Exactly.
Tom Ray: I love it man. The passion behind it.
Tom Ray: now also, this interview will be coming out a few weeks from when we’re speaking right now. Do you have anything you’d like to, you mention to people, projects coming up, things that are happening. Anything in the future you’d like to tell people about?
Johannes Ernst: There is a ton of interesting stuff happening and there’s now so much that even for somebody like me who organizes events, I sometimes don’t know what other events are happening. And I know this because we almost scheduled an event on top of somebody else’s Fediverse event. so there’s now so much movement happening that it’s getting not crowded but it is really good to see because so much is happening. So for that reason, on the fedi Forum side we are attempting to track all the events. It started out just as own purposes, but it is generally useful. So fediforum.org events has all the events in the broader open Source web that we are aware of.
Tom Ray: Yeah.
Johannes Ernst: So I think what’s coming up, the next event I believe is we’ll be doing the Study Forum online at the end of April and then there is going to be an event in Amsterdam, at a public spaces conference where they’re doing the Open Source Awards. That’s an in person event. and then there’s various in person events all around the world. and there is occasionally online events. I say most of the online events but I think your, your listeners might have fun on pretty much all of them.
Tom Ray: Yeah, yeah. And I, now I want to. I was looking at that events thing and I was like God, you guys are doing a lot of stuff. No, those are other things. I love that. That’s awesome. That’s actually really handy. and how often do you guys do the fedi Forum? Is there, is it yearly? Is it biannual? Is it, how, how often do you do it?
Johannes Ernst: So fedi forum is basically every six months, the main event. but we have done a few special events outside of the schedule in addition. Like for example last September we did an event with A book author who wrote a book about the failivars. And we do basically a book tour kind of event, just virtual like you would have done it at the bookstore because our audience kind of likes to hear about these things. And recently I did an event with Meg Maznick, who is pretty well known author from Tech Dirt, on sets on the Blue sky board, on a special event, focused only on how we growing this thing, how to grow the open search web. So we’re doing some special purpose events as well. but the primary fedi forum is twice a year and we do basically two or three days of mostly on conference. We’ve added some keynotes because people wanted to hear from some important voices in the community. And we also do demos, speed demos, which goes beyond the unconference format but it is also quite useful. we basically invite a small number of projects to do five minute demos of whatever cool software they built in this space. and so it’s just five minutes so that nobody gets bored if some software isn’t for you. Ah, you can see in a very short amount of time you can see a lot of innovation that happened. And then we encourage the people who do the software to run an unconference session afterwards where then there can be discussion on whatever they want to talk about specifically. that format has worked pretty well and if anybody’s Interested check out fetiform.org there is session notes from pretty much all sessions that I’ve ever run. It’s probably the single largest body of knowledge about decentralized and open protocol based social media out there. and we also have recordings of all the keynotes, and the software demos which sit on peertube, which is another one of the applications in the fediverse.
Tom Ray: Yes, and you literally answered the last question I was going to ask you which was is more information on fediforum.org and do they have videos of some of those breakouts in those five minute sessions? And you absolutely just told us about that.
Johannes Ernst: We don’t record the actual unconferenced sessions. We only take notes because then people can speak more freely and they can edit some comments out if they don’t want them to be published because you want them to be sessions that are really productive and not everybody should have to monitor every one of their words all the time. for the future when some kind of gotcha journalist comes by. so basically that’s the idea. The keynote is different. The keynote speakers presumably know what they’re doing, and the demos are also.
Tom Ray: I think that’s what I’m referring to because there have been a lot of tech, people who have, after the fact, shared, like, their breakout or their presentation, just as a. What this is sort of thing. And I think I’m just remembering those. That’s good to know as well. Well, I want to thank you so very much for talking with me today. This has been great.
Johannes Ernst: Okay. thank you for having me. I had fun.