semente Lab is our space of experimentation and reflection. In this page you’ll find our research notes, thought experiments, musings and fast-paced reporting.
See also the wiki pages about semente (in Portuguese), and this repository with documentation of its development.
Going further on developing semente, we are now experimenting with different shapes for the canvas, as well as more consistent views of community dynamics. We expect to have new developments to show in the coming months. Open processual documentation is being published to this GitHub repository. As any good Lab, though, live documentation of experimental processes is arguably too messy to navigate for those not involved in the processes. Parts of it make it to public posts like this one on communities and to a wiki page (in Portuguese). But we also have meeting notes, sketches, design boards, videos in Portuguese and other elements, most of which won’t likely be incorporated at the end of the process. ...
True to its roots on decades of experience with collaborative initiatives, semente is fundamentally focused on communities. We do acknowledge, however, the ambiguity of that word. Communities can, after all, be considered places of safety as much as sites of homogeneity and constraint. Inclusion and care, as well as exclusion and prejudice. Of course, there is no precise and universal definition of what communities are. To clarify its meaning to us, we share some practice-based reflections. ...
Felipe (semente) and Ed King (University of Bristol) were invited by the Knowle West Media Centre to participate in the first of a new series of events. It was titled “What if…? Seeds of Tomorrow Growing Today”. Knowle West is a media centre with a long history of community-oriented projects. The event was “a collective exploration of community tech plus arts. A place to grow connections and be inspired by the seeds of possible tomorrows happening today.” ...