Photo by Maria Siriano on Unsplash
I admit, I’m a little stuck with my WOL Circle Theme: “Linking communities and organizations for a higher purpose.”
I thought it would be easier to find compelling arguments for a “corporate social mind”.
But the more I read, the more I find examples of implausible marketing (like H&M) and greenwashing, that is repelling for me.
And a second thing, that is becoming more and more evident, especially when I read and learn from Nadia Eghbal1 about working in public, is how complicated co-coordinated work is, that is not done for money, but because every cooperator has an intrinsic motivation.
Nevertheless I want to share an own experience, an own story of mine, which I remembered in this context when Sabine Kluge was talking in Gabriel Raths Podcast “New Work Chat”2 about the cultural history of networking in the USA, where it was not unusual for settlers to work for board and lodging:
I once was in South Tyrol and by passing through, I helped one day with a hay harvest - a hard work in difficult terrain - for board and lodging. For breakfast I got Schüttelbrot, a hard and crunchy flatbread, which was unknown for me until that time, with home-made butter which had his own farmhouse stamp on its top!
Schüttelbrot is a regional speciality from this area (Vinschgau) and for me the experience of that taste with the hey milk butter was so outstanding as before perhaps only the taste of a freezing quail in a five star restaurant.
And this unique experience I obtained from a non payed job. Usually at work the return is not that outstanding.
By the way, if I had the choice between quail an Schüttelbrot again, I would choose Schüttelbot.
Best things in Life are free, anyway.
Nadia Eghbal: Working in Public: The Making an Maintenance of Open Source; 2020 ↩︎
New Work Chat; Gabriel Rath: Episode 50 mit Sabine und Alexander Kluge, kluge+konsorten: Wie wir die Transformation in unseren Organisationen erfolgreich gestalten, in dem wir gemeinsam lernen https://gabrielrath.com/newworkchat/ ↩︎