User:Marie.Byleen

WHO are you?
Name/Nationality/Ethnicity - Marie Byleen / United States

Location Lawrence, Kansas, United States

Picture I’ll have one up soon, I hope.

Hobbies and Pastimes I sing, dance, and clap my hands. I enjoy models of the self and novel cognitive maps of all varieties. I like to play outside.

WHY are you motivated to support/develop this work?
I see value in a large-scale systemic view of the interlocking processes, things, and relationships that comprise the sum of human civilization on this precious planet. OSE’s work seems to flow out of this kind of view and it combines some of the most relevant ideas floating around today for addressing the unhealthiest aspects of these dynamic systems at vulnerable points. Local fabrication, local food systems, open source development, and global connectivity woven together into a single project/movement could aide an overall direction of change, hopefully in ways that will resolve some of the pressing issues of this time (but, given, will create a whole new set of issues to grapple with).

I like that Factor e Farm is a few hours by car or one very long day’s bicycle ride from my home. The physical proximity of this part of the OSE project makes it seem more real to me. I first ran into information about Open Source Ecology on Jon Robb’s blog Global Guerrillas. I later heard an announcement / plug for OSE at the ECM (center of many things radical in my town) and ended up going to a talk Marcin gave at the Lawrence Public Library. Attending his talk really solidified my interest in lending a hand to the project.

I am interested in building resilient communities as part of a network of makers and tinkerers.

WHAT can you/have you contributed
I’ve contributed a little bit to the wiki. My efforts have mostly been geared toward trying to make the site friendlier and more transparent to new visitors. I have no experience with this, but I’m learning as I go. In general, I’m young. I have more potential than experience.

Communications / Organizational
I've spent time working with a dream team collaborative editing group polishing the creative and professional work we each produce, which has given me some skills for editing texts. Along with working on large-scale structures in the context of writing, I like to spend time arranging objects to let something new arise out of their interaction. I've always been into collage as an art form and recently I've been organizing spaces and objects to be more appealing and intuitive to the people that use them.

Sociology
I am very interested in intentional communities. I have a lot to explore in this realm, and it is something that I hope to be engaged in and coming to terms with until I die. My few years’ experience living in a cooperative house has given me chances to work with others over time to make things we care about real. It's given me a perspective on group dynamics and a deepened my collaborative skill.

There are a lot of reasons why ~90% of attempts at forming intentional communities fail. Working together is hard. Creating spaces and communities that foster the growth of the people involved is exceedingly difficult, to say the least. I have only begun to taste why this is. If my process of learning about this ever intersects with OSE, so be it.

Home Economics
I have cooked for crowds of ten to two hundred people. I do some urban foraging and sometimes have the opportunity to process large amounts of food for storage. I enjoy fermentation, wild and otherwise. I make/have made sauerkraut, kimchi, yogurt, pickles, kombucha, kefir, and hooch. I’m interested in tackling sourdough, but I have yet to make a commitment to it because I have access to so much free bread. I have some background in microbiology and I’d like to build on that by learning more about fermentation science--something for the future.

Building
Some time ago I studied electronics intensely for several months in order to design and build a theremin, only to discover that it would be much cheaper to buy a kit for the components and make a housing and antennae out of scrap materials. From this experience I have retained some passable soldering skills and the knowledge that I find that sort of assembly absolutely engrossing. The theremin has sadly been loaned and lost, but it was delightful while it lasted.

HOW can you help?
I think that in order to be helpful to the project, I would need to go through a period of re-skilling. I’m hoping to spend some time WWOOFing beginning in May, get connected with biodynamic gardeners and permaculturists. become involved with some alternative home-building projects, and maybe explore different intentional communities and ecovillages. In the meantime, I can continue to volunteer an undetermined amount of time to the wiki. I am not a True Fan because I don’t have much money right now.

Ultimately, I want to help build resiliency in communities, and OSE is building a significant and unique set of means to do that. Depending on how the OSE community and my own life develop, I may be interested in participating in the Global Village experiment at Factor e.