The word Borgerlyst is a Danish portmanteau of Nadja’s invention. It consists of the two words Borger (meaning citizen) and Lyst (roughly meaning lust, urge, delight, inclination). In short, a sort of civic urge. It is meant as a sort of play on the phrase ‘civic duty’. Whereas civic duty is all the obligations, rules and expectations society forces upon you, civic urge is something like the opposite.

It is the feeling that you get when you feel a positive connection to the society around you. It can both be a sense of privilige for being able to take part and act in democratic processes, but more often it comes across as a sense of positive indignation. Every time you experience something in your life that also affects others in the same way, and you think “this could be a whole lot better”, you’re feeling that positive indignation, a civic urge to improve the world around you for the benefit of all. And when you succeed in realising such improvements, you will feel a civic delight.

Borgerlyst as a project focuses on building greater awareness around such civic urges, and make it easier for us as citizens to connect with others who share our civic urges and initiate projects to realise our civic urges. We hope that by building a positive framing around such civic engagement and participation, people will be more likely to take positive action together, rather than resorting to skeptical complaining or cynical blame games whenever they come across something in need of improvement.

A fundamental idea behind Borgerlyst is the notion that neither democracy nor society will ever be perfected, but is in a state of continuous development. It is in beta. That is to say: We have certain structures and procedures that generally work but there is still plenty of room for improvement. It is an acceptable error state that depends on our being present and engaged. And the drive that keeps us engaged in this way is our civic urge.

Today, we launched our Facebook page and in the coming month, we’ll launch our website at borgerlyst.dk as well. The whole project is focused on Denmark and will be in Danish, but we’d be most happy if the project can be an inspiration for similar initiatives elsewhere. If you’re curious to learn more, let me know.

I’ve learned a lot about working as a consultant, the process and pitfalls of designing social software, being part of a team and coordinating and solving huge and complex tasks together and producing deliverables that make sense and solve problems within the clients’ organisation.

And for that I’m very grateful.

But all things considered, I felt the need to move on. I felt a need to focus on ethnographic research rather than social business consultancy – and a need to focus on other non-work-related projects as well (more about those in later blog posts). And so, I found that the best way for me to do this is to try my hand at working on my own.

So, I’m starting my own one-man enterprise under my own name, and I’ve updated this website to reflect that. The main change is in the “About” text which now reads:

I’m an independent consultant and researcher working at the intersection between people and technology. I help organisations understand the everyday lives, practices, motivations, worries and needs of their users and stakeholders.

As an anthropologist, I meet people on their own terms, using ethnographic methods to gather empathic insights on how new products, experiences, spaces and services can have a positive impact and create value in existing social and cultural contexts.

I deliver such anthropological insights in a lucid and actionable manner that can be used to qualify decisions or develop people-centred design solutions, often in direct collaboration with other disciplines.

To me, this is the core product that I as an anthropologist can offer organisations: A better understanding of the relationships of which the organisation is part, and in which it wants to take part – whether through a new product, service, space or experience.

It’s kinda grand and kinda broad, I know. But at the moment, I’m trying to open up my expertise from the digital context in which I have been immersed for years and use ethnographic methods to engage in other contexts as well. Contexts where the social relations, interactions, tools and designs aren’t necessarily digital. If you’re curious to hear more, get in touch.

As usual, I’ll give a quick summary of the best concerts I attended this year. I’ve done this for the past few years that I have been blogging and attending the festival. But this year, it doesn’t seem quite as relevant to do so. I have been neglecting blogging for quite a while now. It takes a lot of time, which I don’t seem to have these days. And I’ve been growing increasingly frustrated at my own blog posts whenever I do blog: Blogging doesn’t seem to be improving my writing.

I enjoy writing, but lately I’ve found that the way I blog isn’t too conducive to producing high quality prose. Usually, it’s just first drafts, idle thoughts quickly jotted down and published straight away, thus avoiding the careful re-reading, editing, and re-writing that the well-composed essays that I’d like to write require.

But there is another element as to why I haven’t been blogging, and Roskilde Festival is a great example of this: Coming back from the festival, I can see how others already have posted their favourite concerts on Twitter or Facebook, summing up their feelings in short status updates as the concerts were happening. Blogging about it, even just the day after the event seems late and out of context.

So, in my mind, I’ve been changing the focus of this blog a fair bit. Here, I won’t be competing with the real time tweets and status updates. Here, I will place the more detailed status updates from my outboard brain. For my memory and your inspiration. In addition, I will attempt to experiment a bit thoroughly with tweeting, having realized that I might just as well turn my annual Roskilde post into a series of tweets:

andreaslloydMy #rf09 5 best: Magnifico – Slovenian pop wrapped in golden chains and brass horns. Very dansant. http://ping.fm/4BbyH

My #rf09 best: Jenny Wilson – Chantreuse igniting the audience with empathic and mature uncanned R’n'B. http://ping.fm/BYK0w

My #rf09 best: Analogik – late, late night show of complex beats magicking us away to a hidden balkan sailor’s dive. http://ping.fm/1RQkn

My #rf09 best: Malk De Koijn – rhyming to wrap the Danish language inside out: “De er bare kommet for at fyre den konge af.” http://ping.fm/qaolx

My #rf09 best: The Whitest Boy Alive – dance music, beautiful and unimposing in a very Scandinavian way. http://ping.fm/DNYca

There. How does that look?

So in order to share our stories with others, we (Anne, Mette and I) held a Story Club in our commune last night. Story Club is a fairly simple concept: Bring a group of people together in a cozy, informal, and unrushed place. Make them all feel comfortable and at home (as my dear grandmother always quotes her father for saying: “Make yourself at home, otherwise we’ll wish you were!”), and let them tell stories.

We had spent some time thinking about how to create the best possible setting for telling stories, and we ended up with a few rules (partially inspired by Fight Club):

1) You can tell stories based on experiences – personal or secondhand. You can read aloud a text – poems, speeches, short stories, essays, or whatever else you find moving, interesting, or thought-provoking. The important thing is that the text you relates to a story that is important to you.

2) Those listening to the story may offer to kinds of criticism: Positive and constructive. Both, if possible.

3) Everybody attending story club has to tell a story.
(originally, this was “If it is your first night at story club, you have to tell a story” – but in evaluating our first story club, we found that when everybody shared their stories on equal terms, it helped bring about a sense of openness and intimacy that wouldn’t have been possible if only some were sharing their stories).

It turned out to be a great evening. We were seven people, eating Triple Choc Cookies and drinking hot cocoa with marshmellows (and a few beers to get rid of any initial nervousness – I was the only one who knew everybody present, and it’s always a bit weird to tell stories to people you’ve never met before). We began by playing a little fun game to get going (as Anne wisely says, you relax a lot more when you’ve shared a few laughs), and then dove into the stories. Everybody had spent some time thinking about the stories they’d like to tell. There were short stories and opinion pieces, a few had dug out some of their old writing, and there were stories, reflections, and questions, which sparked more stories and reflections.

There were stories of spending time in airports, of unlikely travels, of disappearing turtles, of visions of the future, and of the flow of everyday life in the Facebook status updates. There were stories asking questions and stories offering explanations. And lots, lots, more.

The stories were good, the atmosphere was excellent – enchanting, even – but the best part for me was getting to know people in wholly different way: Through the stories they tell, and the reflections and associations that those stories bring with them within the group.

In short, it is definitely something that we’ll be doing again, and it is something that I can only recommend for others to try. It doesn’t take a lot of effort, just the good intentions of the people participating. If you’re interested in knowing more, feel free to get in touch.

Back in Denmark after almost 3 weeks in Thailand. We landed in Copenhagen on Friday, de-stressed and re-charged. Ready to seize everyday life and make it wonderful.

I’ve posted some of our travel pictures on my 23 account. I won’t really bother to go into too many details about our trip. We spend a few days (and Christmas eve) in Bangkok before heading south to Koh Chang, staying there for New Year’s (albeit with a nasty bout of diarrhea that dampened the big night), beforing heading back to Bangkok to buy belated Christmas presents and try out Theravada Buddhist meditation.

But now, I’m back. And I feel like writing. So expect more blogging to come.

We are leaving on Sunday and will come back on the 9th of January next year. It feels like such a long time since I’ve had a holiday, and I’m really looking forward to going off on an adventure.

Going travelling also means that I won’t be checking my mail and maintaining my online presence for a while. I’m also really looking forward to getting away from the computer for a while…

UPDATE: Oh, and if you have any good advice on going to Thailand, must-see places, must-avoid places, good haggle techniques, what have you. Please let me know.

Since I joining Socialsquare, I’ve been working with all sorts of aspects relating to communities online, and it’s been great to return to that the my work on the Ubuntu Community and see new ways to extend my old analyses and apply them in new contexts. But most of all, I’ve come back and found just what a good framing the Community of Practice is for understanding online communities, and I hope to learn a lot more on how to apply it from the CP Square community.

I don’t really expect that this realization will have much influence on this blog. I guess I like it that way. It does mean that I’ll never be able to attract huge numbers of readers, since what catches my interest seems to be rather diverse. It’s more a confirmation of the direction of that I’ve been heading so far: This blog reflects whatever I’m thinking about – for my benefit, and hopefully for at least a few others as well.

The commune is located in a big, cosy villa in the wealthy Hellerup neighbourhood north of Copenhagen, with a huge garden and is currently the home for 9 grown-ups, several children and some cats, and at any given time in the past 40 years, a number of people resembling that has been living in the house at any given time. The total number of residents is probably somewhere in the hundreds.

My association with the commune is tenuous at best, as my girlfriend had been invited by one of the residents, whom she knew from her work. And I did feel a bit like an anthropologist visiting some reclusive tribal gathering for everyone associated with the house in some way. This was even more evident when the tribal elders sat down to tell stories in the living room, gathering people to hear the stories of how the commune came to be, how it got its name, and how commune life has evolved through four decades:

For the first two years after its birth as a commune, the commune didn’t have a have proper name. It was merely named, as everything in the area, after the old mill, Svanemøllen, which was the foremost landmark in northern medieval Copenhagen. It didn’t get its name until 1970, and those first 2 years were extremely uneven: At one point 28 people lived in the house, loads of people did various drugs and made various political statements. There was a heavy involvement with the later so notorious Tvind schools. The residents decided to try out having a shared economy, which turned out to be a disaster, and a lot of the founders moved out in disappointment.

In the spring of 1970, just as taxes and mortgage were to be paid, only a few of the old residents seemed to be willing to stay, and a whole new group of communards moved into the house, and did away with the old ways. Among these were famous Danish hippies such as Ebbe Reich, Troels Erichsen, and Henning Prins. The former two were among the 16 residents who changed their last names to Kløvedal (eng. Rivendell) in 1970, inspired by J.R.R Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” and contemporary thinking on neo-tribalism. The shared name only added to the commune mythology of a big family. But the tribal aspect was quite present with all the people – young and old – who all have part in the history of the house.

As to the name, Maos Lyst roughly translates as “Mao’s Delight”. And though it was a celebration of Chinese dictator, all of the the Danish maoists loathed the name at the time. This was because the word Lyst in Danish is typically associated with the naming schemes of working class allotment gardens, and not very pompous at all. Another reason why they liked the name was, as one of the old residents explained, because Mao represented absolutely no freedom at all, yet an obligation to be free, and that was complete at odds with the ambiguities of the word Lyst, which not only means delight, but also urge or lust. One of the current residents said that they had considered changing the name now that Mao is no longer so hot anymore. But they decided against it, because the name has now become part of modern Danish history. So in a way, the name is no longer theirs to change.

There were many more stories. Especially some of the women told intriguing stories of how they’d sought to build gender equality in the commune. And a few of the old men told of how the big meetings and difficult discussions pretty much disappeared in puffs of marihuana smoke.

All of this is quite fascinating to hear directly from the horse’s mouth. Especially to me in relation to the commune which I’m living in now. We’re only six, and our commune is only 8 years old, but Maos Lyst shows how such intentional communities can continue to live on. I think it would be pretty cool to one day be able to attend the 40th anniversary of my commune – my urban tribe of sorts…

I didn’t get to see and hear as music as usual, as earned my ticket working in a Smoothie bar for part of the festival, but I managed to her some good stuff all the same. Here were my favorites from each of the 4 days of the festival:

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Saturday night was a night of nonstop dancing for me. From 11 pm to 4 am I oozed from dance scene to dance scene, mixing genres and tempi all through the night. First up was American Girl Talk, whom I’ve heard of from his appearance in the excellent Danish documentary Good Copy Bad Copy. He mixes and pitches all sorts of music together in a inferno of groovy music where you can recognize fragments just well enough so that you can sing a long while at completely different speeds and beats. It’s remix culture at its very best, and a great performance as well.

From that point on, my night was positively balkanized between the amazing balkan horns and rhythms of the German band Shantel & Bucovina Club Orchestra, the Austrian DJ Dunkelbunt and an Albanian wedding party hosted by Fanfara Tirana. All three of these were amazing fun with irresistible rhythms and those clarinets playing dizzying, sizzling balkanbeat:

And in between these bands I also managed to attend the Chemical Brothers show, which was a loud, flashy return to the big beat music I was a big fan of 10 years ago. The combination of all of this music made it a perfect Saturday night.

A great way to kick-start my holidays!