Dear readers, this is Christoph from Village One, welcome to another edition of this little dispatch! Just tuning in with a quick look behind the scenes and some recommendations for your weekend (as if your read-later-lists were not already full enough.) Here we go!
005: Why we’re called Village One
In the last weeks, we continued to foster and grow our digital garden. A digital garden is similar to a blog, but the content on there is constantly growing, in some places tidy, in others rather messy. Eventually, this garden will become our knowledge repository: Everything regarding our cooperative, our tools, our ideas and mindset will be planted and fostered there, for everyone to read and follow along.
One of the things we get asked frequently is how we found our name: Village One. Naming things can be difficult—there are agencies and experts for that, and for good reason! A brand name carries so much weight: It has to look good in a logo, sound good in an introduction, and oftentimes it’s the very first touchpoint with peers and clients. And as all things are digital these days, there is even more to consider: What’s a cool and suitable url, and is it available? Which emoji could be used in informal communication? Is there a good word mark for abbreviation?
From the initial exploration, we were very sure what we did not want: We didn’t want to be a family (companies that call themselves families are usually a red flag!), and we also didn’t want to be some fantasy sports team that screams CoMpEtItIoN! We experimented with various words, and we circled back to the idea of a “village” very frequently. The word is short and friendly, warm and welcoming, and has tons of positive metaphors and sounds to it (we’ve been addressed in e-mails as “Hello Village people!” more than once). The V can be replaced by this cute emoji ✌, and we even came up with a cool abbreviation – v01 – as a subtle software metaphor. After all, this coop endeavor is an experiment, a first version, and we’re very excited to continue building and iterating on it.
In our village’s garden, we shared some more insights on the naming exploration and how we ended up with “Village One”. Read it here. Teaser: You’ll also see many of the names that didn’t make it!
—
To send you all off into the weekend, here are some reading and listening recommendations from the team:
Doro recently watched and shared this (German) talk from Teresa Bücker about a feminist future (“It’s a YouTube video but she doesn’t have any slides so it’s basically like a podcast.”). The perspective from 2020 is still very relevant today.
Fei shared some podcasts she listened to during the weekend: Here’s a German one about the absurdity of how Germany is trying to digitalize the health system (Logbuch: Netzpolitik).
Harry posted this article on Urban rewildering: How cities are moving away from optimizing public spaces for cars, re-opening them for biodiversity. (“Monoculture creates a weak, fragile world — and rewilding, a stronger one. Do cities work the same way?”)
And I read an interesting opinion piece by Paul Ford in Wired: In “My Dream of the Great Unbundling” he ponders on what managing life under big tech like Google and Meta is like, and how we have to keep building and believing in alternatives.
Alright, that’s already it, thanks for reading this week’s dispatch. Have a great weekend! Greetings from the Village—
Christoph