I’ve blogged about hospitality before, and even tried to define this notion of radical hospitality. It’s coming back into my thinking as I begin working on the Mozilla Open Leadership Project (@Mozilla Open Leaders) with fellow Virtually Connecting collaborators Rebecca Hogue, Nate Angell and Wendy Taleo. We’re heading into week three of this fourteen week project, with loads more questions and complicated thinking happening.

This post was prompted by Wendy’s blog post [Buddy’s Friend: A Vision for Virtually Connecting] where she says “we have a clear understanding of what questions currently exist and that we want to encourage our brand of radical hospitality”.  I turned to wonder – what exactly is this notion of radical hospitatlity? This has been asked on a number of occasions over the past few weeks, so I’m going back to reflect and hopefully bring this notion of radical hospitality forward for more conversation. Grounding our Mozilla Open Leaders project in our shared understanding of ‘radical hospitality’ may lead us to questions or solutions yet to be discovered.

Here’s how I envisioned hospitality within the Virtually Connecting Community [Hospitality Revisited blog post from December, 2015], with a graphic adaptation from an article I’d read, which unfortunately I did not include in the post or image.

I began with an internet search. There’s a course on hospitality – see the syllabus attached to the course description at the Toronto School of Theology. From this document, I discovered additional texts to support this personal inquiry.

• Derrida, Jacques, Of Hospitality
• Leddy, Mary Jo, Radical Gratitude
• Still, Judith, Derrida and Hospitality: Theory and Practice
• Wrobleski, Jessica, The Limits of Hospitality

From this exploration comes ‘aporia’ “a philosophical puzzle or state of puzzlement and in rhetoric a rhetorically useful expression of doubt.” Wikipedia  I’ve posted this on Wendy’s blog, to capture the ideas presented in this video about Derrida’s philosophy (viewing from 6:30 to 7:15).

More reading and searching led me to this article – Jacques Derrida on the ethics of hospitality. Further to this, an article discussing the ‘antimony of hospitality’ [OF HOSPITALITY: ANNE DUFOURMANTELLE INVITES JACQUES DERRIDA TO RESPOND] brings forward the question of ‘others’ and ‘othering’ which is a positional perspective I’ve recently explored in some course specific research reading, relating to Indigenous research methodologies. Continuing to explore, I discovered a book [Radical Hospitality: Benedict’s Way of Love: Benedict’s Way of Love, 2nd Edition] which may need a read.

In the end, I’ve found inspiration from this Ted Talk by Gareth Jenkins, Design Makes a Difference. As I watched, I considered the parallels to what we hope to accomplish within this Mozilla Open Leaders project for the Virtually Connecting Community. As a Canadian, I enjoyed the comments made at the 3:52 mark in the talk.

While this Mozilla Open Leaders project shifts forward, I’m reflecting on how this project with Virtually Connecting fits into the vision established by Mozilla for this work, and the greater purpose, that of internet health. Will our pondering, wondering, aporia moments help others build a better internet, one that is a little more radical in it’s hospitality across global contexts? I’ll continue to reflect here and on the GitHub issue set up for this project, along with other digital spaces where we’ll work together to operationalize this conception of radical hospitality.