Friday Afternoon In The Universe

Welcome to Friday Afternoon In The Universe!

Friday Afternoon In The Universe is an open discourse intentional multigenerational learning salon, initially hosted once a month on the fourth Friday, in Sparta, North Carolina, which is near the headwaters of the Upper New River bioregion along the escarpment of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Friday Afternoon In The Universe, or Friday for short, is an ecological community of practice with legitimate peripheral participation.  Functionally, logistically, this community of practice is hosted by The Upper New, and we have partnered with the Alleghany County Library to be a physical host for discussion sessions.

Why Friday Afternoon?

Friday Afternoon in the Universe is the third album by the experimental jazz fusion trio Medeski Martin & Wood.  The album title is taken from the opening sentence of Old Angel Midnight by Jack Kerouac.

Friday is improvisational jazz.  

Friday is experimental prose.

Interested in participating?  Get in touch here.

For a quick overview of all the ways you can participate in our global Friday community, check out this post: Join Us For Friday!

Friday: Ecological Community of Practice

Friday Afternoon in the Universe is one set of channels within an ecological community of practice.  Communities of practice have three parts: domain, community, and practice.  There are three three modes of belonging crucial to the formation of identity (and thus learning) within any community of practice: engagement, imagination and alignment.

What is our Friday domain?

In a community of practice, the chosen domain helps to create common ground, inspiring members to participate, guiding our learning and giving the community meaning.  For Friday, our domain is the biosphere, or more specifically, the biosphere as a commons.  Let’s call it the Biospherical Commons.  Within the Biospherical Commons, our primary focus is ecological literacy with a goal of understanding and enacting posthumanism.

What is our Friday community?

The community is the social fabric for our learning, fostering interactions and a willingness to share ideas, or as Donella Meadows advises us, to expose our mental models to the light of day.  For Friday, our local bioregional community consists of the humans living in the Upper New River Bioregion (see map below).  Also, we humans must responsibly serve as representatives, as proxies, for all other species living in and passing through our bioregional community.  Who speaks for the trees and the bees, the bobcats and the bears, the fish, frogs, and fungi, the plants and the ants?

What is our Friday practice?

In a community of practice, the actual practice is the focus around which our community develops, shares, and maintains our core of knowledge.  We are lifelong learners, and these are the topics we select for discussion and exchange.  We select bioregionalism:  learning, planning, building.  We select stewardship and systems wisdom: defy the disciplines, get the beat of the system, stay humble, stay a learner.

As mentioned above, for members of a community of practice, there are three modes of belonging to any community of practice: engaging, aligning, and imagining.

Engaging with Friday

Within our community, mutual engagement creates a shared reality in which we can all act and construct an identity.  This engagement can happen in person, such as during our monthly Friday discussions, and it can happen asynchronously, through digital platforms and communication systems, like the Friday listserv.

In our community, we strive for mutual engagement that is topical and multigenerational.  We must learn from each other, old and new.  We are all part of an ongoing collective, where we are actively negotiating meaning through our engagement with each other and other species in our bioregion.

Aligning with Friday

Members of our community align with each other (and the bioregion) through coordination of activities that contribute to broader structures and communities.  This is where reciprocal reasoning can come into play, constantly navigating a path through our internal and external perspectives as we look outward toward the Upper New bioregion, to Turtle Island (North America), and to the biosphere.

We are in this bioregional community because we are actively becoming part of something exponentially bigger than mere human existence.  As we look further and further outward, we will meet and align with other bioregional communities along the way.

Imagining in Friday

In the Friday community, we imagine by extrapolating our own experiences through time and space, reaching beyond direct engagement, creating relationships with identity anywhere throughout history, as well as thinking to imagined relationships in the future, even well beyond our own existences have metabolised into compost.  This is an example of Meadows’ advice to expand our time horizons, as well as continued practice of reciprocal reasoning over time: the internal and the external, over and over again.

Can you imagine our bioregion fifty years from now, long after most of us here today are long gone?  One hundred years from now?

Interested in participating?  Get in touch  here.

How does Friday work?

We communicate about Friday discussions using a listserv, leading up to and following each of the two-hour long monthly Friday discussion sessions. This allows us to coordinate all necessary information and conversation into a searchable archive that doesn’t disappear like social media posts seem to do.

The listserv is a way for members of Friday communities to get to know each other, to be a community of practice, and to connect remotely with those members of the community (and other communities) that are not able to be physically present in our local Friday monthly discussion events.

When a person wants to join the Friday community, we’ll add them to the listserv, and they will receive an invitation.  Once the person joins the community listserv, their first few posts will be moderated.  We’ve got a whole set of posting guidelines and etiquette expectations to help the community communications run smoothly.

Benefits of listservs

Listservs offer streamlined, efficient, and inclusive group communication by centralizing emails, fostering community through shared knowledge, providing easy management (subscriptions, moderation), and creating searchable archives, making them ideal for project updates, brainstorming, resource sharing, and building connections, especially for large or dispersed groups. They allow asynchronous, in-depth discussions, ensuring everyone gets important information using a single email address.

The Upper New participates in the Google for Nonprofits program, so we have access to quite a few Google toolkits free of charge, including Google Groups, which is a platform for running listservs.  Not only can the listserv be engaged directly via email, but there is a web interface for browsing and searching all the threads (conversations) that have ever occurred in the listserv.

Document Hosting

As we continue to generate materials associated with each Friday discussion topic, we will be hosting them in a shared Google workspace drive that is connected with the listserv.  Anyone who is part of the listserv will automatically have “viewer” access to the documents used in preparation for (and reflection upon) each Friday discussion.

In some cases, we will be pre-printing handouts for use during the in-person discussions, but these materials will always be available through our document hosting drive as well.

Friday Discussion Topic Schedule 2026

Our first Friday will be in April 2026 (on the fourth Friday), of course.  All our Friday discussion events will be from 3-5pm on Friday afternoons.  We realize many people are unable to make this time slot, hence the added importance of the listserv.

In deciding how to frame the topics that will seed and guide each monthly discussion, we wrestled quite a bit with the proper approach.  Finally, we settled on something that we think is a pretty good “middle way”: we are limiting each topic to a single word, which allows for depth and breadth of discussion and discovery while still providing initial focus.

Here are the topics we’ve chosen for the remainder of 2026.

Interested in participating?  Get in touch  here.

Fridays: Before, During, and After

The momentum of discussion never really stops, it just flows through each Friday from month to month and year to year, shifting gears as topics change and morph.  Remember: Friday is improvisational jazz.  Friday is experimental prose.

Before each (fourth) Friday event…

Well in advance, typically at least two months in advance, Upper New staff will select the (ideally one word) discussion topic for each Friday event.  For each topical Friday discussion in our bioregional community, Upper New staff will announce requests for volunteer facilitators and notetakers.  These will be confirmed with interested individuals and filled vacancies can be announced on the listserv.  (Similar requests may be made by leaders of other Friday community discussion meetings.)

Anyone anywhere in the world can sign up for the Friday Afternoon listserv anytime.

Anyone who is a member of the listserv can submit ideas and questions for a selected discussion topic (or submit new discussion topic ideas) anytime leading up to a particular Friday event.  Listserv members can also submit suggested readings.

Ideally at least two weeks prior to the Friday event, Upper New staff will compile an initial list of suggested readings and sources (including audiovisual media) relevant to the chosen discussion topic.  This document is hosted on the Friday Afternoon shared Google Drive and the link will be published on the listserv.

Up until two days prior to the event, in-person attendees can use the listserv to request a “slot” in the structured discussion for their associated community Friday.  As patterns emerge, we’ll make decisions about limiting the duration and number of discussion slots to ensure timely flow of the event according to our basic proposed two-hour timeline.

During the fourth week of the month, Upper New staff and volunteers will prepare any necessary handouts, using the listserv to publish the link to the handouts hosted on the Friday Afternoon shared drive, allowing attendees to download and print their own copies if they wish.  Staff will ensure that several printed copies of the handouts are made available for the in-person event.

During each Friday event…

What happens during a Friday discussion event, once a month on the fourth Friday of the month?  We have an open, semistructured, moderated, discussion about a selected topic.  This discussion is facilitated by volunteers like you, ideally two for each event.  Multigenerational participants meet in person for two hours, experiencing a calm, quiet, “digital detox” (no phones!) experience where we all discuss and discover as we listen and learn.  Ideally, at least two volunteers (not the facilitators) are taking vigorous notes, allowing everyone to focus on the conversation.

We’re assembling resources and guidelines for volunteer facilitators and notetakers to help ease folks into the process.

Each two-hour Friday discussion event happens from 3-5pm, starting promptly at 3pm.  Following a 10-minute buffer for “getting situated” the semistructured open discussion will occupy the first half of the event.  Then, following a ten minute stretch break, the second half of the discussion will revolve around follow-up questions and general “Q&A” style conversations.  The final ten minutes of the Friday event will be used for concluding remarks and any last minute logistical questions about future Fridays, etc.

Bathrooms will be available in the library, and Friday participants can excuse themselves quietly at any point during the discussion as necessary.  A general meeting structure diagram is provided below.

After Friday

In the days following a given Friday event, volunteer notetakers will compile and polish their notes into a single cohesive document to be shared out on the Friday listserv.  This document will be hosted on the Friday Afternoon shared Google drive in order to make it publicly linkable through the listserv and elsewhere as an open educational resource (OER) licensed under the Creative Commons.  Ideally we can post this document by the Wednesday or Thursday immediately following the Friday event.

In parallel, discussion participants are encouraged to continue to post follow-up questions to the listserv concerning the Friday discussion topic, and Upper New staff (or previous discussion facilitators) will also be posting follow-up questions, inquiries, and trajectories to expand the conversation onto the listserv and beyond.

Interested in participating?  Get in touch  here. 

There’s more to come.

These 2026 Fridays are just the beginning.

We’re still working on some additional logistical issues, like Eventbrite listings, etc.

And we’re working on a “playbook” for the entire Friday process that will allow motivated groups to form their own Friday discussion sessions, aligned with our globally selected topic each month.

We’re looking forward to having you join our local-global Friday community of bioregions.

Slow down, stay put.

Use less, be content. 

Local focus, global view.  

Upper New.