⚜ Avvisi

Day 6 - Make it worth giving to

Monteriggioni → Siena (20.5 km)

If you missed the other days, you can access them here.

If I said that today would be split into two parts, you wouldn’t believe me, would you? I still owe you part II of Day 4, so I won’t go into more debt. Clocking ~135 km in the last 6 days was a physical challenge, which combined with the logistics of the day, made me decide to keep it brief.

My head is a bit like that mailbox. Part of dinner last night was meeting two guys from Vicenza, north of Venice. Everybody at the table seemed to know the legend: people from Vicenza eat cats. Disturbing. “You take the neigbour’s cat,” a fellow pilgrim said, “put it in the snow for 3 days to freeze, take it to the local restaurant and cook it in wine.” I hope it’s only legend, as I saw plenty of cats on the way today and boy, did those Vicentini eat last night.

Now, let’s talk about donations and places that run on that basis: pilgrim hostels, resting points on the Via Francigena, retreats and a lot of writing on the Internet. They’ve usually got volunteers on the clock, offering services and trusting that if the job is done well, one will recognise the value and give - time, money, attention. Donations are usually anonymous and up to the person on how much they want to support the operation.

What incentives does that create? I think it shifts focus to quality, above all else. The volunteer offering the service recognises that the operation can only keep going if they do their best. If nobody sees any value, then we cease doing it. And the focus on quality replaces the need to think of tricks and gimmicks to make someone feel good or bad about giving money. For example, Pascuale made sure to sit us all at a long table, cooked a delicious meal and created the space where, hey, you can learn about the cat-eating people of Italy if you so desire. Today, at a resting place, the lady running it made me two sandwiches because she thought one wasn’t enough and I needed to put on some weight. The incentive was clear. Little gestures like that make me want to donate more money to keep the operation going.

Humans design, set-up and run spaces all the time. Whether physical or digital, how we set up the incentives for those who run a space translates into different effects on the consumer/receiver/user side. Games, products, blogs or hostels, they all ask something of us. They are spaces in which we give and receive and the ratios matter.

So, I think it’s worth building spaces that are worth giving to (attention or money) as opposed to tricking people into it. Like the volunteers on the hostels, I come back here every day and I try to make it worth your giving your attention to it. Thanks for being here.

Tomorrow’s relatively long (26 km), but we’ll make time to discuss the question: “What have the Medici ever done for us?”

Til tomorrow,

Florin