How did you meet, and what were you doing then?
What would you say were the main threads connecting your past interests and experience with the emergence of FoAM? Was there a direct link, or was it an emergent property?
What mainly interested you in becoming involved in Starlab, where several of the future FoAM core team first met? How did you become involved in this organisation?
Starlab changed dramatically while you were there. Was your decision to found FoAM after its collapse in any way a reaction to these changes? What were some of the most important things you took away from StarLab – both the good, the bad and the ugly?
After StarLab, you went through what sounds like some inspiring, difficult and crazy times. What was going on back then? What were you trying to achieve? How did this change over the next few years?
What were the main contacts and collaborations you formed at that early stage? Which ones have endured up to the present, and which ones have fallen away? Who would you have liked to work with more, and who would you like to have worked with less?
Your professional and personal lives have been entwined to such a degree that they are completely indistinguishable. This has also been the case, if not to such an extreme, with many of your collaborators. Please comment.
On the one hand, one can see a clear progression or at least a consistent thread of interests running straight from then to now. On the other hand, one can't. Please comment.
Now that you are beginning to cast your thoughts back to this time, what are some of the things you miss about it? What are some of the things you'd like to resurrect and explore further? What things are you glad to have left behind? For example, GroWorld was there from the beginning, it's still going, and looks set to go on for as long as you continue to be alive.
What were the main contrasts between the ideal and the reality in these early projects?
The tension between the realms of “pure theory” and “pragmatic application or exploration” seem to be a source of evolving ambiguity for everyone including yourselves. Yet it's also in some sense at the core of your great life project. Elaborate.
What do you think are the main ways you've been misunderstood by each other, your collaborators, and wider publics you've exposed yourselves to? Are you becoming better or worse understood as time goes on? Was it ever an intention to be misunderstood? Why do you think you are misunderstood?
Would it be fair to characterise your attention as fluctuating between between product, process, and being at various times and circumstances? Where do you sit now? Where would you like to be in future?