I’m impressed!
Very good work, everyone, and thanks @Inge for such a comprehensive writeup.
I would like to engage on everything you said, because the conversation feels like it was so vibrant and relevant! But I will limit myself to a couple of points.
The discussion on zero-sum competition amongst NGOs, @Nadia tells me, was replicated almost word for word in today’s workshop in Cairo. I have found this before, for example in the art world: I have found it to depend not on people’s individual attitudes, but on market structure. If NGOs are “spenders” - i.e. they do projects that do not generate any revenue – and the funders are few, competition is perforce zero sum. One lari given to NGO A will not go to NGO B. Over time, NGOs come to perceive each other as enemies.
However, we could try to disrupt zero-sum by trying to build a small prototype that would be funded elsewhere. Here’s what I can propose: Georgia, it turns out, can participate at least in some of the European Union’s funding programmes under the Horizon 2020 umbrella (source). Edgeryders is itself a EU company; a couple of months ago we did the paperwork to be a sanctioned participant in Horizon 2020, as several people in the community are interested (this conversation is in the Horizon 2020 Collaborator project; in fact, just this week we submitted our first proposal). We might help in finding some other like-minded partner in the EU – I would love to work with @lasindias in Spain, for example.
So, if you guys want to consider having a few Georgian NGO collaborating on a meaningful project, we could offer ourselves as EU partners and try and find a suitable EU call. This way, you can collaborate without risking to jeopardize your existing sources of funding. Then, if you like the experience, you may decide to try and collaborate some more. I am sure the EU delegation to Georgia would be happy to help. How does that sound? We could even do a project on boosting adoption of open source software, a topic dear to our heart and on which there is plenty of expertise in the community.
Moving from open source to very closed source and proprietary software and data, I appreciate you want to stay in touch through your tool of choice, Facebook. Edgeryders, however, will not follow you there. We are not being territorial; on the contrary, we believe Facebook is not conducive to sharing knowledge. We have learned the hard way how disempowering it is to commit your precious data and relationships to a large, for-profit corporate with which you have no personal relationship. This conversation we are having here stays with us. We take care of it, make sure it stays available and indexed by search engines. When you look for something on our platform, the search function is simply there to try and help you find what you are looking for, whereas on Facebook what you see is filtered by what Mr. Zuckerberg thinks will make him the most money. Good luck finding a conversation like this on Facebook two years after it has happened.
We hope that in the end your wish to collaborate with us will be strong enough to draw you to the place where we meet and work together. Meanwhile, be well and be strong, for many great things await.