Cairo Workshop June 4

Workspaces Future Makers
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Future Makers Cairo Workshop

The purpose of this wiki is to be a crowd-editable central resource for all the latest information regarding the workshop to be held in Cairo on June the 3rd - 4th. The event has been brought forward, and clear communication is crucial to get something up-and-running on such short notice.

Date, time, venue

Thursday 4th of June,  ?:00am-?:00pm

UNDP Cairo have generously offered a space in their WTC office in 1191 Corniche El Nil, World Trade Centre Boulac.

Purpose

To draw out people doing interesting work in the local social innovation/hacktivism/tech scenes by offering an opportunity to build a sustainable model of networked collaboration, where the coordination costs for each participant can be minimised.

Format: Action oriented and designed to be useful for hands-on practitioners 

We aim to

  • Share practical knowledge: designing  in networks. This provides an incentive for time-hungry social innovators to come out and spend time with us.
  • Let participant be protagonists: we apply such practical knowledge to the participants' own initiatives. This way, we also learn about them.
  • Design something together: in this case, a system of network bartering for Egyptian social innovators (that could be applied to contexts other than Egypt).
  • Reinforce the perception of being part of a diverse community of Future Makers, that includes local projects, institutions, Egyptians and non-Egyptians.

Who it is for: Anyone passionate about their project. Citizens and representatives of initiatives related to unemployment, migration, poverty, environment and use of common spaces, technical infrastructures and solutions, arts, do-it-yourself approaches, community health and wellbeing, innovative civic participation channels etc.

How it benefits you

The benefits of collaboration and working together are seldom realised due to the high coordination costs involved. Best practices that lower the barrier to coordination will actively help you pursue your goals. Meeting other local innovators presenting their experiences will be generative for participants.

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Description

Thinking in networks: learn how to coordinate without coordinators. “Smart swarms” of citizens, loosely connected to each other with no command structure, are achieving incredible results around creating employment opportunities, social inclusion initiatives, and artefacts around raw data. In this workshop we learn how to think about these initiatives in terms of networks and connectivity.

Bring your own project: we will analyse it together. Is it driven by one or very few committed people? Is is widely participated by very many people? A little bit of both? Are participants structurally similar or are they very different socially and economically? All these different situation correspond to network configurations. We will try together to think about your project as a network, and try to come up with ideas for how to move it forward.

Agenda

Networks: an introduction for the social innovator. With Alberto Cottica, Research Director at Edgeryders (30 mins)

Presenting Egyptian initiatives as networks. With Hazem Adel and Hegazy [add proper names and titles]. (90 mins)

Funding without money: bartering in networks to support each other and get things done. Fostering non-monetary collaboration is central to this workshop. We propose a barter campaign, where workshop participants conduct barter activities as a way of active and measurable collaboration. We try to document at least 10 barter instances within the community as a lightning post for the concept.

Slogan: Collaboration through Barter OR تعاون بالمقايضة. With Nadia El-Imam, CEO at Edgeryders. (90 mins).

Facilitator: Nadia El-Imam.

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What happens after the workshop?

  1. PROPOSAL: Barter Campaign

Fostering non-monetary collaboration is central to this workshop. We propose a barter campaign, where workshop participants conduct barter activities as a way of active and measurable collaboration. We try to document at least 10 barter instances within the community as a lightning post for the concept.

Slogan: Collaboration through Barter OR تعاون بالمقايضة.

Resources

SPOT THE FUTURE workshop in Cairo, EGYPT, Event Page Fri, 2014-04-25 to Sun, 2014-04-27,

Spot The Future- What did we learn together? Post-event summary

Mailing List to invite potential attendees, work-in-progress, link will work only to invited participants for the privacy of recipients

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Timing not optimal

I’ll be the first to comment to say that June 3rd Wednesday & June 4th Thursday are both work days in Egypt. It is my understanding that last year the workshop was held Friday and Saturday. This creates a problem: People holding jobs/regular work can’t attend. 

Thoughts?

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Evenings?

I am up for doing them after work hours if people want. Let’s try to make this as accessible as possible under the circumstances?

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I already got feedback from Mona and others that evenings are not optimal, as they prohibit non-Caireans from participating.

We can’t cater to everybody, of course; maybe the UNDP in Cairo can give their opinion/experience?

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Ok guys, decision time

Hello all! Time is running out, and we need to make some decisions. As @Hegazy says, we cannot really accommodate everyone – and anyway this is just meant to be a small event, not a large-scale conference. Most of the action will take place online anyway.

My suggestion is:

  • No, we don't do a two-day workshop. This becomes too great a commitment. Even I cannot be there for two days! 
  • The only day is Thursday. I think we should, in fact, restrict it to Thursday afternoon. The team can use the morning to prepare and set up.
  • We could add a small social event after the workshop. People who cannot attend during work hours are welcome to attend. But even that is a stretch, as we will all be tired. 
  • I would like to add a "field visit". @Hazem, can you think of some "tactical urban" thing to see/people to meet? @Hegazy, any hacker/maker/social innovator? @SamarAli?
  • We accept UNDP's downtown space. Too difficult at this stage to go look for a venue, it would take at least tow days to confirm and we need to start the communication now. 

What do you guys think?

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for the venue, shall I check with Uli about Rasheed 22 ? as she is already a part of edgeryders.

for the field trip, It depends when and where.

Cairo is full of different interventions any way so walking through Down-town or old islamic Cairo one will notice a lot of informal tactical urbanism interventions.

so if we are going to be in down-town for the workshop so may be before we can visit cairo hackerspace and area around it and may be after the workshop( could be integrated with the social event) we can visit Megawra El-khalifa. It is not a pure tactical urbanism example but it is situated in a very busy old area in a restored old building. They started with a participatory project in the area and then developed to be act like a community center in the neighbourhood. I can coordinate with @Ahmed_M_Rabie for this to happen

visiting other place could be time costy, like el ma’temdia as it would take time to go and come back. putting in mind Cairo’s traffic.

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Thursday afternoon/ evening + dinner

Ok so we keep the workshop to thursday evening/night so that non Cairenes can participate (provided they have friends to host them overnight in Cairo). We will keep it to a short event, and require everyone who wants to come to sign up and introduce themselves on the platform before so that we can prepare and make the most of the short time we have together.  I’ve created this event on FB. Add me on FB so I can make you editor of the event page please

  1. The public original invitation text for last year’s workshop: https://edgeryders.eu/en/spot-the-future-about

  2. Icecairo FB EVENT from last year (300 people invited so you’ll be able to reach them again) https://www.facebook.com/events/603892006370040/

  3. Another relevant page is https://www.facebook.com/events/225402387655134/

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Ok now’s the time to do some integration stuff

Hey @trythis and @Matthias, Try this very kindly offered 20-30 hours in remote to help with this workshop. We’ve wanted to integrate Makerfox and the Edgeryders platform so we run moneyless crowdfunding campaigns here (and to facilitate more hands on collaboration between community members). And we would like to make this a part of the community infrastructure. Matthias, do you have documentation of the technical specs/needed info on tasks needed for this to happen? As well as how long it would take to do them?

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There are several steps for integration

I saw “barter campaign” at the top as part of the workshop. Makerfox is not a workshop format, but the kind of barter deals that happen there can be nicely packaged into something that can be used in a workshop. Is that what you are looking for here? If so, here are two ideas (I can elaborate on the one you want me to):

  1. Currency experiment. I think it was @matslats and a colleague who developed this nice group game (works with nuts / sweets and money tokens) that lets people understand different money mechanisms and their consequences intuitively. With Vinay, we developed and extension that allows to understand network bartering intuitively. Has to be tried before use in a workshop.
  2. Barter matrix. A spreadsheet based matrix that allows to construct a network barter deal with the audience during a presentation. Thus, a way to let the audience experience that they can help each other much more than they imagined. Developed for last Berlinale, but was not used in the end. If there is enough time, the information in there can then be put into makerfox.com and the Makerfox will calculate a deal.

In case you want technical integration between edgeryders.eu and makerfox.com: I’d like to promise that Makerfox will work as expected, but who knows at this point. So, if you want that, be aware of the risk :wink: Such integration can be looser or tighter, and it’s best I think to start with something light and easy and then to progress as needed. So, start with the first step of this list:

  1. "Public goods" widgets. This is the new, better way of moneyless crowdfunding in Makerfox. People say: I offer to do this or that activity with collective benefits if I get this amount of products and services in exchange via network barter. And then multiple other people indicate they want to donate to that effort. It's kind of like group buying. Integration would happen with a small widget that people can embed into an iframe in a post on edgeryders.eu where they present their "public good" crowdfunding campaign. Could be supported by a special Drupal content type as well (can be added later). Work is mostly on the Makerfox side. Takes 8-10 hours, or 16-20 hours if with the content type.
  2. Moneyless crowdfunding campaign widgets. This relates to moneyless donations, given without requiring a compensation and thus unlike the "public goods" above. Would just be a little makerfox.com-generated HTML widget that can be embedded as an iframe on edgeryders.eu and other sites to give a link to a moneyless crowdfunding campaign and to show how much donations were received already. Work is mostly on the Makerfox side. Takes 8-10 hours.
  3. Login integration. This is desirable, but a big mess. The only clean solution I can think of now is to start with two accounts and add an API to Makerfox that lets Edgeryders users connect their Makerfox account into their edgeryders.eu account. The benefits are not that much.
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Barter matrix

Got the materials for what you were going to do at Berlinale lying around somewhere?

Then I would like to pursue the option of login integration. Without this we just double the coordination load waffling between two platforms :slight_smile: So if @trythis is up for helping with this that would be great.

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Was AFK (time very well spent)

But now I’m up again and catching up.

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Check now

@Nadia, @Hegazy, @SamarAli, @Hazem: I made substantial edits to the wiki now. Please check that it works by Tuesday 11.00 am Cairo time. At that point we will proceed to create the Facebook event, in English and Arabic.

Nadia: please confirm the venue address.

Everyone: please, make decisions about the time. I would probably suggest we start after lunch, but am open to other suggestions. How many more people wold we gain if we started after dinner? And who?

Hegazy, SamarAli, Hazem: can you make sure at least 3/4 interesting projects are represented?

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Confirmed it’s at the un venue above

The Facebook event is Redirecting...

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Facebook event

we can use this Cover for the Facebook event, if we want change anything, it’s possible

@trythis I used your design (Future Makers)

@Nadia I used STF’s image as background cover-FM-2.png

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Lookin good

Perhaps you want to “calm” the “workshop 4th Thur. June” part down a little by toning down the light elements/shadows in that part of the logo. But that’s only a suggestion I have after reading it on my little notebook screen. It may be just fine in print. Try moving it a little to the right though - so that the corners of the UNDP logo and the top left of “workshop” do not “touch” so strongly.

I like the robot arm! Another tiny detail I thought, while writing this, is to see if it matches the UNDP shade of blue? And perhaps have it “come from out of the frame”. I.e. remover the blueish base and add another chain link segment for it.

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thanks

Thanks @trythis and i’m working on your suggestions

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@Alberto The wiki is great. I will translate it to Arabic, and update the FB as soon as I’m admin. By Tonight.

Time:I suggest we start open the door at 3pm and start at 4pm. I assume the event to take 5h, so we continue up till 9pm. It is customary for working people to leave work early Thursday, which plays in our favour.

I’m getting into contact with some projects, and will try to share projects here asap.

@Matthias I second Nadia, perhaps that spreadsheet matrix could be put to use in our workshop?

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@Hegazy when you translate it to Arabic, i will review it

I suggest we start at 4 pm, too

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Warning, everybody: we may need to make substantial changes to the workshop, as we moved too fast and we did not involve UNDP and UNV closely enough. Working on it.

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@trythis Done, I wish i understood your suggestions.

@Nadia if we want change anything, it’s possible and when event’s time determined, i can add it.

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