Call for participation: #Futurespotters Bucharest Int’l Workshop, 9-10 July

Workspaces Spot the Future Romania
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41

Ok, so I should probably introduce myself

Hi,

I just saw this message on the Facebook event page and I thought I should say something about me, as I am new here. My full time job is PR and social media at TRUSTED.ro, a Romanian trust mark for e-commerce businesses. I also work project based for GPeC (Gala Premiilor eCommerce) and IasiFun (an event website from Iasi) and I volunteer for The Sponge - Media Innovation Lab; actually, I found about EdgeRyders.eu in last week’s meeting.

I’m interested in finding inspiring stories and meeting interesting people. I also have an idea on how we can help little companies from Romania sell online in our country or in EU, but I have no resources to start it and no staff that I can work with on this.

See you guys soon!

Lucian

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About myself

Following @lucian who’s leading by example, I come from Cluj and now based in Bucharest as I was waiting for some time to work with EdgeRyders in Romania (!) I’m a graduate in social science research who during university was doing all sorts of extra-curricular projects in the non-profit sector and traveling for Erasmus, summer schools and unpaid traineeships… I documented my very typical story of a graduate with what seemed to be no future here. I was lucky enough to meet @nadia & @alberto while we were starting the EdgeRyders project (originally funded by the European Commission and Council of Europe) and then spinning it off into a social enterprise, which is the umbrella under which we’re working today in various parts of the world and trying to get more people into meaningful work. Young people need to invent this work because it’s hardly available, which is what I did and suddenly grew on me - found natural abilities for community management and going farther than that, I’m now passionate about designing social architectures that most of the time enable rather than offer solution x. It’s too hard for any one of us to come up with fix-all solutions to problems in our local communities, so what we do as community builders is creating the space for those solutions to emerge out of citizens diversity, passion and willingness to get things done without asking for permission. Hopefully the workshop will get us all on the same page. If only we can achieve that after 2 months since we started, I think we can call it a win for the time being. And after that, designing the next phase… :smiley:

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43

See you soon :wink:

Hey guys,

happy to be part of this.

See you soon :slight_smile:

44

Share a bit about yourself?

Hi @Iuliana_dumitru, good to meet you virtually, for now, and live in less than two days! I’d love to know a bit about yourself and what drew you to the community. If you could briefly mention what you’re working on, what needs your project has and what you’d like to share with the community, I’d be quite helpful in preparation for the workshop.

See you soon!

45

Hey

Born and raised in 2 Mai, a small village on the Black Sea coast, I’m a PhD Student at CESI (Centre of Excellence in Image Studies) within the University of Bucharest, where I write about the image and the imaginary of the villages of 2 Mai and Vama Veche.

Now working for a project that is very dear to me: Dincolo de Fatade DincoloDeFatade. We try to make an exhibition and some other activities in a old house.

I’m involved in more but until the fall, when I’ll give birth to a little baby girl, this is the main project that i’m involved in.

More about me, live :slight_smile:

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Dincolo de Fatade is beautiful!

And CESI I recently visited on their open doors days, was considering applying to one of the Masters programme. Your PhD project about the villages of 2 Mai and Vama Veche sounds really interesting, can’t wait to find more about it live. Congrats on your soon to be little baby girl, greatest project of them all :wink: Thanks for sharing, Iuliana, happy to be meeting you soon!

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See you on Thursday !

Looking forward to meet all of you guys and get to talk about each others passions and ideas. Mine concern public participation in city planning and open data.

See you soon!

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Joining in the presentation round

Great to get to know about you, guys!

As for myself: local Spot The Future connector interested in online and offline community building, since local communities (rather than higher-level politics and policies) is where I see authentic, sustainable change come from. Currently focused on spotting budding citizen initiatives in Bucharest and putting them on the map of Bucuresti2021, the city’s bid to ECOC. Founding editor of heyMarie.ro (online mag for young adults trying to figure out their own way in life), contributor to initiatives of place-making and local network building, volunteer in neighbourhood community organising initiatives, feminist. I’d instantly say yes to anything documenting the struggles and explorations of young adults around the globe, but especially in Romania. If there’s one thing I could pass on to someone, that one thing would be to be unapologetically bold. And kind (cherry on top).

More about how I joined the Edgeryders community and where Spot The Future might be heading (spoiler: it’s where us here are taking it, starting with #Futurespotters).

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Pictures from the first day

Hi!

I had a really awesome day yesterday at this workshop. Unfortunately I will miss the second day. So have fun and good luck with your projects!

Also, you can download the pictures from yesterday here (the link will be disabled in 20-25 days). Some of them are on The Sponge Facebook page too. Feel free to tag yourself, share or whatever. :slight_smile:

Keep in touch!

Lucian

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Good move

You took a lot of pictures of the “talk to me about” signs. I think this is a very good move. If some “handle” would also be on the picture it would be possible to latch on to the right people on the conference - also through the net. Also, I would encourage people to write down the specialty they are interested in (maybe a little smaller). Sometimes images also work instead of text - get creative. Lastly in bottom-up organization in Europe languages are often an issue. If you can somehow partner languages (understanding/speaking/writing) and interests it also prepares fertile ground for future collaboration. This is not sooo important in regional meetings - but even then it can sometimes be really useful.

If you had picture of interests + handles online quickly (or before the meeting) it would also allow contacts you know and trust to interact with other people on the meeting through you as an interface. Or 2 discuss something on skype and 3-4 listen relatively quiet (which is pretty often the case anyway). E.g. can you ask X question Y with focus on Z (because you already know background info on the issue). If it works it could be worth investing a little money in some hardware to support this better.

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Videos coming up

We recorded ourselves each in a 30 sec video reading what was written in the Talk to me… bubble. Coming up in the next few days.

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52

Thank you everyone. Next up: Pizza!

I had a blast and it’s been so sweet of all here to take two days of your life and spend time together to figure out how to work as a community. Laying the foundations was the first step, now onto seeing what exactly we are willing to do and who is leading what.

While I’m collecting all materials in a shared email, here’s the sweet follow up event @ruxandra was mentioning: collaborative pizza at NOD, all invited!

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I hope you guys had a lot of fun & results!

Makes me sad I did not join, so I’ll put up this offer just in case:

If someone feels like I may have been able to help/contribute something that you needed - or you just want to bounce an idea you developed there off an outsider’s head. You can get in touch (skype) with me today. I’ll be afk most of the rest of the week but afterwards I’d be available again. From the outside it looked like this was a real Good Thing so I just want to offer a hand if one is needed.

Good luck with everything to all!

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54

Participatory democracy project proposed during Futurespotters

Hi all,

I really enjoyed the event last Thursday, and regret that I did not manage to join the second day.

For documentation purposes, I wanted to describe a little bit more in detail the idea that I had concerning the participatory democracy project.

The idea was to create a space where citizens could discuss the problems they have in their local community and collaboratively create projects to implement solutions to these problems.

Citizens would be able to browse through these projects and then choose which ones they want to finance with their 2%.

Here are the main differences with what already exists:

  • this is not just a crowdfunding platform, it’s a place where citizens discuss and get involved in the implementation as well. cf. to @anon remark regarding Goteo - actually Goteo could be a great international partner for the implementation of the project. But the platform would be more like Babele + Goteo (Babele for the collaboration on projects strategy and implementation and Goteo on the crowdfunding).

  • this is not just a platform where you see current NGO’s and citizens see to which NGO they want to give their 2%. This could be cool, but it is not a revolutionary value added platform, existing NGO’s are already collecting 2% from citizens, they do not necessary need a platform for that. Such a platform could be implemented without the municipality, and just by contacting NGO’s like Alex Stef suggested…

Actually when I thought this project, it was more for new ideas, grassroots initiatives, that maybe did not have yet a legal entity and that could get the money from the citizens the 2% that are already taxed in order to come to life - and solve the problem of no finance. This is why actually I was suggesting that it needed to be made by the local municipality or institution: the local municipality would get the 2% (I have to check if in Romania, as in Italy, the municipality can get money as well), and then they would allocate the money to the projects based on the votes of the citizens. This is where it gets really interesting: you allow to people to really choose local projects to solve local problems that they want to see alive, and you have local social innovators that maybe do not have a legal entity, maybe yes, to implement them. This is where you are getting smart, in collaborating with institutions, rather than avoiding them.

In this platform thus: grassroots initiatives that do not have a legal entity could get financed through the 2% that is already taxed by the government to solve local problems.

If you find it interesting, come to discuss it through this Thursday at the collaborative pizza event at Nod Makerspace… and bring your pizza ingredient with you :slight_smile:

Ruxandra

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Check out YourPriorities.org and NossasCidades.org

YourPriorities: tool for e-democracy mostly focused on getting good ideas for the community out onto an online debating platform (doesn’t include a crowdfunding option, as far as I know). I think it supposes the funding would come from the city budget. The Icelandic-born platform has an ongoing collaboration with the capital city called Better Reykjavik, it’s quite the success story (a lot of it having to do with good political momentum at the time of its launch).

It also has a Romanian page, not sure how active or popular it is, thought.

Another participatory democracy project worth looking into is MeuRio/NossasCidades, currently growing globally into OurCities, which you’ve said you’ve heard about.

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Just discovered this Romanian piece on YourPriorities

and the experience of participatory budgeting in Reykjavik and Porto Alegre.

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Woaw Alex

Super cool, I did not know about Your priorities and it is indeed super cool what they achieved in Reykjavik. Thanks for sharing!

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Info about the 2% in Romania

Dear @ruxandra, only NGOs, cult institutions and individuals can receive the 2%, you can take a look at how the declaration looks like. But individuals can only receive the 2% if they receive it as some sort of private scholarship (bursa privata, cum apare in formular), but this private scholarship is regulated by a dedicated law

here is the info:

http://doilasuta.ro/content/documente/formulare/formular230.pdf

Colecţie de acte legislative privind bursele private.

In my opinion your idea has a good potential, but more towards the idea that a limited number of cultural projects could be financed via a system of public matching of funds for all the funds crowd-funded from inviduals. The 2% is in any case very very few money, for an average salary you only get about 30-50 lei… Also, the system is bureaucratically flawed… http://www.altreileasector.ro/analiza-de-ce-nu-functioneaza-redirectionarea-2-in-romania/ We only get the 2% after about 1 year, enough time for the whole project-idea to vanish :slight_smile:

I was telling you about the Stockholm experience with this innovative public-private funding scheme, and also @nadia mentioned it then, Crowd Culture is a good example of what could work. http://www.crowdculture.se/en/

Check it out and if you want to develop it more and make a proposal to ARCUB, I am interested to contribute.

Have a wonderful day!

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59

Thank you for your fantastic contribution

@raluca_Iacob_pop, sorry for the delay. Great input, it helps me a lot to realize if this is feasible or not.

Regarding the negative points: you are right, it is very limiting (deadlines, just NGO’s, etc.), with small budgets (if it’s only 50 lei per contribution it is really small).

The innovative public-private scheme is great, the question is : Does ARCUB have the budget to contribute and are they interested to do something similar.

I do not know how, I got invited tomorrow for their open session to talk with businesses, so I will ask them what they think about this. In case there is any interest, we could work on a proposal.

I will let you know,

Ruxandra