A platform, but to do what?
Young people everywhere (and quite a few not-so-young people, too) are busy building their lives – and, as they do so, they build our common future, piece by piece. In Edgeryders we, together, explore the space that all of these trajectories define. How do we work? How do we lead our social lives? How do we learn, and what? Starting with individual experience, we think we can make collective sense of the world this generation is building.
For effective exploration, we have divided individual trajectories into themes. It is an abstraction, of course: our lives are a whole, and all of their aspects are interrelated. But it is an useful one, because it helps the community to shift its attention in sync, and this should make for more engaging conversation and better data. Themes are explored through campaigns, each lasting three to four weeks. The themes are:
- Bootcamp: sharing and commenting personal stories, learning to use the platform
- Making a living: finding work, creating one’s work, social innovation
- Caring for commons: how to preserve, enhance and use common resources, both material and informational
- Living together: sharing resources, making the most of diversity, managing conflict
- Learning: education, knowledge sharing, knowledge building: where, how and from whom we learn
- We, the people: new channels for participation, democracy and governance for a better world
- Resilience: are you ready for the worst case scenario?
- Finale: wiki-style editing of Edgeryders’ final report, the Policy Makers Transition Handbook
Each campaign is broken down into missions. Missions are “packets” of research that can be carried out by a single Edgeryder, or a small group, with a few hours of work. They are going to be based on individual experience. For example, we could target a mission of the Making a living campaign at the problem of how employers are able to spot talent and match it with their needs. Some of the most valuable skills around are difficult to document and pack into standardized recruitment process, and many people find that the most talented people are often left waiting on the sideline while more conformist thinkers get the job. So we could make a mission that asks: have you ever been interviewed for a job? Tell us about the experience. What was your impression of the recruitment process? What do you think recruiters were looking for? Did you have the feeling that a candidate’s success or failure were based on some solid criteria or somewhat random?
The mission is completed by writing a mission report with the requested information. For each completed mission, Edgeryders are awarded reputation points (or reps) every time they complete a mission.