Open Village Festival
[quote=Alberto]We’ve been doing community gatherings for sometime, but are getting frustrated. Great way to meet people and deepen connections, but struggle with launching action orientated platforms. This is an experiment to formulate a new process to create concrete outcomes. Concrete => has spreadsheets,re-allocates concrete material resources for deployment. It has not been so successful in in the past.
We started by running a project with an institution called the Council of Europe, people met and relationships were made, this is how edgeryders started with @matthias , @nadia , @noemi and @natalia_skoczylas . We could see the connections spreading, so we continued on. One project in particular was the unMonastery, which was focused on one project. That was great, a lot of stuff in the event was geared towards the one project. In the Open Village festival, we tighten the screws of the dialogue. We talk on the platform, but the question is always “what next?” Most of the projects we shared on the platform look like they want to be part of some kind of parallel economy, which we are starting to call “Open Village”.
How do you organize an online platform to channel resources towards a concrete goal. How do you channel it is the million dollar question. We try to lead by example, the example of others, in highlighting great their work, and our own. If you come with a nice analysis of the world, that’s nice but not as interesting. So we try to reinforce and reward concrete behavior, if you can show that you have a serious desire to commit to action, then further collaboration can be possible. When we started, we created a corporate vehicle, so that everyone could use without asking, but we not many people took us up on the offer. There is a core group who still has to do a lot of the leg work.
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[quote=Liz] Interviewing In the US, there is a distrust between the groups that do work like we want to do that don’t want to work with governments or companies.
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[quote=Alberto] – We don’t do that here. We embraced the idea of social enterprise, and found out there are good people in government, and maybe in companies too. We always work with specific groups within the UN, the World Bank etc; people with names, faces, track records. It’s worked out so far
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