Taking Notes from the Present, Learning for the future
A campaign to quickly build a book weaving together conversations we are having in different places on the internet
How have past experiences with crisis (e.g. the global financial crisis of 2008, European Financial Crisis, refugee crises, or even prior personal ones) helped shape our individual and collective responses to the current one? What are you learning from this crisis that informs how we’re thinking about responding to other crises, like global climate change?
We want to run a campaign to find and engage individuals to re-publish good content that they have produced and disseminated elsewhere onto our platform. As well as to engage people to discuss it here. So that we can grow a conversation around it, find/see the invisible threads that connect seemingly unrelated topics and conversations that are happening right now. The findings will form the basis for a series of summits to be held later in the year.
What we need help with
Prepare the materials for the campaign to make it engaging and easy for people to add their content, have it discussed with others and get it have it included in the booklet we will collaboratively produce out of this all (a simplified version of a Booksprint that takes place here on the edgeryders platform).
In parallel with this we want to reach out to different organisations that can partner with the effort to draw more visiblity and recognition for the participants who contribute to this work. Rather than have the clever insights the produce vanish into a facebook or twitter feed, we want possible collaborators, clients, funders, employers etc to acknowledge the value of their input and send more opportunities their way.
Wait, but Why?
Because if you want to go far, you need to go with others!
It is no secret that the Edgeryders scene skews eclectic and nerdy. As in: we are better at doing interesting things than getting them out there so more people can discover and support them. We have miraculously gotten some press coverage in international and national media over the years. Funders and clients have shown up at our “doorstep” unsolicited - amongst them fairly large ones. And we know what we do is dope.
We have been quietly acting at the fringes till now. But we are getting signals that our work could help a lot of people weather the current situation, and the storms that will soon be upon us due to climate change + ecosystems. It is high time to get the work out there in a more structured and consistent way - starting with the booksprint + summit activities taking place over the next 6 months.
Partnership building & Promotion work
So we are looking for a group of several people who can identify and engage relevant organisations to support the booksprint and or the summits that will follow. This includes potential media partners, funding bodies etc. This will require a team of people who can work together to make this happen.
We are a global community of people in 80+ countries, rural as well as urban. BUT: Our funding sources require us to ensure that we are engaging people in Belgium, Germany, Poland, Czechia, Serbia, France, Italy and Tunisia…
Creative Collaborative Research campaign
We need to find and engage individuals who have posted good content to participate in the booksprint. Some of this will consist of using search engines, hashtags etc. But in general the most effective way to do this is to crowdsource leads. So we need a clever way to do this, a kind of mini campaign that makes it fun and easy for people to help us find “best of” content that they have seen others post. And then reach out to people who are already following us on our different social media channels & invite them to the party Have a look at Kelsey’s approach for inspiration: https://twitter.com/raeBress
Timeline
We want to get started with this immediately. We would like to start with a 2 month engagement to see how things work out and if all goes well we see this continuing till december. We are a small not for profit organisation: Our ability to generate paid work opportunities for everyone depends in part on the promotion and research crew doing a great job.
Resources we have at our disposal
A network & budget for Coordination + freelance Copywriters, illustrators, videomakers etc
Tell us how you would like to approach the work, and what you need to do this well. We can then reach out to our network to find the right people.
A team of researchers to help us turn our conversations into collective intelligence
@amelia @Leonie @CCS read all posts and conversation threads, then tag them. @Alberto then turns them into visualisations which allow us to get a bigger picture of what the conversation looks like. Together their work results in an easy to understand, visual overview of what connections people in the different discussions are making between experiences, topics, concepts and initiatives. These videos we made for a course give a good idea of what this involves:
If you want to learn more about this, get in touch with the crew by introducing yourself in the open research workspace: Research Network - Edgeryders
Experienced community managers
@johncoate @noemi and @MariaEuler help ensure the space is welcoming and inclusive, connect people across shared interests and help move the conversations forward towards action. But what do we mean when we say “community” and “community management”? Again some materials from a course we developed to teach others how to do this:
Always-on video chat meeting rooms
These are intended for things like running online events where you need breakout rooms, running team meetings or even for just hanging. They are only available to people with edgeryders.eu accounts. If you want to create your own you can do so by posting a request in a comment below. We will follow up with a few questions in a direct message to be sure everyone is aligned in how the room is to be used and then open a room for you. Example here.
Active Online Community Forums with built in sensemaking tools
Relevant because: This enables us to easily connect with others interested in the same topics. Deepen the discussions. Build visualisations to show points of convergence with others as a foundation for potential collaborations around emergent insights.
Registration forms for events that smoothly onboard participants onto online forums
Relevant because: we want to make it easy for people to connect and start the conversations before, and after the event. So that the webinars are part of a fruitful, action oriented process rather than something you just “consume”. Example from previous event: https://register.edgeryders.eu
Tiered access online landing pages
Webinars or Screen videos with password-protected livechat. This is very useful for when you want to have different levels of access. For example you may want to limit access to people who participated in the preparatory conversations or participated in a previous activity. It is also useful if you want to do crowdfunding campaigns where one of the perks is to have one’s questions featured during the webinar. Example here: https://live.edgeryders.eu/
Campaign builder
We have developed a stack of modules that enable you to quickly set up a single purpose minisite and it with relevant content .This makes it easy and inexpensive to so things like set up a website around a specific activity such as conference or crowdfunding campaign. As well as present content picked from the online forum that enables your to feature discussion threads or high quality posts with little additional work. Everything is easily updated through the platform. Examples include: http://er-campaigns.surge.sh, work.edgeryders.eu, https://youthful-brown-c96bcf.netlify.com/ and crowdfund.edgeryders.eu