Edgeryders is a community/company (“a little mutant entering a new phase” like @alberto states here) and in the last months we started a long term project that we imagine would become one of the way we manage to empower our community members.
This project is now under the name of Edgeryders Academy, and it’s a little mutant herself too 
We strongly believe in P2P learning process and with the Academy we want to make more visible and accessible the incredible knowledge that is inside Edgeryders.
During the last six months we developed two courses (a third one is on the way), @johncoate and @noemi created a curricula about Community Building and Management and @amelia a practical and theoretical course on Open Ethnography.
We (@owen and I) did our best (and the Teachers put tons of craft on shaping the lessons) and you can see the results here
We discovered few important things during these first six months:
- now that we tested the process it’s way more easy to imagine new courses (one about public speaking and storytelling with @alex <3 , or Social Media strategy with @zmorda and @owen?), we know how to do it with a small effort for the teacher and we know that could be amazing for the community to learn those skills
- all the content are there, visible in the curricula, so potentially there are dozens of different ways to share it (and in the next months we will experiment a little with that
Today we are launching our first experiment on this regard:
a Webinar about Community Management.
It will take place June Monday 25th at 5pm (CET), and it will last 90 minutes (the webinar will be held in english).
I will try to host it and with me in the panel there will be @noemi, @johncoate and @hugi.
The Panel
Noemi Salantiu is the one of the Edgeryders Fouders and Community Manager since his inception and she could talk easily about the daily routing of this kind of work ranging over strategy to make things actually happens also in an online environment.
John Coate actually invented the term Online Community, working at the Well the “most influential online community” (WIRED, 1997) in the early days of the internet, he could share theory and practice having crossed and managed online and offline community since.
Hugi Asgeirsson is actively working in Edgeryders as a project leader and is one of the leaders of the Borderland, a Nordic participatory event and Burning Man regional event, which has a strong online-offline community working together to create a life-changing festival.
Photo credit the Borderland website
A lot of diversity and contents in this trio!!
How are we going to do this?
The Webinar will be free and we are going to use Youtube Live as a platform.
In the next days we will publish a landing page in which is possible to register and receive the link the day of the webinar (and a reminder one hour before
The partners
We are not alone in this webinar experiment in fact something special will happens in two places.
We will be live at OurGhema the co-working space in Medennine (TUNISIA) with @Yosser and @zmorda and at DARE, the co-working, workshop and event space of MCISE in Rabat (MOROCCO).
In the two spaces there will be a live projection of the webinar and we will be in direct live contact with them collecting questions and impressions during the 90 minutes sessions (with the help of @anique.yael and @hazem).
Who are the ideal participants for this workshop?
As John states in his introductory video, in community management “it’s all about relationships”, so this webinar is for you both if you are a professional Community manager or if you just started thinking about this topic. How is this possible? Because we are going to co-design the session with you ( > read forward)
What are we going to talk about?
This webinar is here to serve your needs, so if you are seriously thinking about participating and you have a question about Community Building or Management, post it on the comment section, we are going to structure the session around the topics that will emerge here in the platform.
We believe that this is more impactful in a professional day by day practice instead of creating something diluted and “for everybody”.
Noemi, John and Hugi will collect all the suggestions and craft few case studies that could light up insights about that and also prepare themselves with their point of view and past experiences.
Please also share this post and invitation to all your colleagues / community manager that you think could be interested.
Update soon with the landing page of the webinar