Community Services and Tools

Workspaces Community Outreach & Coordination
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A wiki where we add descriptions of the Edgeryders stack of services and tools that can be used to simplify building and sustaining sources of mutually beneficial aid … from video meetings, to job listings, to check-ins and contacts …

Resources we have “at our disposal”

A network of domain experts from every field that can be engaged for design, deployment or evaluation of projects.

Experts.edgeryders.eu (under construction)

A Peer to Peer online incubator to support entrepreneurs working for positive impact on people and planet.

The Open Collective Intelligence Lab has been prototyped and deployed in the MENA region in cooperation with the World Bank. We are now in the process of rolling it out in the EU.

The Sci-Fi Economics Lab: An initiative to get economics out of its box.

Academia, tied down in publish or perish, is uninterested: we need a new space. So, we partnered with EIT Climate-KIC , the European Union’s largest climate innovation initiative. Together, we are organizing a Science Fiction Economics Lab , to bring together SF authors, economists, technologists, activists and just ordinary citizens who care, like us, to to envision different economic systems. We are not interested in tweaks, one percentage point of budget deficit more or less. By “different” we mean radically different. And these systems need to be rock solid , not some kind of delusional fantasy good for another round of electoral promise.

With this effort we are working to co-create a template for re-energizing society’s capacity for designing paradigm-level reform; help raise the awareness of the climate crisis as a carrier of opportunity and hope, and not just of disruption and dismay; and embolden would-be reformers, especially in Europe. This space is what we are asking you to support. In 2019 we prototyped the idea in a barebones format, and started building a community around it.

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

We develop and use our own Open Source tools for sensemaking and co-creation

An innovative suite of online software developed, customized and maintained by Edgeryders. The software has been developed in cooperation with leading universities and deployed in projects for the World Bank, United Nations Development Program. It has been supported by Grants from the Rockefeller foundation and funding for Horison2020 research.

Open Ethnographer: helps you to understand how communities make meaning and create culture, from the point of view of the community itself. It is an open source tool for Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA), which is a way to systematize and understand long chunks of text and to make sense out of it. OpenEthnographer is used for “coding” or tagging the content of online conversations, with awareness of how each tag fits into the social network of interactions.** It is a simple to use and intuitive tool that is key to other and more rich visualizations (ie through the use of Graphryder). Ethnography as always been a solitary science, Open Ethnographer is a new and scalable system that allows digital ethnography at an unprecedented scale, and because the goal of Ethnography is to understand communities make meaning and create culture, from the point of view of the community itself, OE is one of the first step to harness collective intelligence at work. It’s developed for and by ethnographers, but can easily be taught to any community manager to keep track of an online conversation at depth.

EdgeSense: help you understand how much your community members are active and engaged in the conversation, which is key to understand different roles or project groups that could emerge during the period of activity. It is a dashboard that allows community administrator to understand their community. It’s organized around a graphical representation of the community where nodes represents users and edges represent interactions. EdgeSense helps you take decision on your community management. For example is it possible to highlight or hide the role of moderators, and understand how much the community is self-sustainable or need a push from the center. Another possible analysis is based on the subcommunities that are active in and how dense the networks are between subcommunities. Analysis of nodes then help you understand how much your community members are active and engaged in the conversation, which is key to understand different roles or project groups that could emerge during the period of activity.

Graphryder: Helps you navigate conversations at scale and gain insight into your community because it maps out a graph of the view of the community about sets of topics, and it can lead to unexpected solutions or original point of views. It is a dashboard tool that allow us to analyze the conversations that are happening in the community through reading of ethnographic data. Graphryder is based on innovative academic research which has led to publication in scientific journals. A dashboard represents conversations, and the fieldnotes made by researchers thereon, in network form. We call these networks semantic social networks, as they incorporate information on social interaction and their meaning. They encode a map of the associations between key concepts as perceived by informants as a group. Graphryder is what helps you navigate conversations at scale and gain insights.

DreamSense: Helps large distributed groups to co-create projects in an easy and transparent manner. It’s also the tool that will keep track of budgeting and fund applications. It is the Edgeryders version of the open source tool Dreams which has been used by participatory communities since 2015.

Training for using the methodologies and tools

The curriculum for the OCI Lab & Documentation of all the webinars (see the event announcements and “follow up” posts for Online Labs and Webinars here: https://edgeryders.eu/c/ocilab

Publications

Repositories
Scribd Repository for Edgeryders publications

Event Reports:

Ethnographic & Network analysis

Books

Audiovisual

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My video is dated in the sense that it advocates in-person activity.

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hmm what do you mean?

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I advocate building community as a combination of online and in-person, because the key element is relationships and however you get there is what works for you. If I made that video today I would figure a way to modify that part. Without advocating Zoom per se…

It does not at all negate the thrust of the message in the video. But when I watch it I think, “hmm…that part is dated now.” Provided of course that this “new world” we are in really is a new world, rather than a temporary condition. We really don’t yet know…I think it is different, but the inertia of the old ways is powerful and there are many sheeple…

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oh I see - it’s ok, I think it’s enough to give a sense of what we are talking about, don’t you think?

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I do.

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ping @marina and @andreja

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Nice example: Dein vernetzter Workspace für Wikis, Dokumente und Projekte | Notion