Photo by Sam Muirhead
Edgeryders, a community of 1800+ predominantly young people in over 40 countries, is reaching out to our peers in Armenia, Egypt and Georgia to invite them into our growing community.
In Edgeryders people from all over the world come together, inspire one another and help each other. Peer to peer. The ethos is that there isn’t any point in waiting for someone else to solve the problems: if we don’t build the solutions ourselves with our minds and bodies, they won’t get built. Together we have managed to pull off ambitious projects like the unMonastery and the Economy app with very little means. In doing so we have learned that we are one another’s best resource.
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We’re creating a tour bringing together people doing inspiring things in Armenia, Egypt and Georgia with their peers from different parts of the world. Rather than working in a top- down manner, we prefer it if people active on the local scene are involved in shaping the initiative from the beginning. The contents of the workshop in each country will be heavily based on the online discussion. So we are making a budget available to people who can help build engagement and drive participation in the online platform ahead of, during and after the tour. If you know of people doing interesting work in either of the three countries (maybe you are one of them), are active in the local scene as well as on social media and speak either Arabic, Armenian or Georgian you’re probably eligible for one of the paid work opportunities we publish in the Spot The Future group.
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We are building a useful online knowledge resource, mutual support community and collaboration opportunities for and by change-makers. After the tour, we envision the online contributions to be further developed into individual articles (2500 words), meant for publication in digital format for and by participants. As well as in the final deliverable to the UNDP. Each article selected for the final publication will be paid for*. And released for free under a creative commons license.
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A number of selected contributors to the online conversation and local workshops of the tour will be invited to an international conference in Georgia, with their travel expenses covered by Edgeryders. The conference is a unique opportunity for people doing interesting work in your community to come together with peers from other parts of the world, inspire one another and help each other.
Why now?
While a few of us are in Central and South America, India and South Africa, most of the 1800+ community members are based in Europe. We want to reach out to our peers in other parts of the world to explore how we can learn from and support one another’s work. P2p. And we’ve built a nice opportunity to do so together with anyone and everyone who wants to be involved.
Basically we made a compelling case that the UNDP should launch a so called “foresight” exercise in three countries modelled on the Edgeryders way of doing things…and they agreed! The principle in Edgeryders is that the people who do the work call the shots: now is the perfect time to get involved in shaping this initiative as we are just getting started!
- You can learn more about the actual initiative on the Edgeryders blog: https://edgeryders.eu/groups/blog/edgeryders-helps-undp-spot-the-future-in-armenia-georgia-and-egypt
- And about Edgeryders: http://www.cottica.net/2014/03/08/the-business-corporation-as-a-symbiont-to-a-community-edgeryders-crosses-a-watershed/
How to start?
The way it works is that you sign up on the Edgeryders platform, create a post saying hello to the rest of the community and telling us a litte about yourself here. This breaks the ice and makes it easier for everyone to start interacting with you as they know more about what you are interested in. It also makes it easier for us to get the word out about the paid opportunities to people who we know want to join us in building this movement together.
We hope you’ll join us on this shared journey. If you have any questions or need help getting started, don’t hesitate to email or tweet us. We usually respond quite quickly.
We’re so looking forward to welcoming new friends and collaborators to join the community in building, well, whatever we do to make the most of this opportunity together!
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