We know how to produce a new kind of knowledge product. You can think of it as a hybrid between consultancy and consultation. Like consultancy, it is as technical and narrow-scoped as required: there are hidden experts on everything out there, and the Internet (and our own community-building skills) makes it cheap to reach out to them). Like consultation, it is open to everyone and scales quite well. Unlike run-of-the-mill consultancy, our method:
- is self-correcting . Radical openness guarantees that, if a particular group of citizen experts takes a wrong turn, their mistake is likely to be spotted and corrected early on by others – just like what happens with open source software.
- is truthful . For almost all participants being a citizen expert is not a job – although it can occasionally lead to paid work – and there are too many of us to buy us all off. This takes away the incentive to keep the client away from inconvenient truths.
Even more important than a model, we have access to great, world-class people who can quickly be recruited and assembled into teams to work on a broad range of projects.
We use advanced techniques and software to induce and harness collective intelligence dynamics in a global, incredibly diverse community . We don’t employ full-time consultants. We call this open consultancy , and we think it is superior to vanilla consultancy models.
- Foster maximal diversity to attack your problems . We now know diversity trumps ability .
- Improve ability to analyse and interpret information . Produce and use data. Have a data strategy.
A smart community outperforms any of its members; this is the result of people working together, improving on each other’s work. So, we
- use graph theory, combined with ethnography, to access the wisdom of the crowd. You can think of it as an artificial intelligence whose components are human beings.
- use next generation management practices to identify, mobilise and coordinate
Our methodology is based on what we call Semantic Social Networks . It has several advantages:
- Robust to ill-defined questions. Exploratory questions are important. Who is doing the most interesting work on X? Which trends are emerging around Y? Free-form conversation minimizes framing biases and encourages serendipitous discovery.
- Scalable . Edgeryders projects can result in large online conversations, with hundreds or thousands of participants. We use graph theory to aggregate them, and extract from them what is most important or unexpected.
- Rigorous . Mining Semantic Social Networks yields qualitative and quantitative research. We apply network metrics to score and weigh the qualitative conclusions of ethnographers.
- Beautiful and intuitive . Everything we do is a network, and networks are easy to visualize. In fact, most people find them intuitive and beautiful. We provide visualizations of our data with all our projects.
How we can help you
Help you move forward after Covid. Edgeryders researches and experiments creative models for how organisations and communities in the post pandemic world can work.
Discover and find your place in the future . The future is already here and many organisations are already operating in it. We help you discover and make sense of it. Read More
Identify the questions you should be asking. The most important issues that will affect you are the ones of which you are not yet aware. We help you reach the people who are already building the solutions. (More)
Embed you in dense networks. The smartest people are always working for someone else. But no one is more capable than everyone. Dense networks are a powerful force for imagining and implementing new solutions. (More )
Experiment new economies for the green transition. We experiment new models to get economics out of its box for a more humane, fairer, greener society. (More)
Edgeryders as a home organisation. Edgeryders provides a service for freelancers and others who who need an organisational affiliation (More).