[DESIGN]ating Purpose

[thereallex]

Defining the purpose, suggestions for process

Hi, I wanted to join the discussion because I’m also approaching it from a design perspective and I’d like to support iamronen in trying to come up with a way to structure the process in such a way that we can be clear what the purpose is of edgeryders and first of all communicating it to people participating in ER and secondly being able to communicate it to the outside world.

Just like iamronen I think that there is definitely a set of goals and a specific purpose that is central to the community and by distilling it into a simple, readable form we can make it easier to build upon it and decide on a strategy. Of course I am quite new to this so as an outsider I am quite unaware of the ideas and assumptions that the more active members already have.

I think what would be very valuable is to make a list of specific design techniques that we commonly use in the design process and apply them systematically.

This is a list of some that I think would be useful:

• Defining Vision/mission/strategy/scope/function/aestetic (similar to J.J. Garrett's approach to elements of user experience).
  • Try to define each one (starting with the first ones) in a short, succinct way. I often try to define each one in 1 word, 3 words, 1 sentence, and 100 words. 
• Research overview of all the ideas people have about edgeryders, documenting these, comparing them and visualising to extract what is already common consensus
  • Perhaps we can do a survey with some key questions we want every ER to answer (much of this info might already be available.
• The business model canvas - a good starting point (http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/canvas) 

These are just some starting points that could help us structure the session a bit better and work towards tangible results.

I think that we should also make sure that we document the most important results of the session (preferably in a visual way) and communicate them back to the participants/community so it can form the basis for the rest of the conference.

I’d like to view your proposal iamronen and see if I can contribute.

[iwas]

my vision

Thank you for your vested comment thereallex

I plan to introduce some tools that I believe can go along way in the hands of anybody that cares to use them. I am hoping to communicate a hollistic approach that does not require specializations (such as the ones you mentioned) but can give context on to any other technique you or others may be familiar with or like to use.

I am refraining from presenting my proposal at this stage for these reasons:

1. Like you I am relatively new here and I do not want to make superficial assumptions. I have questions to ask other EdgeRyders that have been around longer.
2. I believe that doing so without first establishing a shared understsanding can introduce misperception.
3. I am used to doing this on my own (due to past experience in the "consultant" role) and I am trying to avoid this and to give an opportunity for something else to surface in a group setting.

In the same spirit I have refrained from making quite a few comments on various topics I have come across on the ER platform. I do hope that people who participate in diverse tasks - shaping the platform, developing the business model, leading projects, building the unMonastery participate in this session.

I will bring my thoughts with me and put them out there (like anyone else who cares) for consideration.

… and for more context and inspiration I once again recommend the book I mentioned in the post.

[nadia]

Re purpose: After South Africa trip

I think this session proposal is starting to take a nice form. If you want to raise awareness and draw more engagement into it, you may want to consider making use of the twitter storm we discussed during yesterday’s community call for focusing participants attention on fleshing out the program (check next summary of the community call for more info).

Re: the visual documentation, maybe ping [Sam Muirhead] who is running this session on video documentation?

After a week in South Africa of preparing the Edgeryders presentation to would be clients with Arthur’s help, gathering their feedback and then iterating the presentations I have come to some conclusions. These apply for me, others will have different interpretations:

1. Edgeryders is at it's core a platform for enabling collaboration on a massive scale around alternative responses to systemic crises : ecological, economic and political (without focusing on ontology). It does so on three levels: 
   • Connecting people experimenting with solutions with their peers in other places. Basic level collaboration is sharing of experiences, knowledge and advice
   • Enabling hands on, place-based collaboration between people with hands on skills from experimenting with solutions and those with detailed knowledge of the issues at hand through unMonastery residencies. More intensive collaboration through people moving from one part of world to another where they work in teams with people from the areas which recieve them.
   • Many people sharing many experiences of problems and solutions = patterns begin to emerge. Third level collaboration is collective intelligence about alternative responses to systemic crises, grounded in hands on experience. This can then be used by community members for purposes of interacting with power and resources on basis of hard evidence and scientific rigour, but also as a means to become better at what we do together.
2. Edgeryders is a do-ocracy: the rules of engagement are designed to enable people to collaborate in free-forming constellations and self-organising swarms, not build consensus about what needs doing before people can act. We have no idea how to fix the big issues, so we need many many experiments happening in parallel and knowledge flowing between them. 
3. There is a core of people that have more central positions in the network by virtue of having done hands on community buiding and management for the most amount of time. Or because they craft thoughful posts and comments that contribute interesting/useful  information or knowledge that resonate with other community members. And because they are active in promoting their posts on social media.

Don’t know if this helps.

​

[iwas]

purpose

I’ve been following your writings from Africa and they seem to be resonating with newfound clarity.

I understand and agree with almost everything you’ve written … there’s much we can talk about … but it already feels like a mature direction and I believe that further refinements will come through more and more doing.

However I feel there is one aspect that is still missing. You’ve spoken of what EdgeRyders IS but I would like to talk about the PURPOSE of EdgeRyders. This isn’t a dialectical excercise. I offer this for reflection:

“The purpose of EdgeRyders is to make cutting-edge knowledge available to mainstream society.”

A lof of the things that “EdgeRyders is” are not unique to EdgeRyders … people are doing and researching and collaborating and communicating all over the world. However I believe that the effort to bring all this into mainstream society (the business model discussion) is a unique cutting edge of EdgeRyders. Speaking from personal experience, I live kind of like a monk in my unofficial unmonastery. I do lots of applied research however I do not (for numerous reasons) make an effort to make it public knowledge (other then publishing it online). That is where EdgeRyders comes in with a unique offering to both me (being part of a commmunity, make a living, etc.) and to mainstream society (finding ways to connect, organizing information and knowledge, creating circumstances for relevant applications, etc.).

I believe that a clear purpose (the one above is just my suggestion) can offer loads of guidance and clarity into decision making. Here are some examples, based on this purpose:

1. The public website should appeal first and foremost to the kind of people who we believe we can reach and work with in mainstream institutions.
2. The public website is a tool to support the work of people like you Nadia who are trying to find a business model that will provide the financial breathing space needed to sustain EdgeRyders.
3. The public website is not just a side-effect of leaking information from the internal platform.
4. Maybe we can call these mainstream people "potential customers"?
5. Maybe we need to all (as a community) care about potential customer - to remember that maybe they are not EdgeRyders (though they may be perceived as such within their context of life/work). Maybe we can adapt and moderate our internal forms of expression when expressed externally so that potential clients can better connect with us.
6. Maybe we need to figure out (or make assumptions) about what we can gift to potential customers that will make it easier for them to digest EdgeRyders and to "sell" (on our behalf) it inside their organizations.
7. Maybe projects that we do inside EdgeRyders can be considered for their value in the context of this purpose. Compatible projects can be presented with more focus and clear presentation to the outside world.
8. Maybe this purpose can bring clarity and guidance to projects taking place within the community?
9. Maybe there are projects that we can initiate - such as tools that enable our customers to interact with our community? Maybe such tools can empower our community AND create a unique value offering to our clients AND in doing so create income to sustain ourselves?

When I moved to living in a Romanian village I was worried about money and so are a lot of people who I’ve spoken to about making a similar transition. The underlying question of this view is “how/from where can I get money”.  I didn’t have and still don’t have answers to that. But once here we launched a CSA (community supported agriculture project) with some features unique to the cultural setting we found here … and the project has created a small, reliable, growing (with much potential) revenue stream for us. So now, when asked, I offer this as a reflection: instead of asking what you can take ask yourself what can you bring and offer to the village?

Almost everything you wrote was self-serving - the self being the EdgeRyders community. Yet you have been investing quite a lot of work in serving those that are outside the community - reaching out to our potential customers - but that part is not reflected in what you wrote and I believe that is the core of EdgeRyders and the key to its abundant sustainability.

[k11]

Do you have these written

[Nadia], do you have these written somewhere in a separate post? Totally apply for me, and also twitterstorm-friendly. Important point on do-ocracy.

[nadia]

Not sure I understand

If you’re asking whether the points about how I define what Edgeryders is and aims to do are posted somewhere else, the answer is no…I wrote them in response to Ronen’s question. Feel free to post them somewhere else if you want to. The Twitterstorm for N00bs how-to guide is here: https://edgeryders.eu/blog/twitterstorm-for-dummies-how-well-do-a-press-conference-on-twitter-and-that-means-you-too

Maybe you were asking something else?

[k11]

I meant that I find these points useful to shortly introducing people to ER and for this matter useful for the next twitterstorm. I’ve started a quote depository wiki to put all these bits and pieces of content which … hmm I like. Will put them there

[nadia]

Not sure I understand

If you’re asking whether the points about how I define what Edgeryders is and aims to do are posted somewhere else, the answer is no…I wrote them in response to Ronen’s question. Feel free to post them somewhere else if you want to. The Twitterstorm for N00bs how-to guide is here: Twitterstorm for dummies: how we'll do a press conference on Twitter – and that means you, too! - Community Outreach & Coordination - Edgeryders

Maybe you were asking something else?

[mishek]

Customers

First and foremost we must be here to serve one another.

This idea of being customer to one another is a model yet to be sustainably proved here before we can hope to extend (or market) it any further.

We cannot truly serve one another unless we know who that other is…and not just their current work but their visions, hopes, needs…

How to create a platform that can reveal and communicate (in ongoing, evolving, live fashion) such personally complicated yet important data…

[nadia]

“Must”? “Should”? Who determines this on behalf of others?

I am very uncomfortable with  assumptions underpinning communication that contains the words " should" and “must” with regards to anyone other than the person making statements that contain them. Also imho one way to test a model is to contribute towards testing ideas and conversations which already exist and could be built into a model to test with a little work. I would like to draw  the conversation away from a theoretical one. to one in which the discussion is based on evidence and reflection on practical, first hand  experiences from trying different things out, together or alone. Otherwise we are in the domain of  opinions and not knowledge which  makes engagement in Edgeryders much less attractive to me and renders whatever conclusions drawn and presented to the world from Edgeryders much less credibe.

[iwas]

NOT customers to one another

I did not and do not suggest we be “customers to one another”. You misunderstood me.

I used the word “customer” to describe people [Nadia] has and is meeting with in an attempt to give life to the consultation business model which is intended to provide finacial sustenance so that we can continue to explore and create together.

[mishek]

Confused again by these recent replies

Not sure how to reply to any of these. Who is misunderstanding who is misunderstanding who is mis?

[alberto]

I would not worry

Don’t worry too much, [mishek]. People are trying to wrap their head around this thing. It is very unusual. My guess is that everyone is misunderstanding everyone else to a point.

It is one thing to say “we focus on enabling” and quite another to stop worrying that others will be more able to benefit from all this enabling than you. But if you don’t stop worrying about this, you are going to be focused on dis-abling others from running ahead in the race. On the other hand, if you did stop worrying already, you’ll claim there is no race, and different people are doing different things, and be upset by the worriers trying to wield veto power over the doers.

It’ll all sort itself out. People who are not comfortable with this proposed way of working will retreat to where they feel safe. If almost everybody does, the do-ocracy will die for lack of critical mass. Which  would be a shame for me personally, but evolution generally knows what it’s doing. Maybe I’m just wrong.

[dante]

Edgeryders as Online Forum - Define each activity separately

I find the last posts of interest. Thanks.

I suggest with insistence that the different activities and approaches need to be called with different names, or at least a combination of names.

I personally feel this can be beneficial.

IMHO, from what I perceive, I feel that first and foremost, Edgeryders is the build up of a brand for a forum ( and technically speaking, an aggregator of attention and interaction )

I personally sense that the basic Edgeryders brand is about simply that : an online forum.

After that, several spin off brands can emerge, such as “Edgeryder Events”, or “Edgeryder Collectives” - though for now examples of such names / brands used for that seems to be Edgeryders Lote" and Edgeryders unMonastery. Yet I also imagine that these complemetary brands can be used separately / not necessarily connected to the Edgeryders brand, if and when it is not initiated and organized using the Edgeryders forum, or that they can choose not to use the Edgeryders brand.

I want Edgeryders as a forum to discuss ways of incubating various other tools that can eventually be reified as other brands, and progressively use these to continue building and connecting shared networked infrastructure.

I see Edgeryders as a brand that , apparently, currently builds itself on existing networks of people and projects who are already invoved and highly empowered.  In other words, Edgeryders is not a brand describing each of these existing projects and networks.  Edgeryders only describes a more specifically defined online forum as tool , midst other online forums, that eventually leads to processes of convergence and mutual facilitation.  It does not generate what it feeds itself from.

IMHO, I do not want Edgeryders to become a brand used to describe me or my activities, simply because I interact using Edgeryders.  I am not an Edgeryder.  I am a user of Edgeryder - the forum.  And I am connected to a multiplicity of people and networks of people, including through the Edgeryders forum - many of which I have been connected to before Edgerders forum, and many with whom I interact with without being dependent on Edgeryders.

In that sense, it is not like a coworking space, and even less so like a company. It is also important to me that it is not used to describe a community or a culture.   Imho, from there on, some of the temporary communities can have the freedom to decide to describe themselves by adding Edgeryders as adjective, to describe the origins of their interactions, or the mutualised tools / infrastructure they may use, including the forum.

Also, the Edgeryders brand is not a culture.  It is , again, imho, a online forum, where eventually some communities may form temporarily. Yes, some of the individuals using the tool may convene on using or expressing ( self organized, meritocratic, etc ) cultures in their interactions.

Edgeryders is also not a verb ( some may say couchsurfing, for example, may be considered as a verb ).

From what I read, some people may want to define Edgeryders as a market ? Between consumers and producers ?  Personally I hope this is not what we use the attention that converges around the Edgeryders brand and tools for, but if that is what it is used for, then it should be called by a different combination of words, and not simply “Edgeryders”.

There can also be various other concepts using Edgeryders as attention and participation aggregator.  For example, a syndicate.    Yet the example of a syndicate may also require that we are willing to share the political risk of being connected to each other and mutually responsible for each other ( even if only in terms of public image ), if and when it is defined by including the term “Edgeryders”, with a specific social contract bonding people ? And personally this can only be done if and when there is sufficient trust, which for now is mostly superficial, despite the lovely interactions and lovely persons met through the aggregator.

[nadia]

Ontologies?

Categorisation-focus while enjoyable and important to some, is a tendency which I think Clay Shirky made a convincing argument against:

“Now, anyone who deals with categorization for a living will tell you they can never get a perfect system. In working classification systems, success is not “Did we get the ideal arrangement?” but rather “How close did we come, and on what measures?” The idea of a perfect scheme is simply a Platonic ideal. However, I want to argue that even the ontological ideal is a mistake. Even using theoretical perfection as a measure of practical success leads to misapplication of resources.”

The full article is available here for those interested: http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

[iwas]

purpose of session

You have touched on many many subjects which may get their time … but this is not what I would like to do. my purpose with this session is not to open an endless speculative process.

I have offered it and my thoughts based on my understanding (from reading, interacting and meeting with [Noemi]) of where EdgeRyders is and where it wants to go.

We WILL NOT be talking about what people want EdgeRyders to be.

We WILL be talking about what EdgeRyders is (defacto) and how design can support that.

If you want to talk about what EdgeRyders is (brand, forum, participation aggregator, etc.) I think the best way to go about that is to suggest a session about that.

[Nadia] would you like to add to the workshop part of the session a presentation of where EdgeRyders currently is to get everyone on common ground?

[dante]

Defacto, there are different projects and networks

Exactly, Defacto, Its about understanding what we call what, and about not needing to speculate.

And if we do not have the same definition of a word,

especially when this word is related to a social contract with objectives, and purposes, such as this thread,

how is it even possible to agree to engage with each other … unless I allow another to define for me what it is I engage myself in. 

Hence the proposal to name each defacto , existing or planned project or social contract, for what it is - including through combinations of words,

as to more easily differentiate, and hence have the ability to choose the social contracts in which to engage in.

//

I also admit I have difficulties understanding the point of Nadia’s brushing off reply.

If she does not want to use a Edgeryders label / container / category, fine with me - but right now it seems to me that she aims at benefitting , as some kind of curator,

from the enclosure of crowdsourcing within an Edgeryders brand. My point here is that if she and others set forward such enclosure, defining it in their terms,

then I need to understand what exactly it means, and what is called what.   IMHO, I do certainly not benefit from having to agree implicitly with an all ecompassing brand enclosure, by interacting, or be perceived as interacting via Edgeryders.

[nadia]

Resources.

I don’t think general overarching theoretical discussions about what to call what are generative. My experience is that it is more likely you will succeed in driving generative engagement in what you want to discuss if it is based on some shared, hands-on experience.  I.e. that this conversation might generate more practically useful output if it is based on looking at ongoing Edgeryders-related initiatives as case studies and deriving guidelines from or testing the ones that exist, against them. 

My brain is reading what you have written and asking: Is it here? Is it now? Does it matter to me getting this specific project I as as a participant am interested in getting off the ground sucessfully? Does it respect that I as a participant have limited cognitive bandwidth and time? Does it map onto my immediate priorities at this moment or will this be one of those conversations that while it does pay lip service to stuff that sounds good on paper, is disproportinately costly in terms of time and draws away focus from getting anything concrete done with the limited time and energy I have as a participant in this session? Exhibit A being activists that insisit on pushing Open Data everything and demand everyone else shoulders the costs involved, and then are nowhere to be seen when it comes to doing the work involved. Which isn’t made better when it turns out neither they nor anyone else have real use for the data they pushed so hard to liberate. Which in extention makes it harder to justify expenditure on Open Data in the future for others who really need it because it gives those who don’t want to do it the best ammo against them: we or others did it before and it was a waste of resources.

If you can make a credible case that the the answers to the above questions are yes by doing the required preparatory work then I think more people will be excited about discussing the topics you want to.  Myself included.

[dante]

confusing shared environment with your own projects ?

• sigh -

none of this - perceived attitude of brushing off - gives me assurances in terms of the modularity and autonomy of projects within the framework you seem to be proposing,

and hence has a direct pragmatic impact on my perceived potential for defining engagement and enabling overlap.

[iwas]

please bring that

your need for assurances please bring THAT to the table … break it down, if you can specifically, not generally … if you have a specific project in mind speak of it and to it.

Another aspect I would ask you to consider is giving before taking. I can bring a few projects to the  “platform”. I haven’t done that because I feel that the platform itself needs my help and support before I place any more burdens and expectations on it. So I am focusing on what can I bring to the platform rather then how I can use it for myself. Can you see that distinction? can you relate?

I feel its useful to remember this whole thing is still an experiment, not yet an oiled machine that can be rolled into production.

I have just started thinking about bringing a project into the platform … but my purpose is to use it as a learning experience. To get direct experience from a specific example about using the platform and engaging the community. My project would be, for now, secondary to the platform.