This summit is part of a series of activities aimed at co-designing experimental new social, business and investment models to withstand the shocks which will be soon be upon us as climate crisis and ecological devastation unfold. Ecosystems of economic resilience and regeneration.
Register your interest now for the Resilient Livelihoods Summit, hosted by Edgeryders.
When: Pre-summit events starting on 2nd week of June, Summit takes place in mid september.
Tickets: Fill in this form
Program: See here.
Description of the process & what comes out of it for participants: Summit events: Process (for participants)
About
When a crisis hits, we look for systems of support & collaboration that go beyond the status quo. At this online summit we gather together people who deploy policies, infrastructures, tools, business activity and community projects that can form an essential support system for sustaining livelihoods in times of crisis.
The event is designed to help participants…
Find the right conversations
Grow their professional network
Build new income opportunities
Learn from others’ past experiences
Experiment new models for securing resilient livelihoods
What will happen during the online summit?
- A series of listening sessions around key issues
- Webinars to present and discuss case studies
- Online co-creation workshops to design and plan joint actions
- An online hackathon to accelerate existing initiatives through technical support
What happens before and after
- Preparation: Collecting and discussing case studies, preparing initiatives for the hackathon, Pre-event introductions and networking
- During the event: Rigorous documentation, definition of a list of follow up action points with clear allocation of roles and responsibilities, open participatory budgeting for the activities.
- Follow up: Rapid deployment of the actions (1 week cycles), followed by open participatory evaluation and codesign of next cycle based on lessons learned.
Features:
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Accessible & Inclusive: Everything online for free, multilingual content & facilitation, video + audio + text alternatives.
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Fast to deploy: we do all of this in partnership with an already active online community on an already existing open source online platform that has been running for over 7 years. It has been used to deploy similar processes for the World Bank, UNDP, EU funded research project
Why this, why now?
section text cocreated with @jean_russell, inspired by an older text contributed by @hexayurt
How we have been organizing resources and markets so humans have food on the table and a roof over their head has proven to be fragile in the midst of a pandemic. Most complex challenges (like getting food on the table for your family from a hundred sources and locations), are not one well-defined problem (grow apples), but a constellation of interdependent issues (transportation logistics, factory sorting and processing, demand & supply negotiations, regulation etc) undergoing constant redefinition and renegotiation. Any one organisation, no matter how efficient and smart, has no hope of containing any such challenge.
At the same time we see that in the face of large shocks to the system, organisations optimised for efficiency and profit cannot provide the means for material, relational, and existential resilience of neither individual nor society at large. Case in point: When supply chains are broken, even benevolent governments in affluent countries cannot access the equipment or protective gear to protect frontline workers on which we all depend to stay alive.
On the other hand, communities are getting smarter. The Internet has produced decentralized, scalable tools for coordination, archiving, and retrieval. It has also spawned cultural practices and ethical rules that incentivize people to collaborate with strangers. As a result, leaderless “swarms” of dedicated citizen experts are writing encyclopedias, mapping the Earth, doing science, developing and maintaining complex, successful software stacks. In each of these areas they outperform powerful businesses and government initiatives.
These initiatives display uncanny speed and efficiency, because communities are better than organizational hierarchies at making use of human intelligence. They treat every person – not just the top echelon – as a potential or actual expert, rather than as a passive consumer or beneficiary. They ask people to help, rather than charting their needs, and they have more human talent to throw at problems. They weed out under-performing initiatives in a healthy and natural way, making way for new life to emerge.
Wikipedia’s a good example of the combined power of Smart Swarms to change the world. We all use it every day, and it’s taking effective action on both poverty (poor people are using it too, all over the world!) and ecology (it’s saving huge numbers of trees on paper books.) People are working together to solve a real human problem - access to knowledge - and it’s improving everyone’s lives. There’s a tiny thread of financial capital – running the servers, say – but Wikipedia is a community-driven enterprise. It shows what can be done.
We want to achieve resilient lives and livelihoods. Contributing to Wikipedia doesn’t put food on the table or ensure that communities support one another to mitigate the consequences of social distancing. Or even keep our mental health intact when automation wipes out the need for many professions, the foundation on which many of us build our identity and sense of purpose. We need to use a similar kind of effect to meet the material, relational, and existential needs of individuals and communities. And we need to develop sources of prosperity that secure their resilience by serving these needs.
This is not just semantics: it is about reframing livelihood generation from a lonely, competitive activity that only is accessible if you have money to sustain yourself while you build your business or have specialised training. To one that is collaborative, mutualistic, and accessible to all, regardless of your personal background. We frame the building of sustainable economic livelihoods as that of building an ecosystem, made up of many overlapping circles of people engaging in different activities. Commercial activity always relied on cooperation more than competition (but that was called an old boys club).
This summit is part of a series of activities aimed at co-designing experimental new social, business and investment models to withstand the shocks which will besoon be upon us as climate crisis and ecological devastation unfold. Ecosystems of economic resilience and regeneration.
About the Organisers
- The Edgeryders organisation was created in 2012. Is an international community consisting of 5000 members in 80 countries. It’s members mostly interact through and an open source digital platform with it’s own custom made digital tools for large scale dialogue and coordination, as well as through community events such as workshops, conferences, retreats and festivals.
- Notable members: Robin Chase, Founder of Zipcar, Amelia Andersdotter former MEP for the Swedish Pirate Party and Digital Rights activist, Fabrizio Barca - Ex General Director of division chief at the research department of the Bank of Italy, Chief of the department of development and cohesion policies at the treasury with previous tenures as chief at the research department of the Bank of Italy,and the president of the OECD’s territorial policies committee.
- Mission: Support a diverse groups of people with the relations ships, information, knowledge, tools and opportunities to accelerate the transition to a greener, more equitable and humane society for all.
- Born out of Council of Europe Research project on social cohesion at the Council of Europe, an international organisation which houses the European Court of Human Rights, which enforces the European Convention on Human Rights in Europe. It’s stated aim is to uphold human rights, democracy and the rule of law in Europe.
- It is supported by a not for profit company with the same name registered in Estonia. The company is stewarded by 6 directors based in Belgium, Germany, Sweden and the United States.
- The company develops its own technologies, methodologies and insights through academic research cooperations with leading Universities.
- Current and Previous Partners, Clients and funders include: University of Bordeaux, City of Matera, City of Galway, City of Milan, City of Amsterdam, Stockholm School of Economics, Nesta, Aarhus University, EIT- Climate Kic, World Bank, UNDP, European Commission and the Rockefeller foundation.
How you can partner with us
If you can grow our visibility, contribute financially to offset costs or open doors to others who can do so please get in touch with us!
Write to kaja@edgeryders.eu to schedule a phonecall or meeting.
How is this all financed?
This event is part of the NGI Forward project Generation Internet (NGI) initiative, launched by the European Commission in the autumn of 2016. It has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 825652 from 2019-2021. You can learn more about the initiative and our involvement in it at https://ngi.edgeryders.eu
