A few days ago I published this job opportunity for a Social Media Manager for Edgeryders. One after one good ideas started showing up in the comments. It turns out that even in a situation that in other contexts would be framed as competitive, Edgeryders community members are open and tend to collaborate.
It also reminded me that the whole point of Edgeryders is to come together and build infrastructure to support community members and others future-building work, not reproduce the dynamics of artificial scarcity.
So I got an idea. And checked with everyone involved. We’ve decided we are NOT hiring a person for a temporary job.
Instead we are going to build a new communications agency lead by a stellar team. They are:
@SaidHamideh: well you saw his proposal. It kind of speaks for itself.
@Dorotea : GETS community. Especially this community. She is also on the Social Media Team and knows the platform well.
@Daniel_Vaarik: I could tell you. But you wouldn’t believe me. Check it out for yourself.
You: This will only work if you, me and everyone we know gets behind this effort.
A new kind of agency for the bleeding edge
Many of us have chosen to take the path less travelled. And it is very hard to be good at everything. During lote3 a room full of people building really awsome projects said they could really use help with design and communication. Plus many of us simply prefer getting on with the work we are passionate about, rather than promoting our projects or even ourselves. But we’re happy to contribute towards supporting one another if someone is coordinating and making it easy, fun and meaningful to do so.
The purpose of the Edgeryders in house agency is to help us get really really good at leveraging our collective online presence to:
- Support individual community member’s projects
- Support the Edgeryders company projects and sales processes
- Do outreach work for external clients.
The revenue from the outreach work for external client projects will go back into covering the costs of communications work for the Edgeryders community projects.
Edgeryders company would be the first official client. I set up a company website here, but we clearly need help with the pitch, and to get word around to prosepective clients. We will all pitch in to the efforts to secure paid clients for the new agency but Said, Daniel, Dorotea will guide and coodinate the efforts.
So we’re just going to hand over half of the Edgeryders company communication budget and trust you guys to manage it well.
It amounts to enough money for Said to drive the implementation of his proposal (3500 USD) and an additional 2000 USD as seed funding for this new venture. If this agency is successful in building a serious client base this will contribute towards more paid work opportunities finding their way to the community, so it makes sense for everyone who can to help out. We’ll give it our best shot for three months and then do a public review of the results after which we decide if we want to continue.
What kind of work or clients?
In Edgeryders those who do the work calls the shots, so it’s really up to the co-founders to decide what projects they want to work on. They, like other community members, were however drawn to Edgeryders because “ we are working together to make the world a better place and have a fairly aligned idea of what better means” as Leo puts it. Community members are not in anyone’s chain of command, so the success of the different gigs will depend on the team ensuring that the work aligned with the community members’ values.
Our requirements in exchange for the seed funding are:
- That outreach efforts draw people towards the community and interacting on the community platform: using third party services like FB and Twitter solely to share links that point back into edgeryder.eu landing pages so we don't fragment the community.
- We coordinate and collaborate on communications efforts on the platform through e.g working out loud posts.
- That a contract is signed with the Edgeryders Company that outlines the agreements between the individual co-founders, and between the co-founders as a group and the community as a whole.