In early November Edgeryders Noemi Salantiu, Alex Levene and John Coate will travel to the Croatian city of Rijeka, on the4 Istrian coast, to conduct a community building workshop in support of their status as a European Capital of Culture in 2020.
Rijeka has already created a number of projects for Rijeka 2020 (Home • Rijeka 2020) including building a dynamic new community and cultural center, the RiHub, the similar Brick House, and numerous cultural and civic initiatives such as Energana Incubator, Seasons of Power, Green Wave and 27 Neighbourhoods.
Rijeka 2020 organizers wish to use an online community network to tie all of these projects together in order to increase visibility, foster collaboration and develop an ongoing way for people to come together in ways that increase the permanence of their many initiatives.
This is where Edgeryders comes in. They asked us to give a two-day workshop on the steps required to organize, build and grow a healthy online community. The workshop consist of presentations, Q&A, analyzing and selecting a platform, active real-time collaboration on developing a working terms of Service, advice on generating public awareness, and advice on managing a growing community. Much of the focus will be on the 27 Neighbourhoods project. We will work with ten of the neighbourhood representatives, helping them shape Rijeka 2020 online so that it increases fulfillment of their goals.
The workshop will take place in Rijeka on November 5-6.
Noemi’s aware of it but the rest of you may be interested in checking out the Participatory Governance in Culture conference that was also held in Rijeka as a part of their European Capital of Culture activities last year. I presented there on Generative Participatory Governance and in fact shared some notes and reflections about it here on Edgeryders.
Wishing you all the best with the workshop and its ripples.
Saw that, thanks. They are writing up the contract, flights and rooms are reserved. We will do a couple of set presentations for them, but mainly we need them to tell us more specifically what it is they need that will benefit the most from our input. I get the sense that we will kind of co-discover that during the 2 days. (Nov 5-6).
Very much looking forwards to this now.
Do we need a call you, me and @noemi between now and Sunday to discuss what might be happening.
I’m pretty good to go with the flow and contribute what i can from my own personal experience.
Happy to also be guided and led by the two of you in advance.
For me the best day would be Sunday, or Tuesday next week
We definitely could do that. I have been thinking about this workshop quite a bit, naturally. We only know generally what it is they most want and need. My presentation, and no doubt Noemi’s too, is going to be a variety of ideas and issues related to community building to give them a good overview of things, and to make them aware of the things we can help them with. I figure then that the rest of day 1 and day 2 can be us collectively drilling into the things they identify as what they are most interested in. From there it becomes not a brainstorming session but a deeper look into selected issues so they and we come away with something that they will really apply to the situation.
Let’s do Tuesday afternoon CET, if @johncoate is not already on the road? 17:00 PM Brussels time?
I propose me and John deliver our presentation points and we all poke holes in them,
Alex: it would be great if you will be representing the Edgeryders community in those discussions, having a set of examples up your sleeve on how people meet through the platform and collaborate, and how projects go much farther then they would have in the absence of the community - for inspiration see the cards we produced on key examples. Of course, your personal examples would be great too, even better!
I should be able to do that call. It would be 8 AM here. I will be at home then, will leave not long after to head south. I’ll stay at my son’t place so I can get the bus to the airport Weds morning.
I still have some editing to do - I have too many slides and points to make…have to cut down some. I am thinking that for this talk I will not do a lot of that autobiography material, even though it’s entertaining, because there just isn’t that much time to go into it compared to other subjects…
good call on the cards, though of course Alex’s own experiences will have plenty of power.
Also, do you think we should buy our bus tickets from Zagreb to Rijeka in advance? they want you to declare a specific time and I am not sure what that would be for us…
Hello Edgeryders!
After two days spent with Edgeryders, we learned a lot about new community building approaches. I hope we’ll meet again (maybe on Trust in Play project) and I mean it!
Thank you for sharing these with us.
I hope we can come back and do some more work with you and the Rijeka 2020 in the future. Such a wonderful area I would love to explore it more.
