We’re finding out about many projects but we can’t visit all of them, so for the ones we can’t we intend to do email interviews, you can too, see below for email template and interview questions****
Dear [XXXXXX]
Today I am contacting you as part of a European community called EdgeRyders, a community platform for collaboration between people and projects all over the globe. Faced with multiple global crises (environmental, economic, social, political), we have chosen to act, each of us contributing to finding and testing ways for improvement.
We are working on all fronts of radical social innovation, from open source everything to small batch manufacturing, from urban agriculture to moneyless economies. We come together annually around a conference called Living on the Edge, in order to compare notes, share skills, experiences and encouragement.The Stewardship is the fourth LOTE, the physical gathering takes place on 23-26 October 2014 in Matera, Southern Italy, at the unMonastery, one of many projects to emerge from the community.
As part of the lead up to this event we are travelling Europe to meet with and interview individuals and groups who are engaged in important projects that relate to the theme of Stewardship. Through speaking with people we came across your work and although we won’t be able to visit you prior to the conference itself - we would really like to share your work with our community as feel it is extremely relevant and there is much to learn.
If you’d agree we’d like to conduct an interview with you online by sending you a series of questions relating to what you do. Please let us know if you have the time or this would be of interest to you and we will send through the interview questions.
Very Best,
Ben and Lauren
Can you tell us in couple of sentences what your project is about, how it got started and who’s involved?
What would you say the core objectives of your work are?
What are the main challenges you have faced in the course of your work and how did you overcome them?
What mistakes have you made that you believe that others could learn from?
What other projects, groups, organisations or networks do you see as an essential dependency or influencer on what you do?
This year the EdgeRyders unConference is centered around building a common language around the concept of Stewardship. Principally we see Stewardship as communities or individuals taking it upon themselves to care for social services, assets and infrastructure - as an alternative to examples where the state has failed to meet up to it’s social contract or private interests have worked in favour of profit, over people. But in order to develop the concept we’d like to understand what you think Stewardship means and how it might be relevant to the work that you do?
What do you think will be the greatest challenge for the human race over the next 100 years?
What question did I not ask that you think is important and you’d like to respond to?