ER survey response for Real Economy Lab

Hi edgeryders,

This is a request for input from someone well familiar with ER community who can offer their insight as a representative ‘profile’ of the project / network to a new collaborative research and mapping effort covering the landscape of economic systems change.

You can read a bit more about the initiative here: realeconomylab.org/blog

The survey form is available here: http://goo.gl/forms/zGGT0feqw0

How can one person attempt to represent a diverse, changing network?? Good question! We are not attempting to determine the ultimate ‘consensus’ position from everyone in the network, nor do we want the voice of one person saying what they think ER should be / could be, in their own version of it. Instead, the invitation is for an informed opinion and assessment which is likely to be agreeable to the majority of the community, if not perfectly accurate for everyone.

We will use the data collected here to start to identify clusters and patterns based on the current taxonomy we have developed (mostly visible in the survey options), and to begin testing methods for collective intelligence and coalition building amongst interested groups, with the goal of developing a dedicated platform for this work to continue in an increasingly open and adaptable format.

If you are willing to take 10-20min to complete the form, please volunteer your name in a comment and if no one else responds or suggests otherwise within a day or two go ahead! I will follow up here as soon as a valid response comes through.

Thank you. I look for the chance to share updates of our work in coming weeks, and invite ideas, feedback, references etc. from anyone. What kind of knowledge, insights, opportunities can something like Real Economy Lab offer to Edgeryders? (that’s one of the questions on the form too!)

1 Like

Sounds about right

It was me hesitating when someone emailed to ask for this info, as I thought it’s hard for one person to make themselves responsible for what Edgeryders is as a network. Even our wikipedia entry is incomplete.

So thanks for bringing this here. Hope someone volunteers.

As for collaboration opportunities, I checked the RealEconomy lab but didn’t found a story of how they collaborate with orgs on the map. It reads general because we don’t know where the mapped content is going. So it will mostly depend on that…

Story of collaboration

Hi Noemi,

The Lab project is still in early stage. We are designing and testing and making connections at this point, building momentum for a larger development effort towards a full-featured interactive mapping platform.

What we would like to begin to offer to groups who are interested in participating is to join in dialogue with other ‘peer’ organizations where there is a high likelihood of mutual benefit or relationship. So, by doing the mapping process, we are looking for natural clusters and alignments between groups / projects, places where there is a good potential for collaboration or other types of convergence and exchange, using this overview of the landscape.

When I ask “what does Edgeryders want from real economy lab” I am really asking what type of participation or resource or support does Edgeryders need / desire most to fulfill its mission, vision, and cultural narrative? I’m curious what is your first response to that question :slight_smile:

Another invitation is for groups to participate in more involved ‘collective intelligence’ process, building consensus about effective scalable models of new economic systems which maximize well-being and shared wealth. We are just now preparing some trials to begin later this month, let me know if you are interested in joining one live conversation of about an hour with representatives from other groups in our study so far.

I appreciate your input, and will follow up with our next report!

First thing that comes to mind

Well, it has to do with inter-platform collaboration and e.g. the Big Data of self-organised movements. Specifically, resourcing people who are part of aligned movements to work together and share the costs of maintaining infrastucture: even the basic one - communication, events sharing & piggybacking, tech maintenance. A lot of people are moving in and out of the same networks, so maybe identify these very central nodes and supporting them more in weaving the narrative across communities? What one organisation needs may be what others have in surplus, who knows.

Some folks said this has to start with technical inter-operability, but not everyone agrees. See discussion following from here. 

Mapping the alignment of networks

Aha, good. Is it clear to you which are the aligned movements or communities? Maybe this is exactly the kind of knowledge or discovery process which could come back to ER from testing the mapping process of Real Economy Lab!

final call for input

Would love to have someone take this on by Wednesday!

We have received about 45 responses now from other organizations and initiatives across the ‘landscape’ of systems change, out of a list of around 150 that were identified and contacted so far.

This week we are going into analysis of the data from ‘phase one’ of this project, in order to test and demonstrate our current methods and prepare for collaborative design and development of the next and more participatory phase.

Will leave this up in case anyone wants to take it on. We will continue to add to the map in coming weeks as we go ahead with analysis process and design for the next stages.

Feel free to get in touch or post here any questions or ideas for REL project!