Fast forward through Community Calls: April - Dec 2015

nadia · April 7, 2015, 7:34am

If you skipped those, here’s a recap…

This page is a wiki where we post the key points from each community call. We do this so that 1) people who couldn’t be there know what was discussed 2) everyone can get a quick overview of what was discussed 3) people know what tasks are available for those who wish to contribute.

At the beginning of each community call, one person is asked to take responsibility for updating this wiki as soon as the call is over. t

Thursday April 9, 11:00 CEST

Present during the call:

@Dorotea @Nadia @mishek @RuxandraCreo @Alberto @Adela_Militaru

Adela: Works in Romania as freelance psychologist. In addition to practice, works with ngos in Romania. Into Education, has done work in India. Specialising in Global Education. Stumbled upon Edgeryders. Curious. Got email from Noemi. Join the call see what other people are doing and if we can partner up. unMonastery. Being in touch with people who take matters in their own hands nd try to push things forward. Seem very determined in building community of changemakers. Personal interest to contribute to social change in own way.

Alberto: network- and data scientist. Involved in Edgeryders from beginning. Some products of Edgeryders are research products.

Ruxandra: lived outside Romania for 10 years now back. Working with Babele: open sourcing business modeling so people can improve and replicate strategies of social innovators. Trying to build Ouishare community in Romania

Dorotea: Comes from Academic background, was doing psychology and math. Also related to decision making, economy. Currently experimenting with co-living. And how to make people feel nice in the space and create good atmosphere in the space. Challenges with a lot of people in current space. Involved with several communities

Michael: A background in community building and the personal learning journey, small business and the performance arts, currently just traveling, working through my ideas around public and personal space by putting on such social experiments… https://www.facebook.com/events/422774881222986

Topics discussed:

1. What makes someone an Edgeryder: Edgeryders community has blurred edges, you never have a clear in and out -only a position in an online network that changes over time e.g. in this daily updated network analysis of the Edgeryders conversation http://edgeryders.edgesense.spazidigitali.com

2. Ownership and co-creation within communities - we identified some open questions and discussed what can be learned from the ongoing tensions around the unMonastery project.

3. How to respond to calls for clarity- A suggestion was made to define Clarity as availability to answer questions, rather than have all questions answered.

4. To discuss or not to discuss- Sometimes discussions do not solve things/bring solutions, but cause more problems and every minute spent discussing is a minute not spent on other things.

5. Collaborative processes and where to turn for help when community dynamics turn strange.

6. Adela’s Project:Adela wants to fight against fact that more people complaining about things but not doing anything about it. She wants to bring together people from different places and fields of practice, to find opportunities for creating more social cohesion together. She wants to partner with Edgeryders for her project. Someone suggested checking out LOTE events for possible collaboration, maybe even running the next one in Romania, maybe even in Cluj. Something we think @Noemi might approve of

What makes someone an Edgeryder? You are an edgeryder if you say you are- it’s self-selection. This is critical because there is no need to draw a hard line, people move in the network. Communities like ours have blurred edges- you never have a clear in and out. It doesn’t matter if you are in or out, only you location in the network. And this is not some mysterious, static position…it’s even visible e.g. this daily updated network analysis of the Edgeryders conversation http://edgeryders.edgesense.spazidigitali.com. That said, there are some values that many Edgeryders seem to have in common.For example Personalisation. Most people take certain templates for how you should live as a given. This does not seem to be the case for many Edgeryders. In the call all the participants have been experimenting with their own lifestyles (moving out of the country,co-living, nomadism) and working or living with others in unconventional constellations.

Ownership and co-creation within a community is a delicate issue. Very difficult to identify who are active community members doing things, are they doing it as their own projects, or under an organizational umbrella. How can we ensure people are not excluded from accessing the value they contributed towards building open community projects as projects progress? How do we ensure that all contributions made at all phases in the evolution of projects are acknowledged and rewarded, as projects continue? How do we frame that success? What is the time-frame we are looking at? - rewards: is it an individual responsibility to make our needs tangible to other co-creators in this process?

Edgeryders is a still new community. it is hard to have all the answers. But it is good to ask questions. How to balance the community members being totally free to do what they want, and protect the collaborative processes. Example: licensing of open source software. You think these people doing the open source are good people and would not steal the software. But it does happen. If the community starts to behave strangely, who do I call as a member?

It is not clear how to respond to calls for clarity as there is no efficient way to ensure everyone understands everything at all times. People care about issues and questions that come up. Usually when they step into the Edgeryders platform, or any other platform, they have not read the terms of service. Or if they have, they do not always make sure they have understood them. There is no efficient way to ensure everyone understands everything at all times.

Also there is a problem with the “need for clarification” argument: you can always shoot down something by claiming it is unclear. It can, and is often used as a a powerful stalling mechanism. In the case of Edgeryders there are write-ups all over the place:“That does not mean people read them, or understand them. So you risk getting into very unproductive discussions. The person doing the communicating needs to be as explicit as possible. Once communication is there, if people don’t read it then it cannot be helped”.

When conversations get stuck. Discussion has an opportunity cost- every minute you spend discussing it is one minute you are not getting something else done. When is it really worth the time and how to tell? Does digging deeper into things/discussions always help? “Everyone can have their own interpretation of everything. Sometimes discussions do not solve things/bring solutions, but cause more problems.”

Tasks

@Adela_Militaru has kindly offered to write the invitation for next week’s Community Call around a key question that came out of today’s call, and post it as an event. @Nadia has committed to get the invitation out via next week’s newsletter and the Edgeryders social media channels. Everyone else committed to updating the summary of the call above where needed.

Community headlines for this week:

[please update the Community news Calendar with 140 character status updates on projects or opportunities driven by, or relevant to, you that you want to draw the community’s attention to]

Thursday April 16, 11:00 CEST

Present during the call: @Noemi @Nadia @Alberto @ Matthias @Vieri @Natalia @Dorotea

Topics discussed:

Follow-up on last week’s discussion on ownership. After last week’s call, an interesting question emerged: How do we ensure that all contributions made at all phases in the evolution of projects are acknowledged and rewarded, as projects continue? We proposed to look into it a bit deeper, but postponed this challenges, as a more ‘juicy’ opportunity arose to update the community on what has been going on in the past week.

Update on EdgeRyders’ new project in Nepal. See edgeryders.eu/en/future-makers-nepal for details. Following the announcement of this big news, we asked Matthias to give us a bit of background on this initiative. It came up that they are leaving to Kathmandu on April 27th, in search for local changemakers and social innovators, that the project will further bring together. Similarly to an older project, “Spot the future”, this is an horizon scanning initiative that will bridge between institutional stakeholders (i.e. UNDP) and the local community engaged with social change, doing interesting work all over the place. It is based on warm social contacts, online and on site. Matthias and Natalia will be working on the ground, engaging with little talent-picking trips.

How do these projects work in engaging the local communities at large?

Well,for these projects to work you don’t need everybody. You just need to find relevant game-changers to connect with. The success of this kind of online engagement is not in percentage or population share, it’s in the absolute number of people who get involved.

What can our community do to support this new project?

First of all, make sure we keep our eyes open for Nepali newcomers on the platform, welcome them, engage with them, share ideas, and exchange useful resources or connect them with other edgeryders elsewhere.

Meanwhile, it was suggested that the Nepal permanent team may share things that happen offline on the actual platform. E.g. short videos and photos and posts from events. This will make us who are not there feel involved and more engaged in new Nepali additions to the community.

Other updates from the community. Noemi moved to Bucharest, to be working with the Cultural Institute there. //still off the record - she will update us when the time comes

Ideas for the making of the Edgeryders cultural team. We have some contacts to do more work in ECOC for other countries and cities. At the moment, we have a good standing in the cultural field because Matera European Capital of Culture happened.

Does it make sense to put investment into this and create a more permanent global team for doing this kind of thing? How to train and edgeskill people? Our cultural team would 1) scout for opportunities for paid projects in the cultural field and 2) be ready to “go” when paid projects come in. There are at least 10-15 opportunities each year.

Maybe some people in the community aspire to drive this for their city and we can help. The solution we propose is turning top down decisions and programme building into collaboration and citizen engagement.

Challenging shared ownership of collaboratively built projects. Do we believe projects should be kept open? This launched a whole new topic of “decent practices” in collaborative project management, that keep the project cost-efficient (time, team, money etc.), avoid diffusion of responsibility and blurred roles, while maintaining transparency and collaborative principles.

Matthias shared the example of Open Ethnographer."we experimented how to build projects on rewards and collaboration. We kept it very open at beginning of development work. We put tasks on mailing list and people could just “grab” tasks, and then commit to doing them. This worked to a degree but it turned out we had a core team of a small group of people, smaller than we had hoped, and it closed the project because larger effort of breaking down work and packaging it into task turned out not to be worth it.

Another experience brought to the table relied on making sure everyone contributing their time to the project is compensated accordingly (time-bound). Matthias has tried time tracking in other startups, and it worked well. But it is still to be discussed how and where this approach is appropriate.

Another approach is to place the focus on the project leader/driver. In this case, the organizational vehicle acts as a support for them. Leaders will tend to be the people who propose projects.

Another possibility is to keep group open during task definition phase, and close the group once people have taken on all the tasks. However, the downside of this is that it doesn’t leave the possibility for other groups or members to build on it, or spontaneously contribute their ideas online - this has been a great way to scout for talent (people show up when interesting projects are happening and contribute their comments, interests…)

One more decent practice from how Nepal gig has gone so far: one comment can land you on the team, like in Natalia’s case. Meeting and getting to know what everyone is good at, allows you to stay in touch informally with key people who can contribute to new projects.

The last thread of discussion is about organizing our next community event - building on the great experience of LOTE4 (see LOTE4: The Stewardship on Vimeo)

Who would be fit to assume coordination of this event?

Maybe for people who are new to the community it is hard to get an overview and connect the dots. It would make sense to have someone who is older community member being conference director. At the same time, the enthusiasm of newcomers could be beneficial, since there are many resourceful members who could support the whole process.

An insight into Natalia’s experience from being involved in coordinating Lote4 would be helpful. She was asked to share this in a post for the whole community.

It’s time to think about next LOTE! What is most important is for the coordinator to focus on building relationships, doing engagement, helping people help you, to give that sort of direction, apart from having the overview of logistics of the event.

How long does it take to “get it” and be able to take the lead on organizing/coordinating the work of community members building a LOTE? We’ll see, there is no ONE clear-cut answer. People have to resonate with assuming this position, it will be A LOT of work! (e.g reading everyday a little bit, participating in discussions, looking at previous programs and how they were structured…)

The advantage would be that coordinating team get to know community really well and are more exposed to what happens within the community. But… it’s not really a part-time thing. So, who’s up for the challenge? We’ll see.

somewhere down the line the true purpose of the community call arose: Natalia helped Vieri connect with someone in London - life saving!

Tasks: @Noemi kindly offered to prepare next week’s call. Others present in the call, as always, are invited to edit this post to complete with any other relevant info. @Natalia was invited to share her experience on contributing to the coordination of LOTE4. Community members will need to decide who will take on the coordination of LOTE5 and where it will be organized.

Community headlines for this week: We need to find the mastermind who will be behind LOTE5. Who’s up for the challenge?

Thursday April 23, 11:00 CEST

Present during the call: [add @aliases for participants hre]

Topics discussed: [ add 1-sentence summaries in bulletpoints here] [add urls to relevant Edgeryders posts here if relevant]

Teams affected: [add Urls to team pages here]