If you remember last year’s exercise of building Edgeryders shared vision, one of the recurrent ideas was to leverage the establishment for our own projects. Well, here it is in action. EU funding applications are crazy complex, and yet we are giving this a try and setting up an infrastructure to coordinate and lower the individual effort of going through the different calls and figuring out everything by ourselves. The good news is that we’re moving forward. Over the last weeks many of us have dreamed up what we hope to see funded, and we have some pretty solid things to go after.
1. Research/Deploy technology supporting social innovation towards digital green and digital fair
Hypothesis: technology can support a societal transformation towards sustainable development, but only if we actually (want to) do it.
Testing it involves:
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project development and building a pilot
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collaboration with public sector as important driver of public/open innovation towards sustainable development
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from team: really committed people.
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who’s already interested: @caroline and you?
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deadline for signing up to work on joint Horizon 2020 applications: February 20
2. We want to deploy community building and ICT tools to support local social innovation in various parts of Europe.
Hypothesis: exposing local challenges to high quality, collective, online, global expertise accelerates local social innovation
Testing it involves:
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partnership building between Edgeryders and local organisations with practical experience; in addition to or alternatively, partner with regional and local governments who can facilitate connections
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more individual community members doing outreach (location based or mobile team)
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map other global organisation with experience in online communities
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mix tactics of online with offline community building; ensure continuous feedback loop between building community capacity and digital assets
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create protocol for deploying community members on the ground to hack local policy issues
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design replicable, problem-solving ICT collaboration tools with the local community
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from team: develop model for volunteer recognition of the wider ER community efforts.
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who’s already interested: @noemi @vidrij_da, @ilariadauria
3. Building an alternative, inclusive “social security system”, ending the dichotomy “Employed/unEmployed” in the long term.
Hypothesis: Reframing and changing the cultural and institutional mindset is possible.
Testing it involves:
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build the system around (existing) alternative currencies as safety nets: purpose bound, unlocking potential, transnational
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start small and scale up when possible
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reframe completely what we consider exclusion and measure the gains of a changed mindset in non-financial ways
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an open platform to collect labour experiences: “The Academy of the excluded”?
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redefine ways and conditions to understand work: precarious or permanent, employed or unemployed, business or voluntary
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ensure diverse participation of informal networked groups
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learn from groups already doing that; e.g. research digitallabor.org
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who’s already interested: @thomasviscom, @thanasis
4. Build community cooperative networks
Hypothesis: Higher social impact can be achieved by connecting potential coming from Ireland, the living lab direction (unMonastery) and from social cooperative development of key models such as CSA and cooperative property guardian co-ops.
Testing it involves:
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using a rhizomatic model being prototyped in Ireland: community exchange based on sale and supply of the local food system, generating cooperative enterprise models
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OS alternatives to proprietary software we currently employ
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finding partners in key participant countries
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research into building multi-stakeholder cooperatives
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who’s already interested: @eimhin
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deadline for signing up to submit to the Horizon 2020 call: [TODO]
5. Take up of ethic, social and environmental responsibility in ICT business
Hypothesis: Higher impact of the ICT business if societal issues are seen as opportunities not as threats.
Testing it involves:
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label mechanisms to identify responsible ICT businesses
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a focused consortium bringing together researchers from both ethics & ICT field, SMEs that want to differentiate by an ethic positioning, consumer associations and citizen communities.
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adoption of the label by SMEs and recognition by a broad community
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from team: professionalism and strong reactivity in the proposal writing phase
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who’s already interested: @bcpx
The list is of course open, but gives us enough to work with in order to move on to identifying which calls are suited (list available here) and locating resources: building Gantt charts and timelines, and strategizing for partnership building. So I guess what is needed now is either another hangout to follow up properly on this conversation, or an actionable like [noelito] just suggested: formstorm to map research institutions or partners altogether, looking at those who would be compatible with the specific topics above. How about that?
Another thing which rose from our conversation, especially with [Caroline Paulic…], is that we’re keen on working in smaller teams driven by a common interest, so one of the next steps should be grouping ourselves around some of the above. As @ilariadauria pointed out a while ago, one can only have resources to deploy around their own interest and background. Chances are you know who is already doing stuff and maybe even have some contacts to build partnerships around it.
Finally, back in December when about 40 Edgeryders helped shape our vision, a dozen of us have made ourselves available to get involved in helping with collaborative EU funding applications. [pacheca], [aden], [Jeff Mowatt], [Ursula], [L14B] does it still hold true? if yes, is there something above which interests you? how do you see yourself helping and do you have any suggestions at this point? Do mention if you are a researcher, an administrator, if you’d like to join as an individual, as a company etc.
Let’s do this
P.S.: If you wish to participate in building a joint Horison 2020 application for any one of these options, leave a comment below indicating which one you are interested in. Deadline: February 20.