Future Makers Team call #1

[nadia]

@nataliegryvnyak @Mikhail_Volchak @Inge @Hegazy @Iriedawta @SamarAli @Masha cc @Noemi @Alberto

Now that the team is almost complete let us get into the habit of having a weekly call to come together, get up to date with what is happening in the different countries, and plan the next steps together. I suggest saturday mornings as once we get rolling, this call can be joined by people you invite into the project. Does this work for everyone? If so, please mark Saturday mornings at 10:00 CEST for the weekly call. Starting tomorrow

@Hazem @trythis @Eslam @monarezk and anyone else who wishes to be involved, you are of course more than welcome to join in and the invitation is open for all parts of designing, planning and executing this project.

To join the call:

1. Please let me know if you will be there through the attend button

2. Log in to skype and add Edgeryders to your list of contacts

3. We’ll call everyone into a skype call few minutes before schedule

Date: 2015-05-30 08:00:00 (Brussels time)

[noemi]

Saturdays work for me

Hi and welcome everyone in the almost complete team!

I can do Saturdays, but not tomorrow as I am traveling.

Will surely follow the writeup afterwards and try to help as much as possible from afar while Nadia and Alberto travel to Cairo next week.

If you guys will need friendly social media power, the rest of us should probably coordinate and pick up on key insights from the projects Hegazy, Samar Ali & co. mentioned and e.g. tweet them.

[samarali]

Saturdays are good

Hey @Nadia Saturdays are good for me, looking forward to meet all of the team.

[nadia]

Great. Please indicate you will be attending the call tomorrow?

It’s the blue button. If we develop a shared code for communicating efficiently with one another this will help to keep it all running smoothly See you tomorrow!

[inge]

works for me!

See you all tomorrow!

[hegazy]

Looking forward to tomorrow I will be a bit late, though, i shall join at 10:30 CEST, as I have a prior commitment at 9

[iriedawta]

Works for me too!

I’d like to discuss how each of us is going to select the right projects/people for Case Studies? What is the way each of us is going to identify and select the stories we want to share?

Talk to you all tomorrow!

[nataliegryvnyak]

Hi everyone!

I am exciting to get to know you all, and to be introduced. I will be on the skype call, but would have to leave a bit earlier than 11 EST, since I have an appointment at vet doctors, that can’t be moved (ultrasound).

Maybe it’s good to have such calls Sat eve or Sat but earlier? Think it would be good to discuss

exciting to meet you all)

[hazem]

morning future makers team

looking forward to it

see you soon

[nadia]

Record of this call now available

Thank you @trythis for kindly making a record of the call in case anyone who was not present wants to hear access it here https://edgeryders.eu/en/node-4554/record-of-future-makers-team-call-1

[inge]

My notes:

People who attended:

• Natalie: engagament manager Ukraine, works with communication and networking, joined edgeryders to share her knowledge and is very excited  to learn a lot from the edgeryders community as well. 
• Anna: resides now in high atlas mountains, but will be in armenia for the next 3 months. Worked different fields, teaching/translating/cso's, but currently works in tourism. Looking forward engaging interesting initiatives in Armenia.
• Hegazy: was ate because he was rowing on the Nile. Economist by training, works now on stats/data/edgeryders
• Samar: active for Egypts bloodbank and part of the Ubuntu Egypt team.
• Natalia & Matthias: are in Nepal, matthias usually does tech stuff, but is now working on collecting and mapping initiatives in nepal. Natalia is from Poland orginally, works with Matthias on mapping earthquake related relief work. 
• Inge: many hats, teacher/csos/lecturer/editor/journalist, worked with edgeryders as well last year.
• Nadia: has been doing online engagement and collaboration for a long time. Will start with sharing her vision on methods which work. 

Online engagement and online collaboration with each other is being unlocked by 1^st person view stories, they tell the reader something about the place and people and what they care about, who they are, why they are doing the work, why it matters, wand how they go about doing it. This creates a space to offer your story, a way to start the conversation.

So this is the start: starting with these stories.

But this is hard for two different reasons:

1. Usually the most interesting stories are so deeply embedded that we dont see it as a thing,it is too obvious, but if we have a conversation with someone else, if someone ask us questions, that's when the interesting things come out. That is why we are going to organize these online community calls, both local ones and the general satrday morning ones.
2. What makes a good/understandable story, how is it clear? How can you make it clear as engagement manager?

Nadia: I found that online hangouts or skype interviews are very helpful. So, see it as a listening exercize. So 1 is the person who is speaking, one is asking active/deeper questions and the third is documenting. From a first person perspective. THEN, this documentation is shared. The first person and the engagement manager work on it together until the first person is happy with it and wil post it on the platform. We have an interview framework. I would suggest skype calls because it is cheaper, but it is not necessary.

People dont have to be there with name in places where it is politically a bit more dangerous. So it is also not necessary to have the audio or video online, only if they first person agrees with it/wants it.

QUESTION: But how to transcribe it? Just cut out the uhms and ahs, or summarize it? Because it will be truer if you just cut the uhms and ahs, but then it’s also too long and probably uninteresting to read.

The key are the case studies to unlock the conversation, The community calls will be good, as they will meet their peers. Just make sure that you follow up, dig deeper.

Preferrably the people should be registered on the platform, ideally right away, if possible.

HOW ABOUT THE PLATFORM?

How do we promote the platform to people? The stories will be like playbooks, like a learning curve, it makes people smarter and more knowledgeable, and it fosters collaboration!

In LOTE4 we did something similar as what we would like to do for this project. There is something of value what comes out of this project, that people want, and they can get it when they share their stories. Maybe we can do customized matchmaking, or perhaps we can produce a book that is going to be shared? Or something else?

One thing is that we need to find out what is valuable to each person. Use tasks to define what each person needs as a concrete need. A kind of problem pile. Then the campaign is about driving engagement to complete the tasks

saturdays at this time we have these kind of calls, we should keep it below 1 hour

individual calls and times decide engagement managers, in english and local language, VERY SOON

we need to have a deadline for the case studies, agree on milestones so we know we are moving forward

milestones for casestudies and producing the books and invitiations for local hangouts

end of the day on monday = deadline

online case studies = June 30

create a task based on what needs to be done to move us forward, one task per person

[nadia]

Ok i posted my notes too

I have posted them into this wiki which is intended to be more outwards facing, but for the sake of keeping good record of this call I also add them below: https://edgeryders.eu/en/node-4554/after-the-future-makers-call-1-the-project-design-and-call

Future Makers: Collaboration costs effort, can we show that it will be repaid by scientific means?

Our hypothesis is that Duplication of effort happens, and networked collaboration could fight it and help us all achieve our objectives and achieve impact at scale by enabling us to make better use of our time and small resources.

In Spot the Future we discovered that there is a need and desire for collaboration and that learning to work in networks could be a way to achieve this. In the stewardship we explored whether it is possible for networked communities to achieve complex tasks at scale, specifically we asked whether networked communities could take care of public assets like unused buildings.

So far we have looked at the supply side- that it has a high cost to collaborate, to keep a network going. In future makers we focus on the demand side,: is there actually a benefit to collaboration? Is there something to benefit for me? What is most off-putting about it?

PHASE ONE (3 months)

is to collaboratively produce book which is collection of case studies with analysis and graphics. The book will provide people an opportunity to discover and draw inspiration from what people in similar situations are doing in different parts of the world, and use their methods. In the book we collaboratively produce 70 case studies from Armenia, Belarus, Egypt, Georgia, Morocco, Nepal and the Ukraine. We will analyze the case studies to identify areas where collaboration may be necessary.  The book is mental framework to make gathering case studies easier for engagement manager and person contributing case studies. What would a program for sustaining network collaboration look like?

How do we produce it?

We will use a three step process.

1. Collecting the stories 

2. Analysing the stories

3. Producing a high quality book which presents case studies and analysis in a practical, easy to understand format that is useful for time-hungry innovators and activists

How do participants contribute?

one to many: each participant gives their story in exchange for a book edgeryders is writing as a whole

one to one: each individual is sharing their stories in exchange for a service from a member of the community

What's in it for contributors? 

Good for you: Exposure (being featured in the book), discovering what other having access to global community of people with different skills and resources who can help you take your work to the next level.

Good for everyone: 1) Discovering what interesting projects and people are near you, how they/we are working. 2) Identifying concrete ways how we can get mutual benefit from one another.

How to get involved/join the initiative?

1. Join one of the weekly community calls: Armenia, Belarus, Egypt, Georgia, Morocco, Nepal, Ukraine or Global. [link each to invitation to call in local language]

2. Help develop posted stories into high quality case studies: Read the posted stories and leave comments with thoughtful questions and suggestions, links to relevant projects or resources

3. Submit a story about yourself and your work. Sign into Edgeryders (you just need an email address), and post your story in the Future Makers Global group.

4. Spread the word and involve more people in the project. The more people that get involved, the better this project will be.

5. Got other ideas? We are open to all kinds of collaborations and contributions. Get in touch with the team by introducing yourself in the Future Makers Global group and what you would like to do and we will do our best to support you.

PHASE TWO (After the book is produced)

is extracting tasks from the case studies to help the people and projects who participate, and engaging the global community to  help to complete the tasks. Each participant picks one other participant and finds out what is valuable to him or her: If it the person says money- then its what is it they need money to finance? Use tasks to define what each person needs as a concrete need and call for action (think of it as a kind of problem pile). Then we collaboratively build a massive social media campaign to drive engagement towards completing the tasks.

 

Relevant links:

This book Greenpeace made for social media: @SamarAli mentioned this… [add url here?]

This call for participation in producing a book on global stewardship:  https://www.smore.com/y9pp1-new-book-on-global-stewardship

- See more at: https://edgeryders.eu/en/node-4554/after-the-future-makers-call-1-the-project-design-and-call#sthash.3RJOTS7S.dpuf

[trythis]

that was quick

Thanks!

I wonder if it would be possible to do these summaries wiki-style (without extra work!). Then it would be easier to spread the work - one could do the beginning the other everything that comes after the 1st hour or so…

Also for these “get something done calls” it might be a good idea if there are a few comments (and perhaps links to relevant concepts & brief documents) beforehand. That could work as an agenda-light, and would help the non-native speaker to get a word in edgewise. I know this is usually pretty difficult to do otherwise (especially if content is complicated and conditions not perfect) for most people in most languages. That is also one motivation for recording and async communication.

[darren]

I have often used etherpads for collaboratively writing on-line meeting minutes/notes live.  I found it works nicely.

[nadia]

Yes, wikis

You can create wikis in the group. We used to use the functionality to create wikis for the calls but the information load is hard enough to manage as it is with conversations spread across too many urls. So we try to keep things simple and people post notes in the event page itself. Then people break them down into tasks in the group. Makes sense?

[hazem]

thoughts after the call

quick thoughts on the call

1- on collaboration between different initiatives, I remember that last year different educational initiatives gathered together to make one big crowd funding campaign instead of competing for resources ( I don’t have much info but Uli @labanita could tell us more in the workshop as she participated with mini madina I guess ). This was an example on how local initiatives could collaborate( unlike the common ridesharing example ) and the question for this already established network would be how to enhance this so collaboration is done on various levels, not only crowd funding.

2- During the discussion on the harmonious hackathons, an idea poped up ( I think this was between  @lauren @jamesL @K @Dorotea in berlin ) about an exchange between different hackathon tracks. so one can be working on his/her idea for most of the week but for 2 days exchange with another one and work on a different idea. I am thinking out loud here and I am not sure if we can reuse this idea as a a sort of “special contribution” if participants have time for it, so for example someone working on a hacker/maker space can exchange for a week and work with another initiative on biogas and vice versa. of course this exchange would need specific challenges, time and willingness to risk and try … what do you think ?

[trythis]

Moving fast, defining tasks

re 1: Check out how scientist collaborate in universities. Of course it varies a little with disciplines, and if the standing of the universities is not equal - but in general a lot of collaboration is the norm (the currency is citations of a paper, and each author pretty much gets them all). That is a similar dynamic as in the general open source scene methinks.

re 2: Yeah, in most intellectual (or interlectual?) work some diversity is helpful. And once you go past a few layers of specialization, diversity often becomes a rare good and sometimes a limiting factor. I just happened to write down my favorite work approach here. Applied to the book I would suggest to push (on the FAST track) a first tiny set of cases all the way through into the typesetting stage. Delegating as much as possible (make tasks) to relatively green people, who then have time to get going when the real surge comes.

[nadia]

Break down questions/suggestions into well defined tasks?

Hazem, thanks for this. I think it could be very helpful if you broke down what you are asking/suggestion above into tasks. They can be e.g. fin out from Ulli about x, y or z. And #2 I have a hard time understanding what you are asking. Maybe break it down a bit. If a) then b) then c)- clearly defining what a b and c are?