Surprise! If you have not been checking out Edgeryders since July 11th, you must have gotten that feeling of opening a familiar door to an unfamiliar room. I know I did! Here’s what happened: Edgeryders, my friends, is growing. It is growing in numbers: we are pushing 4,000 accounts now, with close to 30,000 written contributions and, by my own rough estimate, maybe 6 million words.
But, more importantly, we are growing in reach. As old-time community members know, back in 2013 we created a social enterprise to act as our community’s infrastructure. This company, also called Edgeryders, is also growing. As it grows, it becomes better at connecting our projects and initiatives for change to powerful, established organisations. And connections breeds alliances: the Edgeryders vision has always been about coalitions for positive change between the vast resources of society’s center, with its corporations and institutions, and the ability and need for “deep innovation” of society’s edges. The OpenCare project has been, and still is, incredibly generative. It already spawned The Reef, and more initiatives are in the pipeline.
As part of this growth, we have outgrown our old Drupal 7 online platform. Back in 2013, we chose it for its extreme flexibility of use. We were not at all sure how we would end up using it: we knew technology and its user base co-evolve, so we chose a platform that would not tie our hands. After four years of extensive testing, we now do know what we Edgeryders do online. We, it turns out, share knowledge, learn from each other and form alliances, through respectful, truth-oriented debate.
So, we decided to decamp to a new platform that puts debate front and center. It is, as always, open source software, based on Discourse (here is the GitHub repo). It will take a bit of getting used to, but those of us involved in pre-testing adjusted very fast, and we know absolutely love it. Give it a try! As always, get in touch if you experience any trouble.
Here is what you need to know:
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Your edgeryders.eu login and password work as normal. One exception: if your username contains anything that is not a Roman letter (a-z, A-Z) or a digit (0-9), you have to replace each of these characters with an underscore. So
Quíntus-Fabius Maximus
becomesQu_ntus_Fabius_Maximus
. (Or you can use your registered e-mail address instead of your username for login.) -
All content has been imported. All authorship information has been preserved. Your content is still acknowledged as yours, and you retain intellectual property rights on it. The Creative Commons Attribution license used on the old platform also is maintained for all content.
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We have rolled out an ethical consent funnel. It is a two-questions quiz that replaces the “I agree to the terms and conditions” box to tick. We developed it as a way to make the OpenCare research more ethical, and are now extending it to every corner on Edgeryders. You will only have to answer it once, but until you do the platform will not let you post.
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All links pointing to individual posts, wikis, events, pages etc. of the old platform still work (or soon will), and now redirect to the imported content on the new one.
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Mentions still work, like this: @alberto (try it).
Photo credit: Chris Potter