We are in one of the consortia shaping the ECs Next Generation Internet (NGI) program, strategy, priorities etc for their investments/regulation.
We are offering six-month paid Fellowships as part of our contribution to NGI.
What we need are individuals coming in with a set of burning questions that they are exploring and have been for some time now. And can bring in a network of people also doing relevant work to share their own experiences and discuss them with others. Then collaboratively interpret the findings from the SSNA - Semantic Social Network Analysis. The data is open, the findings are open, software is opensource, platform is based on Discourse. Anyone welcome, all they need is an email address.
The participants who go through the Internet of Humans process get invited to the matchmaking event happening in Brussels this fall in time for the next round of collective applications for larger pots of financing.
Including but not limited to the next round of Horizon 2020 applications, this is the process:
What the fellows do:
The fellow contacts people who they think are relevant/should be in this conversation and reaches out to them. The fellow then produces a shortlist of people who are interested in participating in the IOH collaborative discovery, sensemaking and matchmaking process as outlined above.
We try to make it simple for the people you get on board: you give us a list of names of people who you as a Fellow have reached out to so that they are on board and know to expect an email from Edgeryders. An Edgeryders team member then calls them and has long in-depth conversation/deep interview. The team member edits transcript/notes from the call it into a skeleton post with a first-hand perspective of the person interviewed. They review the skeleton, make edits and then post under their own name on the platform. They then respond to questions in the comments. They also read 2-3 posts submitted by peers also doing interesting work, and leave thoughtful comments with questions, key information, deeper reflections to help move the thinking /conversation forward.
The whole thing all ends with a collaboratively built community event. “Collaborative” as in: every individual proposes to host a session on something they want to learn, teach or build. Session proposals get developed/refined through P2P input. The event sessions are documented online, conversations follow after the event and they are processed into reports here on the Edgeryders platform. In the run up to the event we all help to bring people to the table who can in turn help further participants with their own work (based on their session content). In the form of Matchmaking and proposal building sessions we help people generate high quality concept notes and meaningful consortia for EC funding and other opportunities for collective fundraising.***
List of Fellows’ deliverables:
- Participate in one physical event in Brussels at the beginning of the fellowship to learn more about the project and how to align with the work/activities the team is doing. When: End of June/early July. (t.b.c with team & fellows)
- Commit to the 1-a-day: You come up with one status update with url to a high quality story, or discussion to share via your own social media account. This helps us to highlight and make it easy for new people to find their way to the best discussions, events etc in IOH. When: throughout your fellowship.
- Participate in a remote meeting/ video call/virtual cafe: Personal interview: a deeper, reflective conversation about your work with Edgeryders team and the other fellow (we have two fellows at a time). When: by May 30 (t.b.c with team & fellow)
- Write your Deep Story: Incorporate what surfaced during the personal interview into a deeper, reflective post introducing your work and the path leading to it, questions you have, things you struggle with etc. Some examples: Anthony, Winnie and Ybe,
- Recruit people: Give us a list of min 15 people doing interesting work relevant to the IOH/ongoing conversations on the IOH forum on edgeryders.eu. The people on the list are ones you have reached out to and engaged to participate in the collaborative discovery, sensemaking and fundraising process on the edgeryders.eu platform. What they get: new information, structured collective intelligence and wisdom around a topic of interest to them, growing personal network, invitation to facilitated/well curated matchmaking and proposal development events organised by the Edgeryders team. Important: the people you suggest should be based in Europe or have really strong ties to the continent in terms of personal and professional network. We also ask that your list is somewhat gender balanced. The people you recruit would be committing to do the following:
- Come to three video calls (interview, discuss findings from SSNA, prepare event session)
- Post their own story and respond to comments posted on it…
- Read and leave thoughtful comments on stories of others ( contributions should be thoughtful & rich: have to have value added for both participants and the team in terms of new information or perspectives to further the thinking/learning with quality).
- ideally, they would also do one session in a final event, but this is not necessary.
- Write six Internet of Humans Dispatch posts: Follow the conversation on the platform and highlight key contributions and insights emerging from it in a post.
- Participate in a remote meeting/ video call/virtual cafe: Discussion of findings from ethnographic-coding /SNNA analysis. When: TBD
- Participate in a remote meeting/ video call/virtual cafe: To propose/develop one theme/track for the final IOH event weaving together key threads and a cluster of people/participants.
- Co-write introduction to the event and detailed description your own event track in the Program for the final event. When: TBD
- Participate in one physical event at the end of the fellowship to present your findings and hand over the reigns to the next batch of fellows.
- Wrap up fellowship with one thoughtful post summarising fellowship experience, what you got out of it and your own recommendations for next batch of fellows to move the collective IOH experience & community forward. When: TBD
The bursary & travel support:
- We have a total of 6 fellowships to award at 10,000 EUR per fellow. Payment is done in tranches against submission of listed deliverables.
- Each fellow is eligible for 400 Eur in travel support. Up to this amount in total is reimbursed to the fellow with due justification prior to incurring the expense, and is reimbursed after the travel has been conducted against receipts (with VAT) and documentation (written description of purpose of travel and what was learned/achieved as a result in a post on the platform).
The duration of the fellowship is 6 months.
The Paperwork/administrative process we need you to follow:
Step 1. We send you a Contract
You are sent the draft your contract. You Read it through and if you agree, let the research coordinator @Marina know. She will invite you and @Alberto, the research director, to sign it digitally via SignRequest.
Step 2. Time tracking
At the end of agreed period you need to report your time and describe the activities. To do this, we use the FreeAgent software. Ask us to create an account for you.
Go to “Work → Time Tracking”. You have now three options to proceed. In all cases, select the work package as the FreeAgent “Task” to which your worktime belongs. This is mandatory according to the reporting requirements we have.
- Option 1 : Select project and task and click “Start Timer”. This will use FreeAgent as a time tracker. To stop tracking, click on the “pause” button that appears next to your newly created timeslip.
- Option 2 : Select project and task; fill in the worktime field and if necessary the date. Click “Add Timeslip” (the “Start Timer” button changes its function when you add a worktime figure). This allows to record the worktime for a single day.
- Option 3 : Click “Add Weekly Timesheet”. This allows to efficiently take over your worktime tracking from another tracking application, and may be your preferred choice if you are already using one.
Add a comment: a few words as to what you used the time for, referring to tasks and deliverables as much as possible. You can also add a link to what you produced, if applicable. For this, use the comment field at the bottom of the timeslip form.
Inform Marina that you finished reporting time for a certain period. She will export your timesheet.
Step 3. Invoicing (you do this twice during your fellowship)
Create your invoice. The time reported needs to correspond to the amount allocated for your work. Our standard hourly rate is 41,86 eur. To create the invoice you can use this template.
Send your invoice to Marina. She will attach it to the exported timesheet, invite you to sign using SignRequest and import it back to FreeAgent to request the payment.
Important to know about the IOH matchmaking and collaborative proposal writing/fundraising !!!
The people who participate have to do the actual work of putting together the proposals - we just save them time and money they would otherwise have to throw into the process of trying to participate in EC funding bids. The work has to start months ahead of time, with someone at their end committing to a structured process and taking responsibility for ensuring that their organisation respects everyone else’s time - by e.g submitting their parts in a shared document that is curated by someone who knows what they are doing
*Our initial point of departure is EC funding applications for the next batch of Horizon2020 applications. That said, the process we have designed is intended to feed into other community submitted opportunities.
People who have participated in previous Edgeryders run collective discovery and sensemaking processes have continued to build on the relationships formed. Some have gone on to do interesting work, others have received professional opportunities such as got invited into good consortia etc. The unMonastery, OpenCare. Others have continued to use the Edgeryders platform/instances of it for their own work e.g Winnie building a biohacking community connecting counterculture labs in SF (Openinsulin) with labs in Ghent, Geneva etc - at one point discussing with city of Milan about setting up a patient-owned microbrewery for insulin in the city.
. how can one become a Internet of Human fellow?
. i want to find out if there is a trend towards user centric content in web marketing. by that i mean designing web content that meets user needs. less quantity more targeted more precise around researched discovered user needs. I want to understand if there is more budget allocated to this kind of marketing. What are the main barriers inside teams to put in place the workflow that produces this kind of content. I have been doing a small research among law firms this year. this is the