First of all I wanna say I’m extremely glad and impressed that you’ve started this project . A few years ago me and my NGO, Poiana lui Iocan embarked in a somewhat similar project, of trying to understand what is the core of our grassroots initiatives in Romania, what are the strategies, how to they communicate and interact with one another and most importantly how do they actually allow people to participate and engage outside their group.
At the time though, I think there where other dots to connect, for our NGO, for the innovators that didn’t see themselves as a community that could strive through collaboration and for me who just finished architecture and wanted to get more into understanding cities through interdisciplinary interactions.
I think now is a better time to start this, also for the emerging community and for me as a urban studies master student in a european wide interdisciplinary program that focused on exactly this, understanding the role of these stakeholders in a number of european cities.
I don’t know if i am eligible as i am still abroad until the end of June but i would be most honored to be taken in consideration, partially because of my experience in interdisciplinary urban research and partially because my current NGO projects in Bucharest focus on just that, discovering alternatives to our classic city development strategies and trying to build a new inclusive narrative in which all of these stakeholders might better negotiate to reach new outcomes so we’ve already done an extensive research on existing initiatives in Bucharest.
I think my colleague has already talked to you guys about our on-going project, Urboteca and how we want to use it as a tool to get closer to communities and empower them to get involved in city related issues. Its a test and I think we have learned a lot by doing and by failing at reaching our initial goals, but most importantly its a platform that can be reused to serve new goals. We would be more then glad to use our mobile pavilion to promote the practices discovered through your program.
At the same time we are hard at work on a project that wants to promote open data and i think that this would be the perfect medium for cross-sector collaboration bringing together journalists as story tellers , design as visual communication, grass root initiatives, and citizens as local experts, the growing local tech community and other instigators to change that want to base their stories on complex yet understandable data sets.
Going beyond the scope of this job call I would really want to meet and discuss the potential of a longer lasting collaboration and see how we can develop new stuff together, outside our professional boxes.
Cheers,
Razvan