Hello everyone 
This is my first topic here on the Edge Ryders webspace, so I hope I’m doing it right. My wish is to both introduce myself and open another space for introductions 
So, my name is Danilo and I was born in what is currently known as Brazil. I have spent most of my life in these tropical lands, but I was lucky enough to do quite a lot of traveling, specially while I was a student at a nomadic college.
Education has literally changed my life. I grew up in a peripheral region of SĂŁo Paulo and attended the precarious public school system up until high school. At that time, I got a full scholarship in one of the best private schools in the country, which presented me new horizons. From there, I joined SĂŁo Paulo State University as a Mechanical Engineering student. After two years, I realized that was not what I wanted, so I applied to Minerva (twice) and went on to travel the world as a Social & Computer science major.
It seems, though, that two years are the maximum I can handle in structured learning programs. So in the fall of 2017 I took a gap year from Minerva to explore a growing passion: Complexity Sciences. That gap was never closed and I didn’t return to school.
However, I kept on learning (a lot) since then, mostly as an independent researcher and content creator freelancer. Such a journey has led me to initiate and engage with different types of networks of learners and researchers, as well co-create with them. It took me some time to discover that many people do similar things as I do, and that there’s a whole art & science to this practice. Therefore, I’m always happy to come across hubs such as Edge Ryders.
I discovered Edge Ryders through the The Babel Between Us experiment, which immediately caught up my attention due to my own experimentations with collaborative writing. And after doing further research on the methods behind BBU, I discovered SSNA, which excited me even more. Mostly because of the similarities between this method and a research experiment I conducted a year ago. In sum, even though I had never heard of digital ethnography or semantic social networks (in those terms), I intuitively did something very similar.
Last year I was invited to work and speak at “Systems Innovation Barcelona”, a systems and complexity conference. I wasn’t sure what to present so I decided to open up the creation of my talk to the networks that I permeate, only proposing the overarching theme of “Co-creation & Emergence”.
So, for 3 months, people from varied backgrounds congregated in online and in-person interactions to reflect on their previous co-creative experiences. And a “SSNA” exercise (with a slightly different methodology) emerged when one participant started to map the concepts we were discussing. By following his track, we mapped all other interactions and managed to identify some “archetypical patterns” characterizing emergent phenomena in our experiment. So the resulting semantic map served as the backbone of my meta-presentation (the presentation tells the story of its generative experiment). On top of that, I wanted to digitally emulate our co-creative dynamic, so I built an agent-based model that tried to embed the aforementioned archetypical patterns.
That was a very fun experiment, and I had a great time with it. However, I had never seen in it the seeds of a comprehensive methodology for the study of collaborative networks. And that’s what I’ve found in your work with semantic social networks! That’s really exciting for me!
Well, I see this is already a very long post, so I will stop myself. I just really wanted to say hi and also write down my wish to get more involved with what you do. I have taken the time to understand the basic workings of this website, as well as the way Edge Ryders is organized. I see there are many possibilities for engagement, and I hope to explore them. But, for now, I thought it’d be best to share a little bit of my story.
Cheers!
And it’s crazy to see the similarities between that research and what you have been doing! I’m still amazed!
