Engagement is more likely to happen when there is a powerful story to attract participants to the project, outlining a common purpose, a Big Epic Goal as [Nadia] calls it, and conveying key values of the interaction: openness, inclusiveness, tolerance, respect etc. Narrative weaving is a crucial component of the project architecture because it will set the tone in all of our engagement efforts, be those videos, inspirational blog posts or calls for participation, shout outs of project breakthroughs, as well as customization of the web platform (visual cues).
Here’s an example of narrative I suggest, let’s improve it together! You can help edit or add your own suggestions by simply editing this wiki (make sure you’re logged in).
“Spot The Future brings together many of us on the planet who are trying out solutions (sometimes radical, sometimes risky!) to the most challenging problems our big society is faced with: economical, ecological, political issues, you name it.
We’re onboarding a journey to learn together, from one another, as peers, and get the much needed support for our work. No project or goal is too ambitious, too expensive, too radical in challenging the status quo, so do share it with the community! We’re coming together from all walks of life, and we have something in common: we’re here to change the world for the better, to make a contribution to the well-being of our communities, irrespective of age, race, or geographical setting.
Congratulations, you’re not only helping spot the future, you’re already part of it and we welcome you dearly! “
I took a first shot at it with help from Jay Cousins
I shared my original attempt with Jay Cousins and he helped shape it up. What do you think of the result?
Connect with 1800+ other young people working to make the world a better place.
Edgeryders, a community of 1800+ predominantly young people in over 40 countries, is reaching out to our peers in Armenia, Egypt and Georgia to invite them into our growing community.
In Edgeryders people from all over the world come together, inspire one another and help each other. Peer to peer. The ethos is that there isn’t any point in waiting for someone else to solve the problems: if we don’t build the solutions ourselves with our minds and bodies, they won’t get built. Together we have managed to pull off ambitious projects like the unMonastery and the Economy app with very little means. In doing so we have learned that we are one another’s best resource.
Get paid to connect awesome projects and connect people creating positive change.
We’re creating a Tour bringing together people doing inspiring things in Armenia, Egypt and Georgia with their peers from different parts of the world. Rather than working in a top- down manner, we prefer it if people active on the local scene are involved in shaping the initiative from the beginning. The contents of the workshop in each country will be heavily based on the online discussion. So we are making a budget available to people who can help build engagement and drive participation in the online platform ahead of, during and after the tour. If you know of people doing interesting work in either of the three countries (maybe you are one of them), are active in the local scene as well as on social media and speak either Arabic, Armenian or Georgian you may be eligible for one of the paid work opportunities we publish in this group.
Get paid for sharing information about inspiring projects.
We are building a useful online knowledge resource, mutual support community and collaboration opportunities for and by change-makers. After the tour, we envision the online contributions to be further developed into individual articles (2500 words), meant for publication in digital format for and by participants. As well as in the final deliverable to the UNDP. Each article selected for the final publication will be paid for*.
Travel and meet other people doing awesome social projects.
A number of selected contributors to the online conversation and local workshops of the tour will be invited to an international conference in Georgia, with their travel expenses covered by Edgeryders. The conference is a unique opportunity for people doing interesting work in your community to come together with peers from other parts of the world, inspire one another and help each other.
Why now?
While a few of us are in Central and South America, India and South Africa, most of the 1800+ community members are based in Europe. We want to reach out to our peers in other parts of the world to explore how we can learn from and support one another’s work. P2p. And we’ve built a nice opportunity to do so together with anyone and everyone who wants to be involved.
Basically we made a compelling case that the UNDP should launch a so called “foresight” exercise in three countries modelled on the Edgeryders way of doing things…and they agreed! The principle in Edgeryders is that the people who do the work call the shots: now is the perfect time to get involved in shaping this initiative as we are just getting started!
The way it works is that you sign up on the open source platform and leave a post below saying hello to the rest of the community and telling us a litte about yourself. This breaks the ice and makes it easier for everyone to start interacting with you as they know more about what you are interested in. It also makes it easier for us to get the word out about the paid opportunities to people who want to join us in building this movement together.
We hope you’ll join us on this shared journey. Have look at the Edgeryders guide for beginners and if you have any questions or need help getting started, don’t hesitate to email or tweet us. We usually respond quite quickly.
Looking forward to welcoming new friends and collaborators into our home on the Internets
Nadia, I do like this version - one question though - how do we handle the language issue? Do we agree that the working language is English? Does it need to be translated in local languages?
Calls to action, ie when reaching out to people to invite then to join us needs to be in both imho. Reasoning: language is a signal that this is happening “here”. Whenever someone calls your attention to something it needs to be answering “yes” to the questions: 1. Is it here? 2. Is it now? 3. Does it concern me? 4. Can I do anything about it? 5. Ok what’s the one step I need to take?
A lot of this is subconscious filtering. Choice of Language, visuals etcs. Once I’m in, working language is english.
[Khatuna], you can find here a discussion of how we intend to deal with multilingualism in STF. We added some qualifications and flexibility to"English is the working language".
