With edgeryders we now structure our community learning sessions into edible chunks - smaller, more focused sessions on specific situations and needs. At the OpenVillage festival we hosted masterclasses on community building and on digital security. In December, in Matera we offered a two day training to support a new online community for the city. Last week in Medenine, with Anique and Matthias, we delivered workshops for local social innovation. Now, with @Johncoate we are happy to test a new format - a two part webinar to share things we know about what makes communities thrive.
The Culture Open Source event where we met! Photo by CIN
I’m very happy that we’re now starting a collaboration with the Cultural Innovators Network (CIN), a network of artists from 28 countries who, after the Arab Spring, wished to connect stronger the North and South of the Mediterranean. They use culture as a tool to make a difference wherever they are. CIN now wish to level up and structure their organisation as a sustainable, project building community. I’ll let @Filomena, one of the core members who also has been on edgeryders for some time, introduce CIN better.
This webinar happens on the 10th and 11th next week at 18:00, in 90 minute sessions. We will touch on the following aspects: deep knowledge about what keeps groups together; what makes a good community manager; the social contract with your community: how members benefit but also take responsibility to contribute back; how to work at the network level and balance structure with freedom; tools to run truly open, participatory projects; how edgeryders does team coordination on a regular basis. A mix of project examples and case studies will support these concepts.
Attending will be CIN network members and friends who have attended the culture open source forum in Berlin last September (ping @lorenzoci@Maysa@Helga…).
We have 3 spots to offer to our community members who would like to attend one or both. If you wish to be one, please leave a comment below with your interest in the topic and we will send you instructions in private.
Super super cool!
I saw John in Bruxelles and I’m sure that the webinar will be very useful and rich.
I’m teaching on those two days so I cannot attend, 10/11 January seems to be perfect days to learn new stuff
About CIN @filomena I’m part of CAI (Citizen Artist Incubator) that both from the acronym and in the missions seems that could have different interactions with your network, tell us more, please, it will be amazing to do things together!
@noemi : Both sessions seem to be very useful for me.I would like to participate in order to deepen my knowledge about the interaction inside the group. It’s an occasion also to know how to keep all members committed to the project they are working on.
Thank you @noemi and @johncoate for the great start of the conversation and your new format, which I am looking forward to being part of!
CIN members were so happy to meet Edgeryders in Berlin at the Culture Open Source Forum and know more about Edgeryders’ work, experiences, and future projects. Now we want to take the opportunty of this new webinar format to start a process of knowledge sharing among different organisations, groups, and individuals working at the intersection of different fields such as culture, activism, art, technology. We want to understand how to build, grow, and maintain healthy communities, especially when members are geographically dispersed and culturally diverse. We want to talk about the balance between structure and freedom, beureacuracy and innovation.
No better way to do so than having other organisations share their continuous trials, successes and setbacks. That is exactly what CIN is doing after its first 5 years of existence: understanding what worked well, what didn’t, how can we be a better community, and have a greater impact on society.
Indeed, it seems there is so much in common! It would be wonderful to work on something together. Are you guys focusing on any specific region?
What CIN does is mainly using culture as a tool for social transformation. Interdisciplinarity is the key, CINers are artists, activists, journalists, academics, cultural managers, living in over 30 countries north and south of the Mediterranean, getting together to build projects that take something out of the diverse fields and bring about innovation, whether it means provoking discussion, raising awareness of compelling social, political, economic issues, engaging disadvantaged communities, or simply connecting culturally diverse people and celebrating diversity.
Hi @filomena, I’ve participated in the “incubation” session of this summer, along with 17 artist from different part of Europe and Middle East, we lived together 30 days and it was, on a personal level, very intense and enriching.
Right now we are collaborating, mainly online, in order to start a framework that could be interesting for ECoC cities, two things are emerging:
we are good at teaching things (everybody was selected as middle career artist, which means at least 7years of experience)
no one has a pre-cooked recipe for solving problems and all our approaches are very diverse and with the “audience” in the middle and the artist more as a facilitator than as a master.
So yeah if you are thinking about starting something in specific region let’s talk, Edgeryders is the perfect place!
Hi @waeljebri, I am sending you the link in a private message!
You’re welcome to join, I think what’s new for you is the Wednesday’s by John. Part of the content on Thursday by me you already heard in Medenine
See you soon!
First, thank you for seizing the opportunity to attend the 2 days webinar and for your great effort explaining and answering the question.
First session by @johncoate as so inspiring and it made me understand edgeryders as a community I can belong too. As I mentioned during the webinar it was a turning point in my life what happened in the revolution and how I found myself belonging to a hugely diverse group and we all trusting each other. However, after sometime this strong community faded away and the opposite start that we turned to belong to smaller groups until reaching to belong to yourself only. In my case and I think with many Egyptian lived it the same way we kept searching for this feeling of a diverse connected community that is hard to reach. I started to feel that I go inside myself more and more focusing on what I want and what I need which is not something I like. After your explanation and @noemi 's expression “future family or extended family model” the concept linked with the gap I have and I think many in the region have.
It was also great chance to know John and kept searching on him the 2nd day.
2nd session was practical and comprehensive, Noemi related the concept to what is happening in reality. It was a long session and she did great offer answering the questions and covering all the topics. Maybe I would like if the second part was shorter and giving more time to the methods the 3rd part.
I loved also how you explained the selection, and how it should not be so competitive, made me reflect how things should be for good and generate a lot of stress and hate because of competing with others.
on a side note, I met @m_tantawy yesterday for the first time to discuss ways of collaboration I think he will brief you better on that, but the thing that we felt like as we know each other for long, it was just commenting on each other in the platform. So It relates a lot to what was explained before.
This is very very useful to know…
I found it challenging to comprise so much in one session based on the brief from CIN - I wanted to deliver a lot for them, also the background of edgeryders. Obviously impossible to have it all in 2 hrs
Thank you for taking the time and I know the exact feeling of meeting someone in edgeryders and being very familiar because you’re way past the intros
