Calling all fellow members,
We want you to perform in our next video campaign. All you need to do is record a clip of yourself (or a friend) reading lines from our script which you’ll find below, explaining what we do, how and why. Present it in any form you see fit, even in your own language if you’re a non-English speaker. Just remember to upload the video to YouTube or Vimeo and send it to us at community@edgeryders.eu
We look forward to your submissions.
Script
- Edgeryders do
- Document and share open knowledge, often in the form of personal experiences ("ethnography data points"). Sustainability model: mostly community goodwill.
- Provide consulting services based on collective intelligence, including: change management/innovation drives, community management. Business model: bill for time or deliverables.
- Do research to sharpen the tools of collective intelligence. Business model: research grants.
- Invest in and support new social innovation projects. Business model: investment for equity and business partnerships.
- Manage The Reef, a co-living/co-working space where businesses and people and live together and support each other. Business model: permanent residence + a club with membership fees.
- So why do we do this?
- Edgeryders is here to start a different kind of revolution.
- It started with us asking people we have met a few questions: What % of the world’s population have jobs? Do you think we will see that number rise with automation? Of the emplyed, how many do you think love their jobs, their working conditions, and the way their job makes the world a better place?
- What we found is that there is a growing sense of dissatisfaction. Millennials do not want to work like this. We do not want to live like this. It is even more broken than that! We are so dependent on the more powerful that we have very little power over our own lives left. That is visible in our jobs, but it is also true for most of how we live and work.
- So how do we change things? Take to the streets?
- It’s is hard to take part in several weeks of demonstrations, when you have to be back at your job on Monday (that’s if you have one at all). You may lose your job if you are not, and then your savings, and then your nice rented flat in the city, and have to start from scratch again. You may even end up on a blacklist for trying to improve life for yourself and others in your society.
- And it’s a global phenomenon: what the average tenant in the city and the average small-scale farmer in South America have in common is that a good share of their profits goes to those who have the “means of production”, the “means of market access” and the “means of living” (which is, residential buildings, transport infrastructure, energy services and so on).
- So what to do with capitalism-as-we-know-it? If we want the power to be back with the people, should we seize the means of production? It has been tried before, and it was not a big success story. Lots of death and suffering. It’s 2017 now, and we won’t try that again.
- We don't have to seize anything, because everything we need is available for free or for really cheap. High tech has become dirt cheap. A lot of software and knowledge has become open source. And young people are highly educated and experimenting with many new ways of using technologies and human organising.
- Our vision is to create our own means of production, our means of market access, and means of living. We believe we can create whatever we need for sustainable, even restorative living out of the little we have. Of course this means we will have to be creative, more dependent on our peers, frugal, and good team players – but Millennials, as they call us, are all of this. In late 2011, Edgeryders started the work of finding and combining whatever solutions to do-it-yourself, autonomous living and well-being people are developing out there.
- Our long term vision is to become a place where, for the first time ever, all of these solutions come together and put people in control of their lives. The place could be a city neighborhood, a village or even a seasteading platform– it does not matter. The OpenVillage is a comprehensive set of open tech solutions and collective action strung together by a common narrative. It is not an imperialistic model, people will be encouraged to remix and implement what works in their own context with support from a global online community of peers.
- When we get there, how will the world look like? Whenever we have a problem, we'll say "We can solve that ourselves." We will no longer wait for the government, or demonstrate in front of the government after waiting too long. We will no longer apply for a loan to the bank, or rob the bank when they esteem us unworthy of credit :)
- We will have gardens to grow our food, robots that help us to grow and harvest and transport it. We will have houses that are simple but our own. We will have enough solar electricity to power cars, but not enough to power a TV that is running commercials. We will have nice communal kitchens, a creche for raising our kids, a store for sharing tools and materials for free, and a soildarity group to rely on when we are sick or old. We will have a culture that nurtures intimacy and locality, and a technosocial infrastructure that connect us with the world.
- All of that is not rocket science, and will never fill the whole work day. We will have a lot of free time to spend it in nature and with fellow openvillagers. If we like, we may also spend it in our labs and workshops to further improve the OpenVillage.
- What matters now is that together we make progress, step by step, in putting together all the bits and pieces of the OpenVillage. “Being in the making” means doing things, as a community, that
- Make a contribution in and of themselves. For example, by connecting activists and hackers with government officials in a safe and neutral space, we were able to get some dialogue going in places like Belarus and Egypt, where the relationship between authorities and civil society are tense. By prototyping a new way of living and working together in The Reef, we are able to offer high quality accommodation and mutual care to people in the social innovation space, and free them somewhat from financial constraints as they focus on their projects.
- Are “pieces” of the OpenVillage ecosystem. We are aware we need to reinvent not just tech solutions, but they way tech meshes with the social system, and its ethics. For example, The Reef is a protorype for one kind of dwelling in the OV.
- Are sustainable, ideally profitable. We need not to burn ourselves down in these ten years; and we will need money when the time comes.
- So we started a company...
- You can get involved in 3 ways:
- Invest in projects. If you are really committed to getting behind this vision, you could become our business partners. We work on some “flagship” projects with a view to spinning them off as their own business entities. Right now we have three: one is The Reef, which is to become a network of live-work spaces that doubles up as a supply chain and partnership network. Our first prototype is up and running in Brussels, and we are doing due diligence for the second one, which will probably be in Tunis, in partnership with the World Bank.
- Hire us. Dream of working with hackers, activists and artists from your edge on your change management problem, or innovation drive? Want to see how a super-diverse, yet respectful and safe, workspace can be? We can make it happen.
- Become a member of The Reef. Our live-work space that doubles up as a supply chain and european partnership network. Some edgeryders live in the house, but most take on remote membership. There are several kinds, allowing different levels of access to exclusive events, masterclasses, and access to our guest rooms and workspace when you are passing through.