OPENandChange FAQs

This section contains answers to common questions about the initiative. If you cannot find an answer to your question, please add it to the document following the same format.  We will be notified of new questions and answer them a.s.ap. If you would prefer a more “private” channel send your queries to nadia@edgeryders.eu

1.What is OPENandChange?

OPENandChange is a massive online-offline conversation convening a diverse community of caregivers and recipients, activists, social innovators, community leaders, scientists, medical practitioners, technologists and policy makers.

It’s a way to accelerate community-driven care initiatives in a structured way and use OpenCare as a shared umbrella to help them to secure financial and non-financial support.

Introducing Op3nCare from Edgeryders on Vimeo.

The outcome: A credible, shared, application to the McArthur Foundation’s 100 million dollar grant to solve the challenge of sustainably providing participatory, open, safe and accountable health and social care for everyone.

The process of producing the proposal is designed to generate new opportunities and value for participants regardless of outcome of the competition.

2. How does OPENandChange work?

We foster an online conversation on participants’ first-hand experiences around trying to fix/build health and social care in their communities or contexts. To give us enough time to go through the data and put together a proposal in time for the deadline, we keep it open from June 20 - to July 20. We then use a combination of custom-made open source software, a research team and effective content curation to make sense of the thousands of experiences shared. Using the results of the analysis, we drive a participatory process to identify key findings and devise a shared plan for working together and leveraging one anothers’ strengths to tackle identified challenges and obstacles:

  • Seed a conversation through high-quality content that is relevant to the theme. Start with people “at the edge” and traverse the social graph through social media.
  • Grow your conversation by community management, respectful interaction and connecting people to each other.
  • Harvest it through OpenEthnographer and Edgesense, built into the Edgeryders platform.
  • People select themselves to participate This ensures enthusiasm and eliminates researcher selection bias (the “usual suspects”).
  • Insights go into shaping credible evidence backed proposal in exchange for participants giving us permission to use data generated in academic research project on how to reform dysfunctional health and social care.

3. Why should I get involved?

If we win the contest, you get money to support your work. Even if we don’t win the big challenge by contributing your story you are eligible for a fellowship. You get your work acknowledged and promoted through the ‘count on me’ list. You get to discover and connect with peers and mentors doing inspiring work all over the planet in a huge event we are running in September for which we will have a number of travel grants available…and more.

4. Who can participate in OP3NandChange?

Everyone who does the following is included in the submitted proposal: 1) shares their story, 2) responds thoughtfully to all comments posted on their story, 3) leaves constructive and thoughtful comments on at least 5 other stories and 4) shares three carefully curated status updates on their social media accounts/day.

How can we have such an open process and still produce something credible and coherent?

We will foster an online conversation on participants’ first-hand experiences around trying to fix/build health and social from June 20 -to July 30. We will then use open source software to help participants to make sense of the thousands of experiences shared to identify key findings and devise a shared plan for working together and leveraging one anothers’ strengths to tackle identified challenges and obstacles.

  • We seed a conversation through high-quality content that is relevant to the theme. We start with people “at the edges” and traverse the social graph through social media.
  • We grow our conversation by community management, respectful interaction and connecting people to each other.
  • We harvest it through OpenEthnographer and Edgesense, our custom made software that we built into the Edgeryders platform.
  • People select themselves to participate. This ensures enthusiasm and eliminates researcher selection bias (the “usual suspects”).
  • The Insights go into shaping credible evidence backed proposal goes in exchange for participants giving us permission to use data generated in academic research project on how to reform dysfunctional health and social care.

You can read more about how we do this here.

5. Who is behind OP3NandChange (and why)?

OP3NandChange is driven by the same crowd stewarding the Op3nCare community and  opencare research project.

We are doing this because we want to make space for new approaches and smaller grassroots initiatives to become more resilient, and develop collective awareness. A big ambitious goal like this one encourages us to look around us, learn from one another’s experiences and figure out how we can align our small efforts to make big changes in the world.

Right now we happen to have the resources to do the heavy lifting involved in convening, coordinating and hammering out a proposal like this. The reason being that we are involved in a funded research project on health- and social care called OpenCare. When this opportunity popped up via a community member, we realised we could use the same process of producing a credible research publication to directly support the work of the people for whom are building the research anyway. So we figured, why not?

The results are all open, accessible to all and will stay that way.

6. What if we don’t win?

Care is crucial to our lives as individuals as well to healthy, thriving communities. We are working on the assumption that what we propose has to make sense to do on its own merits. Whether or not anyone gives us 100 Million dollars to do it…

We have a process in place and fellowships to offer for participants who wish to just go ahead and continue working together to realise the plan we all devise together.

7. How to get started?

If you want to be involved, register here: http://bit.ly/29BmwxP

8. Anything this page doesn't cover and you think it should?

Email us at community@edgeryders.eu