Ok so Edgeryders is a collaboration platform, and it’s open ended so people use it in many different ways. But it can be a bit tricky for a first time visitor to understand how this community “works” and how to make use of it depending on what your aims are. Perhaps you’re just curious. Perhaps you are looking for inspiration. Perhaps you have a project and are looking for feedback or people to collaborate with. Perhaps you are looking for a project to get involved in. Perhaps you already have or are an organisation and want to work together with the Edgeryders organisation…so on and so forth.
So we need an easy to understand overview of Edgeryders as a kind of organism with different parts and how they fit together. Or as a machine with different component, whatever metaphor works for you.
Adding some information from the call with UNDP Egypt
Nadia, thanks for taking this on. Such a simple to understand, graphical explanation was proposed by the UNDP Egypt team to ease their communication about the Edgeryders project. So I’m adding here the specific requirements which they mentioned to us:
It should explain and demystify the Edgeryders methodology of approaching these "people from the edge" that are so hard to reach for institutional actors resp. they don't even know they exist. So it would probably contain elements like "traversing through the social graph", the iterative process of locating, contacting and engaging participants, the role of an engaging narrative etc..
It should also explain how the "calls to action" work: what incentives do they provide to for the non-mainstream people to join and contribute, even though they are so disengaged from formal political / societal discourse.
The UNDP Egypt team mentioned two of their infographics as an inspiration of a presentation form that is great for their purposes [1, 2 – access protected, shared with you].
Could you please make sure that UNDP Egypt gets a copy of this (Google Drive plus e-mail notification). Ideally, this would be by Sunday (2014-03-23), so it is available in the next call with them on Monday.
Thanks Noemi. But I thought we would have a call with them to discuss which engagement manager candidate to choose? Ok, maybe that was not Monday.
BTW. I reassigned this task to the “Spot the Future Team” group. Not sure where the exact line to split is, but for now I think that the “Spot the Future” group is just for interaction with the engagement manager candidates, and occasional announcements to the UNDP collaborators (and coordinating call times with them).
Reassigning this task is not for privacy, but to protect visitors of the public site from information overload / mess.
A challenge with a visualisation is that while it may help a new visitor or user to understand how it works, a static representation will not help the viewed to find their way to the right place.
Reasoning: Edgeryders is a sprawling vibrant community that lives in many different online locations- different users have found their own paths through them depending on purpose and personal preferences.
Intermediate solution: Interactive map- I have located and linked it to where all the bits and pieces of relevant information are distributed across the Internet. The new user has a meta-level understanding of what the platform is and what you can do with it.
Next: 1) custom-made landing pages in the different languages (Coming this weekend) that 2) link to static pages on the platform with SPT mission brief texts in each respective language (the first batch). 3) Produce static visualisation of how Edgeryders works.