This follows our consortium meeting in Geneva, our former discussion with Milano teams, Costantino’s ask that everyone is made aware of how things progress etc.
From our Grant Agreement, section on Communication Plan (pp.30-31):
Final conference. We will organize a conference in the final six months of the project’s life. This will be organized like a barcamp, with the program being assembled from community proposals (including those from the OpenCare team); and aimed at bringing the community together and putting it in contact with stakeholders in the care debate. Its ultimate goal is to share the project’s draft final outputs under Objectives 1 and 2; create demand and expectation for its final outputs; and foster a dialogue with more traditional stakeholders on care. The template for this type of conference is the Living On The Edge format, experimented by Edgeryders since 2012-14.
○ Activities: conference preparation & follow up (by Edgeryders and SCImPULSE): create concept notes in collaboration with the community; send out invitations to mailing lists and other online and offline fora where existing partners are active;
○ Objectives: 150 participants, 24 sessions.
Our Gantt chart also showed the preparations and event happening until 28/10/2017
This is a proposal for opencare partners to approve.
Edgeryders is committed to running the community event in the form of the OpenCare PopUp Village or in short, OpenVillage - see this group where it is being fleshed out. We have considered some locations in Europe
- East of Amsterdam (piggybacking on a hackers’ conference)
- Leeuwarden for ECOC 2018 (our proposal did not get a timely response)
- Milano (see my notes from preliminary call with Rossana and Matteo)
- Other informal conversations for Lille, Warsaw via Natalia and Nadia.
None of these work in terms of having a partner that can cover a lot of work on the ground ahead of the event. Why I say this is because a community event takes a lot of content and engagement work prior to the actual meeting. While we do most of it online, coordination costs go up a lot when we don’t have someone mobilizing people in continuous communication done at local level, in pre-events, aperos etc. (OpenCare engagement worked best in 2016 due to the physical onboarding workshops we organised in Thessaloniki, Berlin, Brussels, NY)
Here is a proposal for the opencare partners:
A. OpenVillage Festival: the opencare community event in Brussels showcasing projects and tightening collaborations for an opencare global ecosystem.
- Organised by Edgeryders with the OpenCare budget we have
- Open to both community and partners
- Aim [long term]: Build a model for low risk collective investment into permanently affordable living and working.
3 Tracks currently being discussed:
- Track 1: MEET THE OPENCARERS. Learning from the protagonists and projects in the existing opencare ecosystem. Presenting findings from the opencare massive two year research project.
- Track 2: COMMUNITY PROPERTY. How do we acquire and manage collective property for permanent affordable living and working? Exploring existing financial, legal and governance models/ cases.
- *** THE FUTURE OF CARE: A POLICY AND INVESTMENT LAB. How do we make it attractive to finance community ecosystems and what enabling infrastructures already exist that we can learn from? Implications for participants, investors and policy makers.
B. OpenCare Milano Policy Lab: the opencare scientific conference in Milano to present the project results, explore direct implications for local policy
- Organised by the City of Milano
- Takes place right after the consortium meeting (1 day meeting, 1 day public event)
- Open to partners and any relevant stakeholders in Milano and abroad
- Big overlap with OpenVillage in theme - we build it together, share the costs (i.e. the international speakers can be invited to both events - one partner covers the finances, the other the curation/invites/etc., or the likes).
Dates?
Milano consortium meeting: Monday, 16 October | Venue tba
Milano OpenCare conference: Tuesday, 17 October | Venue tba
OpenVillage Festival: Thursday - Saturday, 19-21 October | At FO.AM or our own community EdgeSpace (TBC)
Advantages
- Integration possible: Two events allow both teams to focus on their goal without added coordination. Integration is ensured by overlapping themes and presence of some participants (team and guests)
- Accessibility for both Europeans in Brussels and for Italian policy makers in Milano: Brussels is where policy makers can easily drop in; it is also accessible by train from many parts of Europe, if only to participate for one afternoon/ day.
- Cost effectiveness: the Edgeryders organising team is based in Brussels and can do effective engagement of groups on the ground. Same with the Milano crowd, whose relationships locally can be activated without ER.
- Win-win: We share the communication workload without the burden of having to micro-manage each other to get all the pieces right; Milano teams get to showcase the research work while benefitting from the presence of the whole consortium.
Ping @Rossana_Torri @Matteo @Costantino @Lakomaa @melancon @markomanka @LuceChiodelliUB cc @Alberto @Nadia
