Edgeryders Community News:
UNDP is launching a foresight exercise at the Edge modelled on Edgeryders. And you can be a part of it too!
In 2000, world leaders promised to halve extreme poverty by 2015 with a global plan called the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015 – form a blueprint agreed to by all the world’s countries and all the world’s leading development institutions. As a follow-up to the first round of post 2015 consultation, UNDP is launching Spot the Future, a foresight exercise modelled on Edgeryders. There are two reasons for this.
The first is recognition of the need to bridge the disconnect between the timeframe of development work, and the accelerating pace of change in a globalised world. Development programs take long time to get started so by time results come in, the work you are doing is out of date or worse, counter-productive. Edgeryders has successfully pioneered a novel citizen-engagement methodology that is traversal and versatile, reaches beyond formal processes and structures and is well suited to continuous multi-stakeholder dialogue.
The second is recognition that in complex societies, change tends to start at the edge. Individuals farther away from the mainstream are less shielded from systemic change (mass unemployment, ecological crises, etc.), and therefore harder pressed to respond and adapt to it; at the same time, they are also less constrained by “business as usual”. We are seeing a lot of radical innovators at the edge of society active on Edgeryders and have solid blue sky thinkers in the Edgeryders community. They, and Edgeryders, are quoted as examples in contexts such as the GSN summit and Foresight Program meetings at the UK Government of Science.
In the 21st century, the spread of hacker culture – with its emphasis on DIY, knowledge sharing and technological progress has turned on a spotlight on a small but influential minority of social innovators, activists and technologists that are emerging as a massive, distributed R&D lab for the global society. There is much to be gained from a constructive dialog between the center, where business and governance policies are decided upon, and the edge, where people at the forefront of change and adaptation are gathering precious data on what change really looks like from the inside. However, bootstrapping and sustaining such dialog is challenging. Profoundly different world views and experiences separate policy makers and innovators at the edge; a history of mutual mistrust makes each side weary of engaging with the other. Edgeryders grows out of a joint Council of Europe/European Commission project to bridge this gulf. The approach we advocate – and that we have successfully deployed elsewhere – is based on three main activities:
- traversing the social graph to reach cutting-edge trends and their protagonists just as they happen.
- peer-to-peer validation through a curated online conversation.
- conversation harvesting through online ethnography and network analysis techniques.
We are designing and deploying the technical and social infrastructure appropriate for the exercise in several countries. Besides being a fast, cost-effective solution compatible with time and budget constraints, our approach has two added advantages.
Firstly, unlike any existing national platform, it brings together innovators and hackers in any number of countries, maximizing the opportunities for interaction with each other and with many of their counterparts in different parts of the world.
Secondly, it stays at arm’s length from the client: you can make bold decisions, and live with their consequences. A partially separate identity lets the client take credit for the exercise’s success if it succeeds, and yet shelters it from the fallout of failure should it fail. This means we can build a truly innovative prototype with no risk to compromise the client’s credibility. We employed the same strategy with Edgeryders vs. the Council of Europe, Kublai vs. the Italian Ministry of economic development etc.
This spring we are launching the Edgeryders foresight exercise in several countries. A growing number of organisations are realising that if you do foresight the Edgeryders, way you are likely to catch important weak signals from the edges in a context that promotes trust and collaboration around ground-breaking projects such as the unMonastery. If your organisation wishes to partner with [community member in same country as org#1], [community member in same country as org#2] and other young community members in putting [country where organisation is based] on that map, we’d love to hear from you!