Reflections on the process of reaching out and making it easy and fun for people to participate

Workspaces Community Outreach & Coordination
1

After some experimentation I think we have found a nice format for events, and a good process to invite and onboarding people onto the specific and wider Edgeryders conversation as part of it.

  1. Mission and approach: Edgeryders builds Dense Networks between and around individuals as a generator of opportunities for the individual and means for affecting change/making dent on the big issues people care about. Description here: Edgeryders Festival | November 19-29th 2019

  2. What this means in practice: We try to cut down the investment of time and effort needed for people to discover, understand and build on one another’s work. This involves posting a personal introduction to oneself and ones work on an online platform. Then our community managers draw the attention of others who have complimentary interests, needs, skills and or access to people who might: and the other way around. People read one another’s stories/intros and post questions and answers through comments. Our community managers and research team reads/processes the conversations that develop, to find common ground between people having many separate conversations happening in parallel. We also have hired staff to scouting relevant opportunities to support people’s work. These includes proposing joint applications to specific research grants or building financially viable projects to support long term work on issues. For methodology: see here .

  3. A social/fun, time limited way to get started: To make it easy we schedule a one-on-one call to do an in depth interview that is more in conversation form. Then transcribe and do a first edit into a skeleton post for the interviewee to edit till they are happy, and when they are ready they post it under their own name. It takes a bit of an upfront investment to really get going: Approximately 2.5 hrs including interview time, responding to comments with questions from other participants, and a bit of prep whenever there are events you would like to participate in.

  4. It’s solid & run by grown-ups: We have been doing this work since 2013. Over time we have grown into a community, stewarded by a group of nice, fairly bright people. At present the community of people who are connecting this way on and offline is around 5000 people in +80 countries. It is an open, self-selecting network of people and diverse in the true sense of the word - but people who participate tend to be bright, curious, friendly and committed to the common good.

Any thoughts, additions or resources you would like to add to this?

2

@nadia adia You are recommending the interview format to people who are at the event already in person, do I understand that correctly?

3

Yes. But also to people who cannot participate in person, but want to draw the benefits.

4

I am afraid we as a bit too much there. Maybe we can ask those who are physically and there tondo that during their time at the event. For example one hour after lunch for this. But I am afraid so much upfront and predetermined afterwards commitment is too much of a hurdle to get new people in. To ask them to make a post is fine. Buy the whole process we can only ask of those who are already invested. Just as a opinion.

5

Yes you are right. I was thinking of this more as the contents of an email exchange when we are reaching out to specific individuals on a one-on-one basis and engaging them to participate. Ideally it is for people with whom we already have interacted before - either via twitter or because we have an older relationship with them…

6

Today (10th October) 17:00 Brussels time we have a team call regarding the onboarding and reaching out:

Next Tuesday (15th of October) We will have the usual 18:00 community call discussing how to reach out and invite participants with the organisers :slight_smile:

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