Concept
At the time of writing, we have decided not to offer EIT Climate-KIC any trainings, or anything like that. Instead, we decided to use our role in the project to produce open source resources that everyone, not just C-KIC, can use.
Activities
The project has five components.
- A knowledge base.
- A free MOOC that organizes that knowledge base in narrative form.
- A help desk for people who want to adopt the practices.
- A social engineering component: for example, a pledge to replace at least two trips a year with remote work, connected to a simple tool to count the people who take the pledge and the amount of CO2 saved.
- A handholding component, reserved to C-KIC.
1. Knowledge base
The idea was suggested by @matthias:
I can write down our knowledge of remote collaboration into a manual (of the type I create on edgeryders.eu) and host a Q&A on Zoom with them after they studied it.
2. A MOOC
Can show some tools live via screensharing as well. Not going to Amsterdam for just a presentation.
It might be worth it to expand this in a proper MOOC. More work, but its impact is more scalable. Also revives academy.edgeryders.eu.
3. A help desk
If they want, I can also operate a remote collaboration helpdesk in our Discourse forum for them for some time. That would not be about the everyday tech issues but about tool choice and how to make the best out of the tools they use.
This is a great idea, though I would not necessarily deploy Matt for this. I am curious to see if having a human to talk to increases adoption. Of course it would be temporary.
4. A social engineering component
@augusto has come up with this idea in a different context. We could roll out some simple tools to have a rough quantitative estimate of the impact. Counters for the MOOC and the help desk, of course; but maybe also, like Augusto suggested, a kind of pledge system: “I pledge to replace at least two trips a year with remote work”. Each person taking the pledge would result in the website displaying the total amount of CO2 saved by replacing business travel with remote work.
5. A handholding component
C-KIC pays for all this, so they get the perk of some exclusive human attention from us. I propose to do it in the form of having the help desk operate out of their premises in Amsterdam. A small team of two (@noemi observed that we should always have teams of two people going out whenever possible, for better learning and more sociality) could borrow a room in C-KIC’s office for a while and operate from there, reserving some time for the help desk, and maybe also offering a live demo of tools to C-KIC staff. Additional benefit: we embed ourselves better into C-KIC, get to understand them better etc.
6. Add-on: greening business travel
Both the knowledge base and the MOOC could have a final section about what to do when remote work does not cut it and you really have to travel, on the model of our own guide but much better, of course. It seems there is a thirst for this.
Added value
- Scalable impact: instead of greening C-KIC, we green C-KIC plus a number of other orgs. That number could well be in the hundreds, because Flygskam (hat tip: @nadia).
- Increased visibility for C-KIC and their top management.
- Introduces good practice of “impact before profit” in the C-KIC community.
- We also lead by example, and also get, I think, some visibility. “We are masters at remote work, and yes, we could make a business plan about it and sell it as consulting, but you know what? The climate can’t wait. So the hell with that, we just give the knowledge away, just adopt it fast, every little thing counts!” We could ask C-KIC’s comms people to push this out – it is in their best interest. It also puts everyone else on the defensive: if Edgeryders open-sources for the planet, why can’t you people do it too?
Thoughts?