I am posting this straight here because I don’t entirely understand the site, but happy to learn.
I am one of the writers in Babel Between us and in South Africa, we have just been informed we are about to shut down. Our president, who has done some pretty reprehensible things prior, is actually showing strong leadership. There are a few sections of society, unaccounted for unfortunately, this includes space for the artists, dreamers, those that need to see a way through this beyond just the now.
I have a few developer friends, but I thought I would first make the proposal here, this space is obviously very European focused but it would be cool if we could have something similar in our country, perhaps a sister site, a place to engage in unique ways during the lockdown.
If I spoke to my friends, would there be any support available to help set this up?
My interests are more about like lessons learnt when hosting, key things to know when building and creating the site etc.
I think a team of South Africans, including @irmawilson and @nabeel_p would be easy to gather, I think we would just need some guidance on the best ways to go about it. Even the most enthusiastic group would benefit from those who have already done something.
It would also help to ensure that the sites could work in tandem.
Would this kind of assistance be available?
Perhaps right now I need to know what key skills I should find in creating a team to work on this and then we could start looking through it, figuring it out and asking questions that your team could respond to?
By site do you mean edgeryders platform? Some parts are Europe Focused others no, it depends on who is driving/stewarding any given thread or activity. OCI Lab, the P2P online incubator for social entrepeneurship started in Tunisia and is mainly run by a crew in tunis. Either way, yes there is support in a couple of ways. A good way to start would be to repost your question here What did we discuss during the Covid19 Community Response Call #1 & What will we do next? - #3 by nadia
To underscore Nadias post, here are some good examples of initiatives on Edgeryders from outside of Europe.
A major strength of keeping people under the same roof is that we can avoid reinventing the wheel while still adapting things to our local circumstances. Perhaps there is a way to fit this in here?
There are also ways for us to help you with understanding how to launch a platform, and we even sometimes host other platforms though the Edgeryders Communities network - although that’s usually when there is already an existing community that wants to move to a new digital home. Starting a forum from scratch in an empty forum is a lot more challenging than bringing people onboard to a platform where things are already happening.
Like @hugi said, a reasonable course of action would be that you have a look where you’d like to place this content into the current edgeryders.eu platform. There is the Culture Squad category and I’m pretty sure @noemi would welcome engagement from non-European cultural practitioners there. If you’re sure there will be enough content coming in, you can also have your own sub-category.
In both cases, you would register your own domain and point it to that place on edgeryders.eu as a simple URL forwarder. Then, when your community outgrows this solution, you point it to its new webhome. If it does not outgrow it, no harm done, and no effort wasted on installing a forum that stayed empty.
Indeed, once there is enough content to warrant this, we could add an Edgeryders Communities site – for details, see the manual. Moving from a category on edgeryders.eu to your own Communities site (basically a fresh, empty install of the forum) is simple, as everyone involved can keep using the same account. You can find these Communities sites in the top-right menu here. The Babel Between Us site, which you know, is one of them.
Player 1, great to be connected to you. I can relate to your frustrations as I’ve been working with a group of artists, in our own capacities on collaborative ventures focused mainly on engagement and communication. It’s always great to connect with likeminded persons and I am totally excited by the prospect of meeting the Edgeryders in person once again.
Player, I would be more inclined to suggest using this existing platform as it has a a considerable amount of outliers, creatives, designers, activists all striving toward a more inclusive, engaging and solution driven network. That, and it’s been successful. My gut says why recreate this, and then work to gather a similar kind of audience. I’ve made wonderful friends via Edgeryders, online and in person, and it works simply because it’s multi-sectoral and -disciplinary and stretch beyond traditional boundaries (social, physical, political, etc).
I’m no designer but I’d be keen to learn more about your interests. We could consider a chat. Welcome to the network and I do look forward to hearing from you.
@nadia@natalia_skoczylas@noemi Your presence is absolutely missed.
Thanks again. So we are figuring out something we like, its like a narrative game. Kinda inspired by Babel, but different, its lots of fun trying to work it out. I really do think the Edgeryders platform is cool, but there is so much about it feels distinctively European (including the domain name) . I think something from us needs to be created with our audiences in mind, the way we use the internet and it should at least with the ability to carve out it’s own identity. I dont think that this thing that we create could match Edqeryders nor compete with it. I think it compliments but it must be separate.
i would love if they can be related, perhaps there could be a link between the sites and we can reference. I think people can be introduced to Edgeryders through whatever this becomes and can join the community even. I don’t think there is always benefit in keeping everything on one site. Its really not an attempt to reinvent the wheel, we lack the capacity to even attempt that. I just think there are many ways to be in community.
dont worry about it. Its fairly easy to set up a separate space with it’s own domain etc technically. Maybe show up to next week’s community call? can walk you through it then.
and every Tuesdays noon (12:00 CEST) we have another community call specifically focused on how the loss of work effects people in the current crisis, reading your motivation for setting up such a platform that might be interesting for you too:
