Tentative, as we figure out exactly how to patch together the different pieces.
Week 1
Plan activities
Week 2-5
Complete the research and engagement teams; produce "seed" content; prepare the platform; build the data model
Week 3
Pre-launch activities: start a blog, launch a STF socialmedia presence etc.
Week 6
Launch; preliminary foresight report
Week 7-10
"On tour": missions to Armenia, Egypt and Georgia, for small scale offline meetings and community animation. Driving online engagement. Start ethnographic analysis.
Week 12
Final event to present and validate research preliminary conclusions.
Week 13
Complete the network analysis and finalize the report.
This looks good to me. It seems from week 6 until week 13 we’ll have almost 2 months of actual online conversation and community building. From our last discussion the agreement was we’ll be proposing the Edgeryders platform to host the conversation, right?
If this project will resemble our Mission Baltic, then it means we would be seeding the conversation with targeted, paid blog posts and simply follow up on that (validate insights thoughout the wider communities), without explicitly asking (also potential) participants in the project to write about their experience, through separate, structured missions like we did for the Council of Europe. Is it safe to asume that?
What would those missions to the 3 countries involve? Is it to coordinate with managers on how they can connect their communities to our interactive online platform? perhaps also themed workshops with innovators in the countries, the content & outcomes of which would then be mirrored on the platform?
Who from the team would be traveling? Looking at the role breakdown in the budget sheet it seems it’s Nadia and Alberto, who are tasked with driving engagement in general?
yes, we'd use Edgeryders. Given the time constraints it's our best shot.
yes, we would seed the conversation with posts. Ideally, we would also find "country managers" (need a better title though), who are people with good social media traction in each of these countries. For Egypt Nadia suggested her old schoolmate Sultan (who is not Egyptian, but Emirati), a bright star in the Arab-speaking Internet with a huge following in Egypt; hopefully [Matthias] has asked around for Armenians and Georgians at 30c3. These countries are very different from each other: Egypt, with almost 30 million Internet users (and over 12 million Facebook users) can be expected to have a rich, diverse social media landscape; Armenia and Georgia, not so much. For Armenia, the only figure I could find is Internet usage in 2010 (1.5 million, about 50% of population); for Georgia, it will be a bit more, as the population is a bit bigger. Facebook is very likely the only game in town in both these countries.
the missions are one of my pain points, as the travel budget is a bit tight. But yes, if we can make them happen they would entail some work with UNDP country offices and some small community events – think maybe 3 days per country. We would probably want to split the countries between team members. Are you up for doing some travelling, for example?