After discussing with colleagues and community members in Edgeryders, I propose we “zoom in” from care in general to three specific instances. This will make the discussion more concrete and more relevant to the people out there whom we wish to connect and work with. The price we pay is that we might discourage people with interesting cases that do not fall into this taxonomy (eg. Helliniko). We suggest:
Helping both caregivers and care receivers in dealing with dementia (Challenge brief here)
They are a good match for OpenCare, because:
They involve people in vulnerable situations where dynamics in community connections, or lack of, play a significant role.Can Guy/Alberto's network science perspective help us to make visible and understand these social flows?
They involve some interaction with the formal health and social care system, conditions as well as norms/behaviors in society at large. Can Erik and Tino's approach help us make sense of this and translating it into institutionally comprehensible language?
They involve and require a deep understanding of healing and medical practice, especially the ethical considerations for both caregivers and care recipients. Can Marco, Massimo's and other's work in the field and in the lab help us to identify and understand how to deal with these issues? In the research as well as in the intiatives themselves?
The city as a place and institutions is where all of these interactions and relationships live (or do not). Can Lucia and Rossana and others in the city of Milano help us understand how a city can make visible and enable promising approaches and nurturing the people who drive them?
Can we design interventions offer workarounds to the obstacles these intiatives, and the indivuals they attempt to support (caregivers and care recipients)?What forms could these interventions take in order to unlock more care in the different situations (artefacts, communication, services, processes, upskilling, administrative and legal hacks, policy changes and or something else? Here I think the ingenuity and very particular skillset of Costantino, Zoe and others in the weMake constellation could make a very important contribution.
Please validate them or counterpropose others. We need to move on.
We agree with what you propose, we have a couple of comments regarding two of the domains:
social/health care to refugees
Why focus only on refugees and not on migrants in general? Or if we don’t want to call them migrants and refugees, let’s call them something like people in movement without papers: Sans-Papier
Prevention of Suicide in the hacker community
This target is a bit too tight on hackers and becomes then necessary define what is a hacker and we think we could get stuck in this conversation (ie. why only hackers and not makers? what are really hackers?) .
Why don’t we focus on the domain of mental distress (or psychological distress) in high-tech service sector?
Opening domains allows us to capture potentially more great examples. For example, there is probably nothing to be gained by restricting to hackers the suicide prevention story (we are looking into it as part of a different piece of work we are doing in Galway: apparently, suicide is endemic in the West of Ireland). If we just look into suicide prevention, we can still fetch all of the stories coming from the hacker community.
On the other hand, suicide prevention is more suited to community-driven solution than treating mental distress. Why? Because it’s about someone being there at the right time, pulling the suicidal person away from the brink. This presents interestingly specific challenges. In this case we might lose some focus if we move over to “mental distress”.
People on the move makes a lot of sense. It includes people who move for any number of reasons. But we then need to give people some examples of what might fall under that, e.g. People fleeing war, People moving abroad to study, working mostly online and living in different parts of the world etc.
I’ll prepare the docs for the other two, for now, have a look and contribute to shaping the brief to would be participants for the dementia related initiatives in this shared document?
Another helpful contribution would be to share your own reflections on this after the workshop we both participated in during lote5. I’m doing the same further below in the same document
In order for briefs to be efficient in terms of engaging people to relate deeply and submit stories, they need to be rock solid in providing background information about the topic - short and well packaged, but to the point and credible. It is that background info that helps us contextualize issues and ask very good questions. It seems that especially for dementia and suicide, it would be great to have people with medical training sharing information or pointing us to useful resources.
Any way you guys can share the drafts linked above with your networks asking people what is it that they find most important to ask when it comes to coming up with effective, community solutions?
Also, let me know if you know professionals that are also good writers whom we can approach for writing stories in response to the themes - personal experiences and takes on the issue (example of a contribution)