Summary of Community Call May 15: Viral Academy, Co-funding software platform and Lote 4

The community call went on for a little over an hour on google hangouts. The agenda of the call was to discuss,

  1. Introduce project viral academy (Prototyping at Matera, an Edgeryders Project.
  2. Introduction of "Co-funding platform"
  3. "Build LOTE4", in terms of expanding on-going discussions on technical and logistical strands of the event due in OCTOBER 2014, in context of skills development and co-funding technical capabilities to facilitate organizing event's like LOTE 4.  

Introduction to Viral academy

The session started by introduction of the participants to each other. Followed by brief overview of VA methodology and principals, and upcoming activities, with regards to courses, projects and the launch date of VA website, lastly what possible synergies and opportunities the project VA can be helped with or help to others.

It is a project to reduce the cost of education and viral these skills across borders with ease. Lessons are structured around projects and courses through group based learning’s (formed between students and agile teachers around the world. Website > http://viral.academy/   (the launch of full website will be on 24th May in Matera at a public event in association with projects with UnMonastery). Actionable for K and David> Describe the format and structure of Edgeryders events follow-up learning objects: prototype for futurespotters

Open-Funding - Co-Funding platform for software development

@sylvain -, joined the community call and shared about  on-going activities and future plans of the platform. It is providing high-end skills services by experts via “connectors” to develop products for general online users. engaging communities for skills sharing and minimizing direct cost of resources for production (human, capital and time).

“Sylvains initiatives for “connectors” make links between developers and community of users because developers dont usually want to communicate, let developers focus on development but still get user feedback … everyone gets paid”. Said by Nadia, she adds on during the hangout, that the project “is not a crowdfunding but co-funding” which can be very helpful to finance and develop project’s initiatives of the members representing networks like Edgeryders.

Build LOTE 4

  1. Hackatons - Focus of prototyping activities: LOTE-4 - prepare together,
  2. On-going labs that are working on these initiatives that are connected with edgeryders and its networks.
  • Edgeryders labs developing new format for lote-4
  • Makerfox, a project of edgeryders developing efficient barter systems
  • Labs camp, that was recently co-organized (Dorotea)

Tasks and activities can become courses or lessons months in advance which can help move “Track/session setup” towards “long-term collaboration”. Theme: stewardship - lots of unused assets (land, buildings) vs people who are doing great projects. Possible synergies exists between sharing facilitation from Open Initiatives - connectors, digital assets stewardship’s that are being developed at UnMonastery in Matera, and agile teachers (viral academy).

Possible key study areas that can start are

  • software development
  • content development
  • community development - forming templates for community interactivity and work management

These projects can help build activity templates embed to communities like edgeryders and its projects as well as events while integrating initiatives like aftermath futrespotters. The option to connect them all for LOTE-4 that expands and polish skills of the community members to develop easy templates for productive feedback loop pre, during and post event of LOTE -4.  

David has accepted to take the responsibility as “actionable item” to develop distributed UnConference application for the LOTE 4 event. To connect remote spaces from different geographical locations to the event, and creates a space for meaningful dialogue and participation among the participants of the Events.

End Notes

Chat log of the hangout session on the screen

 
1 Like

VA to contribute to events preparations+ follow up

Thanks @aden for the summary! I’ve glanced through the viral academy website and it looks good, looking forward to see it launched.

What David said and I thought it was quite relevant was about how Viral Academy can pick up on event sessions (LOTE or other community events) and engine p2p learning in the follow up. It’s a way to ensure the transfer of skills beyond the time bound event. Example: start a series of online hangouts, appoint or invite an “agile teacher” to keep it together, and document it as a “learning object” - in your words a wiki to easily structure and make it easier for future courses to take bits from other learning objects.

As for the pre-event organisation - which we do via google hangouts anyway - is there a chance to prototype a VA course on Online Collaboration? In it, we would be teaching each other how to use platforms like Edgeryders or Trello to coordinate the work of building projects with members who are located remotely from one another.

I dont know what your timeline is after the end of May website launch, but we could prototype this in the runup to Lote4 in October if you think it’s feasible…