Over the last few months, and as many of you may know, we have been running community calls in the MENA region. Many amazing change makers, mainly form Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco, have joined our calls and we have had great chats with them. We have had with us inspiring women fighting extremism and gender inequality in their communities, young people working on empowering poor kids who have no access to proper education, others working on founding a bio hacking spaces in a marginalized areas and many other great stories of amazing efforts towards the development of communities in the MENA region. Through these calls, those change makers were able to collect feedback, suggestions and sometimes critics from their peers but also from experts who joined the conversation, and overall connections were made for future collaboration.
Take for example the Hackathon which will take place next month in Medenine (Tunisia). This was the result of a an exciting conversation between @Yosser and @Hugi which happened during a community call.
This proves once again that the power of collective intelligence is limitless, and we should use that to empower all the changemakers who join our community. We voluntarily choose to support and guide them through their journey of making a positive impact on their communities or on people in need. Many great things are happening around the world and everywhere, but they are working alone, and many are in the darkness. They are doing their best to address issues .
It is time for a program that can reach out to all these outstanding changemakers, whom I love to call “the doers”, and the community calls program may be the simplest and most optimized way to do that. To implement and to scale out this project , we will face many challenges to overcome before having something up and running by its own, but also we will have a lot of fun and discoveries along the way. They say that the journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step, and in our case, things won’t be different, we have to take that single step. In order to do that, we need our “early adopters” of “Superheros” from the Edgeryders community , who believe that we can work it out, who believe in the power of collective intelligence and who are willing to contribute and support by advice and guidance great young changemakers . But make no mistake, this is a win-win relationship. In the process, you will be able to gain a valuable knowledge and discover new opportunities for businesses and/or for collaboration.
Now we do not have, in purpose, a structured methods on how we will implement this. We prefer to co develop this along with our “supeheros”. But, IMHO, we have two approaches to test beforehand and your feedback is more than welcome:
1-The first one is to put the “superheros” at the center of the calls, where each time we invite a “super hero”, as our special guest in the community call, in order to discuss a topic of her or his choice depending on her or his expertise. We will mobilize young changemakers or future changemakers from around the MENA region (in first stage) to attend these calls.
Talking about this, I would like to share with you one idea that has emerged from my last meetings with collaborative spaces owners in Sousse-Tunisia: “Online Tech Talks”. In Tunisia for example, and this I think is the case of many other countries in MENA and Africa, there are a lot of well educated and qualified young people who are so passionate about new technologies. Trust me, you will be surprised by their potential and their energy. We can engage with these talents in very fruitful conversations through the “Online Tech talks” which could lead to great and inspiring ventures, you may find either the talents you are looking for or the next big idea to invest in.
2- The second one to put the change makers, as we used to do, at the center of our calls and we invite her or his peers along with the superheros who may be experts in the same field.
Either way, what we need to do now, is to build a list of superheros among our communities, with whom we can engage in conversations and see how to take our community calls together to the next level and how we can plan with them the next calls.
Fell free to leave your comments or contact me by private message on the platform to share you contact details, your areas of expertise and your availability for the next months.
Your feedback is always welcome and strongly appreciated.
