I met temporarily wheelchaired Nadia who was furiously typing away on her laptop and Alberto who was explaining network theory in fairly human terms to anyone who cared to listen at a seminar in Sweden about a year ago.
I myself was there to talk about United Estonia, one crazy experiment back in 2010 that involved a fake political movement in Estonia and taking thousands to a fake party conference. It was a good seminar, with lots of good people including Dougald Hine who talked about the endangered future of work for example. Before the day was over, I was pretty much drawn to the idea to join these insane guys at Edgeryders in one or another form.
There is something interesting about edges. In Estonia there is a small group of people called Seto. Their historic area is cut in two by the Estonian-Russian border, making this ethnic group one of the easternmost ethnic groups of Europe and one of the westernmost ethnic groups of Russia. Some say that even their name means “neither this nor that”. Anyway, since most of my ancestors come from Seto people, I have a specific relationship with the idea of the edge. It has driven me to study cultural processes on the edges and there is no question to me that the edges are where the change happens.
My background is in media and communications. For several years I headed Estonian government’s communication efforts as the director of the Government Bureau of Communication. Later I became the CEO of Tallinn office of an international communications company, the role which included a lot of activities in three Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Somewhere around 2008 I started to tilt heavily towards civil society activities, I quit my job and created a social-political blog called Memokraat. Although I do advise also commercial clients today, I also spend a big chunk of my time on voluntary activities. If that all sounds too official, then scrap it, the main thing is that I would be happy to join in if you need to talk to someone about making your messages heard better.