The edgeryders platform is a place for connecting, learning and collaboration. We use advanced analytics to drive our work - and enhance yours.
Collective intelligence behavior is a network phenomenon. A smart community outperforms any of its members; this is the result of people working together, improving on each other’s work. So, we use graph theory, combined with ethnography, to access the wisdom of the crowd. You can think of it as an artificial intelligence whose components are human beings. Our methodology is based on what we call Semantic Social Networks . It has several advantages:
- Robust to ill-defined questions. Exploratory questions are important. Who is doing the most interesting work on X? Which trends are emerging around Y? Free-form conversation minimizes framing biases and encourages serendipitous discovery.
- Scalable . Edgeryders projects can result in large online conversations, with hundreds or thousands of participants. We use graph theory to aggregate them, and extract from them what is most important or unexpected.
- Rigorous . Mining Semantic Social Networks yields qualitative and quantitative research. We apply network metrics to score and weigh the qualitative conclusions of ethnographers.
- Beautiful and intuitive . Everything we do is a network, and networks are easy to visualize. In fact, most people find them intuitive and beautiful. We provide visualizations of our data with all our projects.
We develop and use our own Open Source tools for sensemaking and co-creation
An innovative suite of online software developed, customized and maintained by Edgeryders. The software has been developed in cooperation with leading universities and deployed in projects for the World Bank, United Nations Development Program. It has been supported by Grants from the Rockefeller foundation and funding for Horison2020 research.
Experienced community management
Our community managers help ensure the space is welcoming and inclusive, connect people across shared interests and help move the conversations forward towards action. But what do we mean when we say “community” and “community management”? Materials from a course we developed to teach others how to do this:
A team of researchers to help us turn our conversations into collective intelligence
Our ethnographers read all posts and conversation threads, then tag them using tools we have custom made for this. The research then turns them into visualisations which allow us to get a bigger picture of what the conversation looks like. Together their work results in an easy to understand, visual overview of what connections people in the different discussions are making between experiences, topics, concepts and initiatives. These videos we made for a course give a good idea of what this involves: