+1 to @Nadia suggestion:
“I would ask everyone who genuinely cares about Edgeryders and its potential, and is sufficiently removed from current conflicts, to get in touch with her and help build it, as it is far too much work for any one person to carry alone.”
On the above, I have notes, and it’s been on my to do list but unfortunately it’s not a priority right now with everything else going on - it will get done though, as well as suggesting a fixed London meetup on a more regular basis.
On the documentation point, briefly: I recently bought a smart pen, hoping they’d reached a point of reasonable maturity, as I tend to document everything, as in every conversation I ever have in note form and have found recently I rarely have the time to type up my notes. It’s kind of working but I haven’t yet established a decent workflow with it.
I also tend to record a lot of conversations and have been paying for transcription at a reasonable rate but tend to only do this for things that make sense to publish - but that also requires substantial editing time.
Having grown up using a laptop (at the age of 11 I was told I was dsylexic and given a laptop as a cure), so I’ve always spent a lot of time online sharing my thoughts and engaging in online dialogue - but at some point in the last year I moved away from this. I find the information overload of platforms like twitter, slack and also at times EdgeRyders to be massively exhausting, and a cause for fragmented thought, both in terms of emotional intensity but also that a constant feed often infers an illusion of progress.
I’ve found of late that a staggered trajectory of: informal conversation over time > curated structured conversation on a subject derived from a longer running thread > distilled into notes > shared notes with time for reflection > structured 2-3 day meet up focused on prioritisation and alignment > assignment of tasks > 1 week sprint > publish. Derives much more successful results than the previous mode that I was operating in. This though obviously has it’s pro’s and con’s.
By way of example this is an approach that has been taken with The unMonastery BIOS, and I anticipate with publication in a month or so time, we will be able to judge whether this process can yield sufficient results to justify it’s relatively closed nature.
Also there’s something worth noting that would benefit from more thought, there is clearly a problem within the transfer and distillation of tacit knowledge from those who do the heavy lifting in networks such as EdgeRyders and unMonastery. That due to the high workloads of those doing a substantial chunk of work from the start there is rarely time to skillshare, teach and pass on knowledge to newcomers, and this seems to grow exponentially overtime. This from my perspective is one of the main contributors to the concentration of power that (accidently) forms in networks that aspire to decentralisation and any form of horizontality. Classical institutions rarely suffer from this because clear hierachy also enables a structured means of transfering knowledge over time, we’ve also had many centuries to figure this out.
Too often it seems that networked and distributed organisations form and grow around a set of personalities that hold everything together by maintaining an overview - as communities or responsibilites grow, the pressure intensifies and it becomes increasingly difficult to hold up the structure. Observing this from my experience with organisations over the last few years, I’ve begun to try and factor in an exit strategy as a part of the workload that is accounted for from the start. Whether that be through teaching, documenting specific aspects of great important or making sure to share external relationships key to the initiatives survival.
**Not as brief as I intended, hopefully it doesn’t read as a ramble 
