Edgeryders is a community of people doing work outside the mainstream in over 30 countries. Members use the edgeryders.eu platform to come together, inspire one another and help each other, peer to peer. What makes Edgeryders unique is our focus on using advanced techniques and software to induce and harness collective intelligence dynamics to help us better understand complex issues. We do this so that we can make better use of our limited time and resources in trying to tackle them. Most recently we used these methods and tools to explore if networked communities like our own can take care of public assets at scale:
Engagement managers are part of the community heart that keeps Edgeryders thriving and growing. Some of us like @Noemi @Alberto and myself have been doing it continuously since the very beginning almost three years ago. Others such as @Inge and @Hazem have also been part of shaping the Edgeryders school of online engagement.
The Engagement Manager role requires a combination of research/storytelling skills and willingness to learn the Edgeryders way of getting things done online as a distributed team. There is no manual, as the practices are new. However, there is a workflow that we know works for us and which paid Engagement Managers would need to pick up very quickly:
1. Finding interesting people and activities in your local environment from whom others can learn and writing engaging stories about their work (English as well as the local language) on edgeryders.eu.
2. Organising and documenting Weekly Online Community Calls the Edgeryders way (if you do not know how to do this already don’t worry, we can teach you)
3. Updating the social media calendar (Edgeryders News Calendar) with 140 character summaries of stories posted by you and others on edgeryders.eu(see the social media calendar for Spot the Future to get an idea).
4. Translating content on the Edgeryders News Calendar to your own language and spreading it through different online channels (see the social media calendar for Spot the Futureto get an idea).
5. Summarising key points and insights from the relevant online discussions at the end of each week to make it easy for newcomers to catch up in one post (in English as well as in your own language). See the weekly newsletter in English as an example.
- Be present in country missions (about 3 days>) with the project coordinator. We will be doing missions in each country during June-July to meet with different stakeholders on the “youth issue” and related, some more formal than others.
Engagement Managers need to be based in one of these countries (and be fluent in the local language): Armenia, Belarus, Egypt, Georgia, Morocco, or the Ukraine.
The project lasts 3 months and we estimate it will take 2hrs/day to do the above, pay is 1200 USD per engagement manager (6 people in total).
How do we select people for the paid roles?
Engagement Manager roles are economically compensated through paid projects developed by Edgeryders LBG, the not for profit social enterprise which supports the community. We view these paid roles as a way to invest in people who want to make a personal investment in this community and the company that supports it. So we are looking for people who are:
a) curious and proactive in finding out about interesting, relatively unknown, projects in their country from which others can learn (see the case study adventures ).
b) passionate about connecting people and projects in their local environment with their peers elsewhere in the Edgeryders community (see this exchange to get an idea of how we work).
c) proactive and creative in finding ways to involving people who are not too comfortable with technology or who do not have internet access in the conversation on our open source edgeryders.eu online platform, not on FB or other proprietary platforms (an explanation is posted here).
