Basically it’s engaging people doing interesting work outside the mainsteam to sign up on edgeryders.eu, submit their own solutions oriented stories, and share their own experiences as comments and posts on the stories submitted by others. Wherever you happen to be based and in different parts of the world (the community consists of almost 2000 individuals in 40+ countries).
The idea is to discover one another’s approaches, and get a deeper, shared understanding around the different themes. And then to we get collaborating on shared solutions, or helping one another develop/strengthen/ scale existing projects, during the physical workshops. Without the online interaction it is difficult to collaborate, p2p, with people all over the planet. Or even the person around the corner who it is difficult to interact with because of invisible barriers.
The other part of the work is preparing all the communications materials in your language and use social media to draw people into edgeryders.eu. This includes producing mission briefs: engaging calls for submissions of more solution centric essays, and commenting the ones that already are online from the local/personal perspective. It also involves a lot of work reaching out to people and networks and draw them into signing up on edgeryders.eu and participating in the conversation on the platform.
Why do we keep online discussion in the Edgeryders platform rather?
We use social media to spread the word about the initiative, highlight great people and projects discovered in Spot the Future and share news. However we use those channels only to share links back to places on the edgeryders platform. Why?
- Edgeryders is designed to support and foster solutions oriented discussion, knowledge sharing and collaboration. The environment is designed by and for people who want to get things done together with other. Not discuss what others should or could do.
- there is a critical mass of great people and initiatives already here to connect with
- good environment to get to know one anothers projects and challenges before physical meetings such as workshop so we make effective use of our time together
- allows people to participate remotely
- good for collaborative preparation and documentation of workshop results...and continued exchange after
- does not exclude people who don't use FB or Twitter for different reasons
- platform is free, open source, and evolves around community members needs.
- ethical online engagement: beyond the aims of any given project we are all trying to help one another create paid work opportunities that are aligned with community members interests and talents.