What is Edgeryders? It took me a year.

Since I came into this collective, I’ve been trying to answer one question to myself and to others: What is Edgeryders? I’ve been in an interesting position to try to understand this, as I’ve been trusted to come in to the core, while not being a director, employed or really in any way dependent on Edgeryders – financially or socially.

For a few months now, I’ve been on track to become a director of Edgeryders. My time looking at Edgeryders with one foot on the outside is coming to an end. So I thought I’d make the best of it and write down some thoughts before I drown in group think.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I think we are in fact less strange and hard to pin down than we tell ourselves. I’m going to paint with broad strokes here. Please allow some blue-sky thinking and take my absolutes with a grain of salt – I just find it easier to think when allowed to indulge in grand statements.

Here is what I think we are doing:

  • Our mission is to make it easier to think and and act together while retaining personal autonomy.

  • Collective thought and action without the right tools is expensive. It often leaves little room for autonomy, which is also expensive. We lower the cost and overhead of collective thought and action with replicable online/offline community building methods, and make collective sense-making accessible through innovative tools and practices.

  • Meanwhile, we constantly strive to improve autonomy of the individual in the collective while also maintaining bonds of trust and commitment. We don’t like having bosses, we like thinking and acting together, but we also recognise that no boss is worse than the tyranny of consensus.

  • Our drive towards unorthodox organisational structures come from striking this balance, rather than from an ideological commitment to decentralisation or direct-democracy principles.

  • Finally, we believe that a network that balances these things can act as an extension of the intelligence of every individual in the network. Because of that, we are eager to connect to and incubate communities on the edges to extend the reach of our sensors into the world as far as possible. But to keep this collective intelligence as sharp as possible, we’re honing our skills in community management, netiquette and empathy to keep our network healthy.

Our commitment to this mission can be traced in circles within circles of how we work. It is our vision for a better future, the philosophy that informs our research, the methodology that guides our community-building and the tenants upon which we build our own organisation.

What do you think about this mission statement? Does it ring true to you?

5 Likes

I dont quite get this… how do you mean?

The rest is very reasonable, and I’m glad you found your own words for what it is, and a version of a mission.
The only way in which it differs from our existing, let’s say “official” one if that word even exists around here - is that you focus on the collective, whereas the former is focusing on project building. True, this year has been a lot about team, ways of working together, governance, and balancing it all out. I’d be curious what you would’ve said years ago when we were running like a crazy machine talking about projects, projects, projects, and all this that you wrote was lying around and being subtext. That’s how I remember it, at least.

Projects are means to the end, for sure.
So good signs all over.

I agree with the points you make for sure.

As I see it, we have two modes: project mode and not project mode AKA the rest of the time. In project mode we adapt to whatever structure is required to fulfill the contract. Much of that time doesn’t call for a lot of autonomy.

But in seeking connections, cooking up projects or areas of interest, etc. I would say we are reasonably autonomous but with a lot of cross-checking to see if the others share the interest.

I do agree that there is not the ideological commitment to decentalisation and direct democracy that you find in, say, more political orgs.

2 Likes

What I mean by this is that the mission informs how we organize internally, who we work with, how we budget, which projects we take on and what world we want to help create. It is present throughout, inside and out.

This is becoming more complex now though, as projects and activities start running in parallell and we scale. Case in point – we have two large research projects over the next three years that some, but not all, are involved in. During this time other activities are also happening, and it’s quite possible that we’ll have groups working autonomously on projects with little overlap. Perhaps something new comes up in the next three years outside of the research network context that ends up being even bigger in both budget at scope, while involving a completely different set of people. That’s when it becomes more important than ever to be unified by mission and purpose.

1 Like

I agree, though to be honest I like how, despite how wordy we are, we are rather minimal at codifying ourselves.

1 Like

I agree that in the Edgeryders company we have a certain, unusual way of organizing ourselves … but do we have a mission, or a purpose? Not so much. The collective intelligence tools and techniques are driven by some of us, but not all (I, for one, don’t believe in these things).

So I see Edgeryders rather as a partnership firm (like, say, a lawyer firm) where we share the administrative overhead but grant each other the freedom to work and specialize in the areas they like. While also helping each other out in projects with (paid) work. I think it was @alberto who brough that comparison with a partnership firm up some time ago.

2 Likes

I don’t disagree, @hugi… but still it does not tell me what Edgeryders is. :smiley:

It does, however, tell me how we do things. And that’s what matters in my book. Given the how, what you end up doing is emergent.

Personally, I would find very useful a simple spiel that I can give to others. I don’t mind if it’s incomplete, or way off the mark. Now I say something like this:

It’s a company bolted on top of an online community, which it uses as a collective intelligence engine. It has two arms: a research arm, that builds methods and software to evoke and harvest collective intelligence dynamics. And a consulting arm, that deploys those methods and that software in the service of people that need them.

Very shallow, and waves off the whole dynamics Hugi talks about. But there you have it.

2 Likes

This is totally new information for me. Is that the same as saying you don’t believe in the methodology we use? An alternative read - which I would recognise from before, is thatt you don’t see how in the bigger game of making impact we are the most effective going this way?

Yes @nadia Hugi, completely agree with the possibility of new teams running pretty big projects, and that’s where we will need to add new processes to not lose each other. I do hope some of us have an idea of how to do it without becoming a heartless law firm, which is a model that, like Matt, I see it happening now (less the heartless :).

Yes, that’s what I think. If something is not making an impact, it’s not working as far as I’m concerned. It’s not that the methodology is necessarily wrong, but, at least at this point, not efficient enough.

1 Like

gotcha… thought so. I very much respect your point of view and completely see where you are coming from. it happens to me often to think about this too… hopefully if more of us become inclined to do very hands on development or impact work that will be equally viable in our company as i.e. the research approach.

1 Like

What is your timeline Matt? I often wonder how to think about “impact”. Especially whn it comes to the messy stuff (where we often find ourselves)?