How has your work been affected and how has your day to day life changed? What tools have you used to cope? What help or resources do you need to deal with the situation? How have the lives of friends and family who work been affected (potentially in ways different from yours)?
I am going to organise weekly calls in March/April to talk about this. For all of us who are staying home and worried about your work safety, income and opportunities in the future. Many people I know are feeling despair, and turn inwards. What if we could just talk about it and see what others are doing?
Rant!
Share about situations in different countries
Offer some thoughtful advice or resource to other people
Connect people who could offer gigs and projects with others.
Not judge, but listen.
Do you want to participate? The calls happen each Tuesday at 12:00PM. Register at this link: http://bit.ly/coronawork
I offer to facilitate the first ones. It would be helpful if you tell in advance what is your situation, and a question you have or want to ask others, so please leave a comment below.
For the issues which gather more responses and for which we see that are common between many people, we can host more specific themed calls.
If you have a project you are working on, let us know - we are finding and mobilizing mentors from all over to help with specific issues - so we’ll match and make!
See you on Tuesday?
P.S. Working Languages: En, Fr. If you speak only your native language, don’t worry! We will invite other facilitators who can translate.
I have many entrepreneurs friends who might need to rethink entire business models - but I wonder: at what point you go into life changing decisions based on a crisis situation which can evolve in so many different ways? You can’t predict what will be in 3 months, so why make those decisions? My hypothesis is that it is a false comfort to our restless brains.
I know another who has an art studio next door to the office where she works. She is trying to get her boss to let her strong an ethernet cable and a phone line across to the studio so she can work there. - @johncoate
A lot of my friends in Italy are experiencing some remote-working but also companies are asking them to use their paid leave and stay home.
So far a friend that is working in the food industry is still going to work, their company is going to be open through the crisis. - @matteo_uguzzoni
Yep, it is quite an interesting situation we have here (Czech Republic) at the University now (Charles Uni is the biggest with the highest number of international students). The so-called presence study system we are working under requires quite strictly from us (the teaching staff) to conduct frontal lecturing, consulting (and to a certain extent examining as well) in person, which is not possible. But there is even more to it - exchange student being sent home, but still having to fulfil financial obligations they previously gained, temporarily residing students (participating in full study programs) stuck in legal no man’s land with no visa and much more,… unfortunately.
The system, us, were not ready for this challenge and have to devise short-term, mid terms and long term strategies at once, since the last week. I am just wondering whether we should unify our approaches as the teaching staff, or give way to differentiating specificities among fields, faculties and individuals…
This is not as much about earnings as rather about being able to essentially do our jobs at all and also remain supportive and helpful to the students. I guess similar experiences are to be found other areas, you might have experienced something similar yourself…let us see.
I was observing the last 48 hours how people are gathering online to find different solution for this crisis in tunisia.
I am super overwhelmed by the dynamic and the engagement of people from different ages and backgrounds, working on social and #technicalchallenges! Nevertheless, I did also observe that a lot of groups are working on the same thing and redoing the same stuff. I think now, it is time maybe to canalize the efforts and avoid redundancy.
My #suggestion would be to create a platform, that facilitate the communication and the coordination of the different working groups. This platform would also serve to condensate the hacks and knowledge that you have been collecting in the last few days.[Amine Abdelmoula]
Hi Yassine, good to meet you, I see that you were involved in Hack4Environment with @zmorda and others. To me, the technical side of platforms and having skilled people to build and aggregate data is one thing. But the other one is the sharing, use of the platform - the facilitation is usually hard, it takes a lot of time. Do you find the same with the one you have created? How is it going?
Is there nothing similar in Tunisia that you can volunteer to help with, so that you are part of a team and have better results?
Hope to see you in what on the calls and talk more!
This is how it is going: my co-founder and I have been always working remotely, in fact we only met in the flesh a long time after we begun working together; so from that point of view our life didn’t change at all.
Our current problem is that we make hiking maps and guides, and that requires people wanting to travel and go hiking, which is (rightly so) not high on the list of many people in the middle of a pandemic. So for all intents and purposes we can consider this hiking season pretty much cancelled before it even started, which means not many sales this year, I’m afraid.
So it’s seems like it is time for re-invention, once again. But it is not so simple, because I am contemplating two somewhat conflicting thoughts:
We want to keep alive what we have built so far, because we actually like doing it and it seems it was providing some value, but it won’t be easy in the current situation.
I feel we could investigate this opportunity to look for something else we could also do. Should we? And not just to “diversify business”, I really just wish this won’t be yet another wasted global crisis. But where to start?
I am starting from this call with you, let’s see. Because I don’t know if this makes sense outside my own head, but at least I hope that talking about it out loud could help. Maybe I’m not alone in this…
It makes a lot of sense. Entrepreneurship is never a dull business is it?
Myself, I am starting a new business and I realise that I’m lucky because I can use this downtime for a solid R&D phase building up on existing plans. But I am in the phase before going to market… So it allows for a lot of these lessons to be taken in.
More about diversifying the model tomorrow,
I would really hope @yannick can join and share his story from a different industry, but anyway you two would hit it off!
It isn’t dull, it’s challenging to keep it at the right level of fun/work as you go though.
“Solid R&D” and “plans” …I wish I were this organised well done to you! And looking forward to hearing more about your idea.
re: diversify, you are the experts when it comes to reinventing work, studying alternative economic models… that’s why I am here (not only to talk would other products could we create, so to speak). I really am hopeful that a different way to conduct business could show itself in light of this pandemic. I’m hearing a lot about social enterprises (being very close to the Impact Hub network) and part of its community, but… is it becoming just a buzz word already?
‘never let a good crisis go to waste’ - is what some are thinking. But yes, many of the crowds we’ve met over the years at Edgeryders did think together about alternative models, but they are always niche or tryouts (this Fairbnb in particular has been in beta test for years afaik), or banking on foresight. I feel what’s missing is the actionable opportunity for someone to actually make them legible and accessible by others.
Anyway, Yannick just wrote a call to action here, if you’re interested in reading before tomorrow:
Hello all, thank you to the many who attended, it was really interesting.
I am collecting notes for weekly updates. But until then, the call remains for everyone who wants to participate in a shared effort and a real community response.
please take a little time to share how you personally are coping:
Pick one option
You pair up with another person to interview each other in another call, then edit the stories in your own computers and post them in the Campfire.
(We have @oliiive and @MariaEuler who are ready to do this… anyone else just give a shout in a comment below)
You write your story directly in the Campfire. How? Freestyle. If you need help, let us know below and I’ll set up some guiding questions for you.
Man, I feel you. I really do. It’s exactly the same thing here. I worry about being too entrenched, and holding on to an unviable business. But i also worry about being too volatile, without the staying power to stick around until the real impact comes in.
I am afraid we can never be sure we are doing the right thing. But we can support each other, and provide each other with much-needed external (but sympathetic) points of views. Hang in there!
Hi Noemi, good to meet you too, about tunisiavscorona project, I was the responsible of marketing and because of UI, people didn’t like it a lot and they didn’t understand the concept.
Hello, I am Yassine Metoui member of the young science association of Tunisia in the IT sector. Because of the circumstances that our country is experiencing, the association young sciences is developing a website which brings together several volunteers on an international scale so that we can help people in their quarantine, help perhaps in the form of donations or simply to answer questions proposed by visitors to the site. In other way the visitors of the site are people who seek answers to their questions or who need logistical help, as being volunteers we can even give food for those who cannot afford to buy or who cannot transport themselves. For this we need several volunteers in all the countries, we have already contacted the Red Crescent and several Tunisian associations and clubs and several communities from Germany, France, Mexico ect … if you are interested in this project please contact me contact as soon as possible and thank you in advance.
I mean this: if you are trying to build something not-so-intuitive, like Edgeryders, it might take a fairly a long time for enough people to “get it” so that you start seeing real results. During that initial time, nothing much is happening. It looks like you are failing. But are you really? Or are you slowly climbing the first part of an exponential curve?
There are two opposite risks, that of being too in love with a project that is unviable, and that of being too impatient with a project that is perfecly viable, it just needs a bit of time.
Hello
I want to ask for something.
How can i find many volunteers,associations and organizations in other countries because i am trying my best to find them and help them with my plateform.
I want to help all of them because they are suffering.
feel free to join those as well,
well done to you! And looking forward to hearing more about your idea.