Like many others, I have been using edgeryders/edgeryding to make new professional contacts, discover and develop new knowledge, improve projects, find talent to hire and build meaningful partnerships and funding opportunities. While the platform does change shape, the overall process is designed so that participation in the online conversation and events generates some kind of levelling up that I cannot do alone
As someone whose life and work exists outside the normal order of things, I felt like we really needed some peer-to-peer way to nurture personal and professional development. I had tried out a lot of different alternatives: higher education, online learning etc but nothing seems to really fit in terms of both learning and generating tangible opportunities to do interesting things.
What makes Edgeryders work for me is being plugged into an open ended, eclectic scene of people from different backgrounds and places in their lives right now. Humans are much better at pointing one another in the right direction through dialogue than trying to find the kind of things I need on a well structured website or formal education process. If I don’t know what it’s called, or even that I need it, or if the word for it doesn’t exist, how can I find it? Through people who connect me to people and knowledge.
When we came up with the name, Edgeryders, it was this idea somehow - navigating these “wilderness” spaces for which we don’t have maps through edges (connections made in conversation between individuals, places, topics and all kinds of other stuff).
What keeps me involved is that I love and respect the community and anarchic+ friendly culture we have built together 
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