A big part of the reason we manage to get such ambitious initiatives off the ground with few resources is because we collaborate well online through the platform. This works because it enables people who want to get involved but cannot take on big responsibilities or have only very little time to contribute to be involved alongside others who put in much more time and effort. Every little drop of love is never wasted! Also by working out a loud, keeping the entire process open and documented this way, everyone learns how these initiaitves are built and more people feel confident to act on realising more projects.
As promised I have prepared the first draft of some material for the team members handling communications/ PR /Social media accounts for each country to look at. The idea is to have attractive and informative material to modify and blast out to your various networks and channels.
For today priority #1 is: get out the Call for online community builders in Armenia, Egypt and Georgia. To make it easy for the news to be spread on Facebook /Twitter/ Linkedin /Mailing lists or newsletters and to the press I have prepared the material for you. Could help by translating the text into Arabic, Armenian and Georgian below? Just add your version of the text in the document. Just add your text below the original one as a reply in the page for the task I set up here.
There are 3 other challenges you can get involved in this week
Identifying themes and questions we want to explore together in Armenia, Egypt and Georgia respectively. We start by going through these documents and sharing out thoughts on their contents. Dig deeper and find out what we really need to explore and understand together.
Preparing our workshop tour of Armenia, Egypt and Georgia. Add your proposed dates and venues on this shared google calendar (email nadia@edgeryders.eu for access to it). Who do you think should we meet when we are in town and what are they working on? Which people should meet or work with one another in your local environment, but currently don't? How can we make the workshop as generative as possible for everyone who participates?
Reaching out friends and everyone you know to tell them amout the initiative and come up with creative ways to involve them in the fun!
Get started by just taking on one of the tasks or leaving a comment below and we take it from there Welcome aboard!
Hi! Welcome [ElaMi5], [Khatuna], [gazbee sorour] and all,
So one of the things we could do to prepare the Tour is to set up a list of people or initiatives we think are worth having there, and then send them a personalized invitation. We can cross check lists with the engagement managers and see who knows whom:
the activists in Vake Park and others that [Inge Snip] knows..
and some more I’ve come across on the web.
For spreading the word we can ask:
[TOOLosophy], who knows people in the Droni Association, and he could help spread the word, see if something interesting shows up in that area ..
Onnik Krikorian who seems to know a lot about what's shaking and has a critical overview
CafeBabel or other interesting online news portals for wider reach. Maybe partner up with them and similar outlets? (and adding UNDP's press office contacts)
Once we have a date and location, we can go through all these and get in touch! this should be in a couple of days time i think, right? Yaaay!!
Before I forget, and I don’t know if this really matters, but if the projects were set up by foreigners, does that matter? For example, ACCT was set up by a lithuanian EVSer (who did EVS at Droni, so this is, indirect a project via them). Same goes for Tbilisi makerspace.
Hey! it’s great you know the people behind these, here are my comments on the issues you raised, if anyone else has points of view to offer do contribute
I think the first and most important is to seed conversations here online, so the invitation better suited is this one: https://edgeryders.eu/groups/spot-the-future/paid-work-opportunities-call-for-articles-about-interesting-initiatives-and-0The more and interesting stories we have the higher the chances that the workshop in Tbilisi will be useful as a mirroring act of the online engagement. And its contents could go beyond introductions and deep into the issues that people will be raising here, before they / we all meet. So the invitation at this point should be to join us here.
Later, depending on workshops location and room capacity we can send out invitations with time, date and schedule included…
Here is a list of some personal accounts of change makers on Edgeryders, old and new, to get a picture of the type of stories and formats we found super useful in the past: we framed it as a Share your Ryde mission which community members took up: /t/share-your-ryde/385 (or simply search for “ryde” in Site content -upper right corner)
Re: foreign ppl driving projects: Sure, anyone’s experience in helping build a future for Georgia is relevant, nationals, migrants, expats etc.
Re: rural community organisation article - there is a lot of interest already on Edgeryders for sustainable agriculture and the resilience of small producers, so any perspective from another part of the world would surely be helpful… From what I’m reading I realise that the discourse is so similar to Romanian villages and villagers - there seems to be a lot of conservative attitude; the reason why community supported agriculture frameworks are starting to pay off here is because people well trained in rural development or knowleadgeable of the benefits of organic produce are acting as an intermediaries or bring their experience to the table, and are up for doing a lot of hand holding. otherwise it’s really hard to self-organize in rural communities.
As Nadia was saying, feel free to adapt them so that it makes sense not just in the Georgian language, for for Georgians as you know them I look forward to reading stories from the Edge, I hope you had a bit of time to go through our older stories in Share your Ryde to better understand the kind of personal accounts we’re looking for. thanks Inge!!
Wondering what your feeling is about the responses you have been getting (if any), or from chats with people you know. Do you think we’re onto something or should we change bits in the way we frame this? Does it sound like something Georgians would get involved in? or the kinds we wanna involve?
Welcome aboard!