An overview of the work Edgeryders team and community have been doing so far, organising the opencare community event.
About openvillage Festival:
Happens on 19-21 October, Brussels; it is the final OpenCare community event. Its aim is to showcase opencare as a nascent ecosystem and inspire knowledge sharing and reflection around how projects can support each other. Aside from a show and tell, the festival makes room for practical work around spotlight projects and high potential collaborations.
We’re organising the event around tracks which represent different perspectives and angles by which to understand and build upon the overall concept of OpenCare.
Day 1 OpenCare project & protagonists
Day 2 Spotlight project workshops around sustainability, finances & scaling
Day 3 Spotlight project workshops around policy & investment
Web Minisite: edgeryders.eu/openvillage
Venue
Default: Edgeryders Reef in Brussels
Fallback: The Egg or other commercial venues in the city - see: Location de salle d’événement pour votre organisation à Bruxelles
Key features
“Clearly, community members are using the posts shared by other members as a means of tapping in to learning and expertise” (Gehan)
- Open event: community gathering where anyone who wishes to participate meets, shares knowledge, works together with others ahead of the event
- Open design: OpenVillage is built by participants - the program is curated by community members, both old and new
- Intimacy as care: It is an inclusive event, built as a common journey where participants build stronger ties with each other and set a solid basis for working together beyond the opencare research.
- Barnraise around projects: Using the runup to the festival to raise concrete support for initiatives, and build legitimacy and reputation around the projects at a greater scale
Program
Session examples - Citizen Science and Open Science
Themes are domains of care in which diverse communities are active, and group different sessions together along common work. There are various overlaps between themes, reflected in common questions.
- 3 themes (so far), each curated by an OpenCare Fellow: themes have been submitted earlier, or are emerging from existing conversations
- Open Science and Citizen Science
diy science #engineering opensource technology healthcare #medical #treatments #affordable #inclusive health
- Architectures of Love: Creating policy conditions for open care
communities #bottomup #delivery services #marginal #socialcohesion #newskills culture #policymaking
- Health Autonomy: Working and living well together
health autonomy #socialclinics #home coliving governance #preventative #mentalhealth #wellbeing reciprocity
- Open Science and Citizen Science
- 3 types of session formats emerging
- Talking sessions: talks, panels, debates
- Doing sessions: science workshops (DNA damage testing); outdoor activities (fly fishing), soft care sessions (yoga)
- Harvesting: (de)briefing along common questions
Registration and support for OpenCare participants (Day 1)
Tickets are available to people who contribute to making the festival a high quality, generative and rewarding experience - they are offered in exchange for contributing 1 story (+ 3 comments) OR 1 session proposal OR other organisational tasks.
Participants who received a ticket: cca 35.
Confirmed participants: cca 25 (including team)
Connecting and coordination happens through regular activities facilitated by the edgeryders team: OpenVillage coordination group to crowdsource activity proposals in an open way; Call for participation with stories and comments by focusing on a topic or set of relevant seed stories every week (blogpost); Social media sharing in a distributed way via three emails/ week (hashtags #opencare #openvillage); Weekly Wednesday community calls to welcome new people and discuss ideas for the event.
OpenCare community attending
- OpenInsulin team in Oakland (US) and Ghent (BE)
- echOpen in Paris (FR)
- Hackuarium in Geneva (CH)
- Bagmati River project in Kathmandu (US, Nepal)
- GalGael in Glasgow (UK)
- Acupuncture clinic (UK)
- unMonastery collective and Tiny Houses in Galway (IRE)
- Woodbine community for learning care prevention and first aid from nyc (US)
- FairBnb platform in-progress (European)
- Co-housing project in Lancaster (UK)
- Help Refugees tbc (UK)
- MIR?? (IT)
- OpenRampette?? (IT)
- Soundsight?? (NL)
New questions, interactions and collaborations
The way we build the festival is organically.
We’re seeing community members advancing from having met each other - to socializing around work - to delivering festival content together with the help of the curators.
Ideas to involve OpenCare partners expertise
A. The nascent open care community ecosystem. Presentation and validation of research findings.
Led by Amelia, Federico. See proposal here.
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GraphRyder ethnographic play and restitution
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Present opencare findings in a synthetic way and generate hypotheses /questions
*** Can we take the discussion beyond validation? Ex: We’re seeing initiatives going off the grid legally, but also some which are keen on working within existing frameworks. Where do you see the boundary between selfregulating to route around the system, and working with existing institutions? Have you experienced a change in how you collaborate with diverse actors?"
B. What have we learned about open care and potential to shape current healthcare and welfare systems?
Participated by OpenCare partners, EU reps, OpenCare Fellows.
Modelled on the session from the beginning of OpenCare at LivingOPEN CARE FILES - Welfare through the looking glass. tbc.
C. Meet the Policy Maker: debate around policies of open care
Led by the City of Milano team and involving other cities and community groups.
Make the most out of experiences in creating conditions and infrastructure for open care: open and collaborative policy making. The session would be playing out as a debate with community members and other (senior?) city representatives in Europe.
Questions
- What is a good way to influence policy by active community groups who achieve promising results?
- How do we ensure compliance with legal frameworks and patents?
- What kind of policy supports citizen impulses around collective care rather disrupts?
- ...