Witnesspedia
child:
title: About
slug: about
parent: 15299
summary: Project Witness was born out of the Science Fiction Economics lab, an Edgeryders initiative>
keywords: worldbuilding, partipatory
image: https://edgeryders.eu/uploads/default/original/2X/b/b1764965659f27bf49fc137fafe36adddcc17c63.jpeg
About the organisers{style=“color: #fff; text-shadow: 2px 2px #000; padding-bottom: .4rem; font-weight: bold;” class=“leading-tight text-4xl”}
Alberto Cottica
Head of Science Fiction Economics Lab. Economist and network scientist, expert on online collaboration, collective intelligence, and participatory, networked organization. Worked with governments and IGOs in various capacities; now entrepreneuring at Edgeryders; civic hacking with Wikitalia and Spaghetti Open Data. In the past a reasonably successful rock musician (Wikipedia), but he is trying to quit.
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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
Author of Numbercaste, The Inhuman Race, and several other stories available from HarperCollins and Aethon Books.
Nominated for the Nebula Award, published on ForeignPolicy and Slate, and appeared on Amazon bestseller lists.
Researcher for Data, Algorithms and Policy team at LIRNEasia, a think tank working across the Global South; Co-founder and editor of Watchdog Sri Lanka, a fact-checker.
For the rest of the time, Yudhanjaya argues with the cat, tinkers with OSUN, a series of AI+human experiments in creativity, builds imaginary floating cities
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Joriam Ramos
Author and networks specialists. Works as Enspiral’s Catalyst - a self-managed servant leader role that aims to turn the network’s invisible resources into something visible and available for all. Creator and manager of Jojojo, a personality exploration cardgame that uses weird and profound questions to accelerate connections between people. Proud owner of a sci-fi Youtube channel.
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Nadia E.N
Edgeryders Co-Founder. Leading development of the SciFi Economics Lab. Contact at nadia@edgeryders.eu.
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Hugi Ásgeirsson
Creative producer, researcher, developer, and community builder. I create and evolve tools for participatory ways of working together and employ those methods in my own projects. Most of my life and work have been in co-created and participatory settings. In fact, I often joke that I have no idea how to do anything else. By this point I have been a central node in participatory art projects and festivals, participatory politics, co-created placemaking, open-source software development, open networked companies, and even dabbled with a co-created religion. I’m a co-director of Edgeryders and co-founder of Blivande. Say hi to me here!
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Michela De Domenico
Architect and comics artist, Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering construction. She has published several papers and the book “Fantastic architecture, the visionary archetypes of the comic strip” for Interscienze edizioni and has partecipated in several International Architecture Conferences. She also made comics for KAPPA editions, Centro Fumetto Andrea Pazienza, Tunuè, Edizioni Interculturali, storyboards and street art works. Her style is characterized by graphic lines of a dirty black and white, mixed with watercolor, realistics and visionary environments. She supports her research in the field of architectural design, teaching at the Messina Art School “Basile”.
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Marco Lo Curzio
He graduated in Architecture at University of Reggio Calabria, Italy and specialized in Interface Design at the Domus Academy in Milan.
In 1999 he found Sciara srl, a company dedicated to promoting cultural actions and media design. Since 2011, he directs the hub of activity of Sciara as a film and television production company, as creative producer and project manager.
Since 2006 he teaches Graphic design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania.
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Edgeryders
Edgeryders is the home of the Sci-Fi Economics Lab and Project Witness. We are a company living in symbiosis with an online community of thousands of hackers, activists, radical thinkers and doers, and just normal people that want to make a difference.
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Fondazione di Comunità Messina
The Messina Advanced Social District is a cluster of companies, non-profit, research and art organisations. It consists of 120 local enterprises, spanning from breweries to construction, from social cooperatives to research centers, from energy production to a contemporary art museum. They were all created or consolidated in the last 20 years in or near the city of Messina and employ more than 400 people, about a 100 of them coming from socially fragile situations. It supports, directly or indirectly, cultural production, tech innovation such as immersive environments for learning and therapy or energy production from marine currents. Its alternative economic approach which focuses on expanding the local communities’ and citizen liberties is coordinated by a community foundation, Fondazione di Comunità di Messina (FdCM).
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Blivande
House Blivande is a center for participatory art, interdisciplinary culture, and visionary community building in Stockholm, Sweden. We cultivate an ecosystem that allows those who participate to realize their projects, find collaborators & make a living. Blivande is founded on the belief that building networked ecosystems of creative people emerged in the principles of participatory culture can help meet challenges in society as a whole. We do this both through the usual avenue of artistic practice– through asking questions and challenging assumptions, but also through an immersive lived experience of day to day collaboration & blurred boundaries between artistic projects and identities.
In this project, Blivande collaborates on engagement and driving participation, as well as on hosting events for the co-creation of Witness.
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Climate-KIC
The Science Fiction Economics Lab operates with the support of EIT Climate-KIC as part of our work to extend the space of economic models that are conceivable and deployable to build a successful, fair civilization, while preserving the planet’s ecological balance.
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Nordisk Kulturfond: Globus
The SciFi Economics Lab: Worldbuilding Academy is funded by The Nordic Culture Fund, supporting innovative and dynamic artistic and cultural life in the Nordic Region that is diverse, accessible and of high quality.
Globus is the Nordic Culture Fund’s new funding programme in 2020-2024, designed to give artists and cultural players new opportunities to seek funding for projects that extend beyond the Nordic region. With Globus Opstart, the Nordic Culture Fund is taking the first exploratory step towards establishing Globus as a support program during 2021.
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