Edgeryders: presentation at Swedish Ambassador's residence in South Africa

7/27/2019 Edgeryders: presentation at Swedish Ambassador's residence in South Africa

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EdgerydersCome together. Inspire one another. Support each other.

Peer to peer.

Nadia EL-Imam, [email protected], @Ladyniasan

Model for fostering more trust in web of relationships with environment includingcustomers. Story starts in 2011 when I was with the Council of Europe. Growing youthunemployment and discontent with the society our parents built. My team was taskedwith building proposals for how to reform youth policy in europe.


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Global unrest, rapid climate change, mass unemployment, outdated governancestructures. So we turn to consultants for advice and perspective. But the Mckinseysofer old world solutions to new world problems. You cant solve the problems of thefuture with solutions of the past. Edgeryders has the network and methodology toconsult on questions at edge of context. We are here today because we want topartner with you and access your networks.


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Useful to have visualisation of abstract concept emergence:REALITY AND THE WAY PEOPLE BEHAVE IN IT IS MESSY AND UNPREDICTABLE. What youare looking at here is a work of art by Berlin based artist Mey Lean Kroneman.Lumibots. Emit and react to light. They show how complex patterns emerge from thecombination of the interactions between the robots, influences from theirsurroundings and just two simple rules. A metaphor for prinzgarten, the financialcrisis. - already two rules make it complex and unpredictable.


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The first move is to recast citizens as experts. And look for the knowledge aboutyouth as embedded in the youth itself dispersed among young people. As opposed toconcentrated in credentialed experts.

The rationale for this is that citizens as a whole typically have a diferent and richer outlook on the problem space than any government agency, large NGO orcorporate. This is especially true for the development problems you are mostinterested in, because they live in all of those developing regions and countries; theywere born and bred there, they speak the languages, they have access to informationvectors that are not accessible to us.


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A THINK TANK

you you

So we decided to roll out a radically many-many participation exercise. We thought ofit as a think tank, which would be:

- distributed. People would participate from wherever they were, using an onlineplatform as a virtual workspace.- massively collaborative. It needed not to break down as the number of participantsgrew.- self-selected. Anyone who cared about the issue was welcome to participate,without Council of Europe filtering.- experience-based. We emphasized stories and experiences, not opinions. We findthe former are richer and less controversial than the latter.


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We believe this approach is superior to the traditional one of hiring a small number ofexperts. The key is in the openness: extensive experience from the open sourcesoftware, Wikipedia etc. shows that open processes are more robust to errors. When alot of people are watching, mistakes are quickly spotted and eliminated. Also, in thedemocratic arena, openness generates legitimacy and consensus: nobody cancomplain that they have been excluded when the door to the process wasdemonstrably wide open all along.


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The Edgeryders networkin December 2012Density 0.028

Average weighted degree 10.87

Average distance 2.3

Of course, a great many people working together generate a lot of content.Aggregating it into a coherent final product can be a challenge. We won thatchallenge using fairly sophisticated techniques: to highlight the connections acrossall the diferent stories and pieces of information we were getting from thecommunity we used ethnographic software. Also, we used network analysis to get anoverall view of which arguments had been most widely debated and whichconclusions had been validated by most people.


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On the other You have bottom up initiatives with experimental and alternativeanswers to the question of how we want to live in the cities in the future while facingenormous challenges (climate change, lack of resources, new form of mobility,gentrification, unequal chances in the educational systemetc.). These initiatives areoften precarious and lack long term perspectives. Most of the time they don't haveaccess to political decision-making influencing their fate or even to a contact personin the political system. Ive showeed you an example from Berlin.This is not justabout Berlin. In fact we are seeing this situation all over Europe with diferent levelsor areas of government setting policies that fail to join up. The result being thatcitizens and people working for institutions are trapped between policies that makecompeting, often contradictory, demands. And so if we want to be able to ensurethat citizens and institutions have the means to be able to afect change andimplement much needed creative solutions, we need to be sure that the processesand policy instruments that enable this are there. And if they dont exist we need tobuild them.

Princessinengarten meets so much of what we need. Ans the people involved in it have a lot of valuable experiences and

knowledge about alternative ways of making a living, achieving resilience, creating and caring for commons,

participating in shaping our collective future, building healthy relationships with others and ourselves, promoting newways of learning and new things to learn. Our biggest resource in trying to address the big challenges we face are

people. In fact Europe is full of lots of people with unusual skills and knowledge invaluable for addressing pressing

challenges. Many of whom are already pioneering solutions in their local environment. But your dont try to find them by

trying to hire them as specialists because you dont know who or where the creative solutions will come from-

Prinzessinengarten was not built by city planners or architects but by passionate amateurs.


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One of the members is active in mobilising businesses to step forward and refuse topay protection money to the Maa. As well as openly declare their refusal to do so.On one hand way for consumers to support them by choosing them over otherbusinesses. It also inspires others to also act against organised crime by showing thatif you do it, no one will come after you.


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Another Edgeryder won the European Social Innovation competition 2013. The projecthe proposed. Is now under development as an Edgeryders project. It is an algorithmfor network bartering. It aims to enable local economies to function even under severeliquidity constraints. Its called Economy App Moneyless economy for the 99%.


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Innovation is important and much sought after in our modern societies. In Europe at least we haveextensive innovation policies, and large and well-funded systems of government agencies, venturecapital investors, incubators, accelerators, universities; and this system has branched a massive eforton social innovation and social enterprise, that includes specialized incubators, impact investmentfunds and ad-hoc legislation. So, we were surprised to find that almost NO story reported byedgeryders involve any of these actors. Many people reported, on the contrary, that they areinaccessible mostly because they did not seem to find their activities valuable.

Why might that be? It seems intuitive that these forms of innovation ARE valuable, in a social sense. Weare not sure. Some point out that the Silicon Valley approach gonna change the world through makingloads of money really fast has captured the discourse on innovation. If you tell a mentor I have anidea to fight ofdomestic violence they respond by asking you what the business model is. Of coursewe know where this comes fror, and there should be a drive towards sustainability, but maybe wehave gone so far into monetization of social solutions that some of the most creative stuf is falling ofthe grid.

Others claim that disruptive innovation is, well, disruptive: and disruptive innovation is impossible toevaluate even in theory. Evaluators try to measure it in terms of the world they live in (and does notcontain the innovation), whereas innovators try to build the world which does contain the innovation.The former are accountable to the present; the latter to the future.


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People experimenting with alternative responses to new problems exist on the edge.People looking for answers & who have resources live here. The people with resourcesask the Mckinseys of the world to help make sense of whats going on. But they, likethe clients they are trying to help live in the centre. The centre asks the wrongquestions and tries to solve the wrong problems. Edgeryders builds infrastructure andsafe space for meaningful and mutually generative interaction between the centre andthe edges. And fosters collaboration on a massive scale around alternative responsesto systemic crises: ecological, socioeconomic and political.Unlike other collaborationplatforms Edgeryders focuses on the social software of human relationships.


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Through our online and oine presence we foster collaboration on three levels.


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It takes a

village...Leaders. Nurturers. Developers.

Bridge builders. Artists.

People contribute differentthings.

They are all needed.

you need people to think with. People to help you do the legwork. People to test itwith. People who connect it with the outer world. A healthy environment is one wherethey all feel valued and acknowledged. Safe space for interaction between edge andcentre: Inclusive, diverse, nurturing.


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Example of a solution to a Problem coming out of Edgeryders: gap in innovationsupport system for pre-market and radical innovation. The unMonastery is like artistresidency but for innovators to take on social problems with local community. P2pmutual learning, knowledge transfer.

Documents

Edgeryders: presentation at Swedish Ambassador's residence in South Africa