How the model of building a global community with EdgeRyders can help initiatives in Bucharest to coalesce and build a collaborative infrastructure. How do we teach ourselves to think in networks and contribute to the city's transformation for the future? Learn more: http://edgeryders.eu/futurespotters

1. Hello all, it’s great to be here, thank you so much for having me. I am
here more as a carrier of a message rather than an expert of sorts..
I would like to make a case that change can come from self-organizing
citizens finding common ground and acting as a community.

2. Crina is a 28 year old splitting her time between freelancing as an art
graduate, raising her three year old and gardening (corn, herbs, broccoli
or goji). Crina is the proud owner of 400 sq metres somewhere at the
edge of Bucharest and finds herself vested in this: “It’s the only fortune I
ever got”, she told me. Her aspiration is to make gardening cool, and
find a community to help steward the garden. She doesn’t know it, but
she is prototyping an alternative way of living in the city, more
autonomous and considerate of nature. She earns a dismal 120
eur/month, and insists that for someone becoming self-sufficient this is
enough.
- See more at: https://edgeryders.eu/en/spot-the-future-bucharest/the-
first-cherries-this-season-taste-like#sthash.BK7XeLEn.dpuf

3. These guys are passionate folks, and in the middle there’s Alex whose
story I recently came to know. Alex noticed that in Bucharest there are
only 49 water fountains left - which means there is one for every 50.000
citizens. If we compare it to a city like Rome, which has about the same
number of citizens as Bucharest and over 2.000 working water
fountains serving locals and visitors, we clearly see the difference.
Alex thinks potable water is a human right, it is vital, yet we only have it
because we pay for it. So with a group of friends he is preparing to
launch an advocacy campaign to convince the municipality to grow the
public network of water fountains throughout the city in order to provide
free drinkable water for all residents and tourists.
- See more at:
https://edgeryders.eu/en/node/4838#sthash.958GchoV.dpuf

4. The people in this picture are from a neighbourhood in Cairo, Egypt,
called Al Mu’tamidia. This is 2011: as the security apparatus is busy
taking a beating in Tahrir Square, the local community are out building
four illegal access ramps to the ring road, forking out all the funding, the
engineering and the workforce, at a total cost of 25% of what it would
have cost the government to do the same work. Then they called out for
the chief of police to inaugurate it. Doesn’t this seem like a story from
the distant future? Well it does, and yet it is not. It turns out that there
are many such citizens operating outside existing processes and
infrastructures, and are motivated enough to go out there and build the
change they want to see.

5. These are just few of the stories I learned about recently.. Like them,
many more people somehow trying to affect change have a story to
present which is valuable. There are surprisingly many trends that
connect many countries across the world. Gender equality, education,
waste and pollution, unemployment etc- these are issues that concern
active change makers. All these stories exist as a live repository and
have been documented on an online platform –with participants
coming in, sharing their work and asking each other for advice. The
numbers are from a conversation that emerged in the course of four
years, on EdgeRyders.

6. Edgeryders is a diverse group of people from over 30 countries and from all walks of life.
They, or we, care about global and local problems. There is a catch though: individuals can’t
solve systemic problems on their own. Many build small projects with limited resources,
and undertaking considerable amounts of risk. So we need a different scale at which to talk
about these problems, a system of peer support across borders and ideologies.
This scale is the Internet, with all the opportunities and connectivity it provides. So we make
it easier for these people to meet and interact, on Edgeryders.eu: our online “home”.
The community keeps growing with every new project that people work on, with bouncing
off ideas that generate enthusiasm, and consequently engage more and more people.
There is also our social enterprise which is dedicated to legitimize the great work people
are doing, and look for opportunities where this work can grow and inspire more people to
join the ryde to the future.

7. So, what kind of future are we looking at here? It is a bit like weather
forecasting. We look at things that are already happening, and scan
them for potential significance. If people talk about some change, not so
interesting. If people are using their limited time, money and energy to
enact change, we sit up and listen.
So, we never ask people “what would you like to happen?”. We have
found this leads to whining and wishful thinking. Instead, we ask them
“what are you actually doing?” We gather experiential data, and
generate propositions like: “Young people in country X are
experimenting a lot with alternative currencies. There is a dissatisfaction
with central control of money that is strong enough for them to try to
route around it. The technology is quite advanced, and the community
around it approaches critical mass.” This does not tell you what will
happen, but it does tell you what direction change might be coming
from.

8. How do we get in touch with these mythical changemakers? How do we
gain their trust and get them to collaborate with each other?
We use the Internet. Social networks have a mathematical property
called small world. It says that you can get from any node in the
network to any other node through a small number of hops. You want to
learn about, say, the tactical urbanism movement in Egypt? Chances
are, you are at 4 hops or less from that crowd. That is, you have a
cousin who studied with someone that was at a conference with one of
the tactical urbanists. You are interested in squatters in Spain? Same
thing.

9. We use research tools to make sense of the massive amounts of
knowledge - for example, we do network analysis of the Edgeryders
conversation. This is useful because we can “weigh” what people say
with measures of graph centrality that the literature on social networks
associates to authoritativeness- being a central node means this person
has been validated before in interaction with others in the community.
This screenshot is live data: we have a script updating the network
analysis every day.
http://edgeryders.edgesense.spazidigitali.com/

10. Openness and diversity to ever new voices are the engine of this kind of
conversation. Anyone can step in and is accepted by who they are,
especially because their first contacts are essentially their peers – early
adopters, not a formal institution, or a project manager etc. We stay
away from labels that differentiate, and focus on constructive narratives,
on what we can do together. We are all outliers, there is no outlier.
Quality does not grow with numbers, it grows with diversity. So you do
all this, and you get a great community that far outsmarts any small
group of experts.

11. Everything we do is based on collective intelligence. The idea is that the
crowd has wisdom, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts etc.
For this to work, it is essential that we treat citizens as experts. Our job
as community builders is to ask relevant questions and throw the door
wide open. People that show up are the right people. Not because they
are representative of anything, but because they care and are willing to
do the heavy lifting.

12. How do we empower the doers? Well, our social contract – which has
taken many written shapes but is mostly conveyed in the way we
interact with each other, is designed to allow people to go out and do
stuff without asking for permission.
Cotroling anyone is far more costly than enabling them.
We take inspiration from Rick Falkwinge’s book Swarmwise
"[In a swarm] influence is achieved by individual leadership and
individual appreciation — if you think something needs to be done, you
just do it, without asking anybody. If other people think that your
initiative is good, they will join in of their own accord. If not, they go
elsewhere. Thus, the person taking an appreciated initiative gains
immediate influence, which gives the swarm as a whole a tremendous
momentum and learning speed.
This has sometimes been expressed as “the law of two feet“: It is every
activist’s right and responsibility to go where he or she feels he or she
can contribute the most and, at the same time, get the most in return as
an individual. If there is no such place within this particular swarm, an
activist will leave the swarm and go elsewhere."

13. Me and Alex are now trying to seed this sense of community and
empowerment in Bucharest, in a project we’re piloting for ECOC 2021..
We are currently spotting amazing people and initiatives locally, many
of them underresourced, but with high potential to grow and affect
change. How? By working together with others who are different, who
have new sets of skills.. People outside your usual network of civil
society partners.
Note that collaboration is hard and even harder to sell. So we’re not in
for vanilla collaboration - for the sake of connecting people in a cosy
network. Crina the urban gardener, Andrei the water activist, they are
acting because they feel responsible towards something more
meaningful. Crina is looking for people who want to produce their own
food or garden as an escape from the schasmotic city, Andrei is taking
the streets to speak up and propose a concrete solution to a problem he
is seeing, while others in the community want to pitch underused
buildings (there seem to be a ton of them in Bucharest) in an attractive
way to investors so they can get back in the urban ecosystem. a
healthier one. They are not experts, they care about living a certain way
and not abandoning what they think is a value call. Alex & co. are
activists and launching a campaign that they themselves want to roll
out! Nonetheless this doesn't mean they don't need all the help they can

14. get or that the problem to solve is less urgent.

15. How can this help us, here?
We are also trying to convince the city and institutions managing the bid
to open up to their citizens and see where change can come from.
Instead of “big government” top-down intervention to move the system
to some new configuration by brute force, the idea of an agency behind
Futurespotters is that of a selective enabler. There is already a social
dynamics behind these changes; there are already local people who are
building it. Strategy means deciding who to help, not dreaming up a
path from the outside. Spotting change is like surfing, not like
bulldozing: the surfer needs to be strong and smart, and she definitely
makes plenty of decisions about where to go: but she can never, ever,
go against the wave, or make her own. She has to surf the waves she
finds.

16. But there is a price to pay. Essentially, detecting change is propelled by
people who are not on our payroll, and will only participate if the
exercise is interesting for them. They also typically hate the notion of
being “harvested” in an exploitative way. This means we need to work
very hard to maintain high standards of rigour and integrity. It also mean
we, as a company, can only report to the orgs and cities we work with
what the community thinks to be true. If we try to cheat, the
conversation will die and the whole exercise will fail.

17. I will leave you with a quote from people we are discovering already in
Bucharest.. which seems to be full of initiatives based on the deep
values we want to build a collective future around. Now, Futurespotters
is in its very beginnings - we started in May! :) But if the global
EdgeRyders track record is to serve as a model, it will take a committed
group to move this forward, because communities are not of one closed
group of people to build or manage.. they are not of an organisation.
They are their own resource, we can only nudge them. You are most
welcome to join in and make an honest investment of time, hope to see
some of you on July 9-10 at a workshop we're doing where we zoom in
on more of these challenges. Thank you!