Why to Edgeryder?

Dear community,

we would like to ask you to put into as little words as possible why you are here.

  • What motivated you to join?

  • What motivates you to participate?

  • What do you search, find and offer on the Edgeryders-stewarded Internet of Humans/NGI community?

  • How do/would you explain the platform to newcomers?

The shorter your answers are the better!

Let’s use collective intelligence to bring communication to the next level and help even more amazing people to understand and find us :slight_smile:

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So, I joined Edgeryders a while ago, to become active in a project related to the country I live in (Futurespotters in Georgia).

I recently got active again on the platform because of the IOH project, when I was tagged in a post for the work I do with Coda Story.

  • what motivates me to join? an inspiring community who is looking to find solutions for a better world
  • what motivates me to participate? interesting people and discussions on topics that matter to me (freedom of information, participatory decision-making, privacy - beyond our own western world)
  • What do you search, find and offer on the Internet of Humans Edgeryder community? I search for conversation that make me help figure out how we can have better online experience
  • How do/would you explain the platform to newcomers? THE BIG QUESTION :slight_smile:

Thanks for helping me craft the right message. So, I’d love to have your input @johncoate @hugi @RobvanKranenburg @felix.wolfsteller @pbihr @jasongreen @JollyOrc @erik_lonroth @BlackForestBoi (tagging y’all because we “conversed” in the ad-based internet topic together :).)

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Hi Inge,

Great way to get introductions. I am working on mine but will write that together with my workplan and then I also set up my pages on edgeryders where I can explain the vision of a positive realistic middle on and with internet and iot technologies. I plan to finish mid August,

Salut, Rob

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  • What motivated you to join?

Recommendation from a friend that joined about a month ago?

  • What motivates you to participate?

am really into IoT and stuff related to it!


Joined in just some minutes ago, researching this wonderful repository of information. Don’t understand it fully just yet!

  • How do/would you explain the platform to newcomers?

Ask me in a few days and I’ll tell you!!! )))

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What motivated you to join?
A friend pointed me to Edgeryders and said that this is where the conversations are held, that I should be interested in. Spoiler alert: He was right. :slight_smile:

What motivates you to participate?
I want, no, need to make a deep dive into the social side of online communications, how it changes human interactions, how we can embrace technology for positive social change.

Stimulation, new viewpoints and suggestions on how to do the being human thing a bit better. And I’ll try my best to provide the same too!

How do/would you explain the platform to newcomers?
That’s a tough one, as I think that most people look for something slightly different here… and it still somehow works :slight_smile:

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Amen to that. It’s what I’ve noticed too, over the years.

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Score one for serendipity!

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that is exactly the thing I am always looking for in my online communications - that moment when I find something or connect to people I otherwise would not have known that I was missing.

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I bumped into @alberto at a conference and he told me about EdgeRyders. It sounded interesting, so I showed up. I was familiar with the technical platform (and I like it), so I signed up to be present more and get a deeper sense of what EdgeRyders is and what is going on.

So far, I don’t really participate. I follow the digest and read here and there, but I haven’t actively stepped into any conversations. I pick up some inspirations on things that interest me, but that’s about it.

It’s a platform that some people use to… run? coordinate? do? their EU-funded (?) research (?) projects which has an eclectic mix of conversations about society/internet topics and a surprisingly high number of members. It gives me the constant feeling that I am missing out what it is actually about. :slight_smile:

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We are so decentralized that, in a very real sense, there is no all-encompassing “we”, just many partially overlapping groups of people following specific issues or working together on specific projects. :smiley:

I do believe there are some values that more or less everyone shares:

  • the belief that societies and their economies are machines to produce individual freedom, happiness and prosperity.
  • the mistrust in overpowering, very large systems.
  • the belief that the world might yet be changed, and an intelligent and coordinated effort of many people makes a difference, though they might have very little power.
  • an orientation towards facts over rhetoric.
  • an orientation towards sharing knowledge.
  • a fairly high degree of mutual trust (“community”).
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ok so I thought about this @juliane and tried to put together a sketch that will then form basis for info to put online. if you want to have a look and help poke holes in it let me know.

Like many others, I have been using edgeryders/edgeryding to make new professional contacts, discover and develop new knowledge, improve projects, find talent to hire and build meaningful partnerships and funding opportunities. While the platform does change shape, the overall process is designed so that participation in the online conversation and events generates some kind of levelling up that I cannot do alone

As someone whose life and work exists outside the normal order of things, I felt like we really needed some peer-to-peer way to nurture personal and professional development. I had tried out a lot of different alternatives: higher education, online learning etc but nothing seems to really fit in terms of both learning and generating tangible opportunities to do interesting things.

What makes Edgeryders work for me is being plugged into an open ended, eclectic scene of people from different backgrounds and places in their lives right now. Humans are much better at pointing one another in the right direction through dialogue than trying to find the kind of things I need on a well structured website or formal education process. If I don’t know what it’s called, or even that I need it, or if the word for it doesn’t exist, how can I find it? Through people who connect me to people and knowledge.

When we came up with the name, Edgeryders, it was this idea somehow - navigating these “wilderness” spaces for which we don’t have maps through edges (connections made in conversation between individuals, places, topics and all kinds of other stuff).

What keeps me involved is that I love and respect the community and anarchic+ friendly culture we have built together :slight_smile:


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