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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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."

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

get or that the problem to solve is less urgent.

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.

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.

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!