It’s hard to describe exactly what Edgeryders is. A distributed, collaborative network of people experimenting and building new ways of working, living, and understanding one another. A website where projects can be built, networks can grow and people can feed off different ideas and perspectives. A respectable, incorporated, responsible front-end, and motley back-end of activists, artists, data geeks, free software developers, hardware hackers, and community organisers. A big ‘bring on the hackers’ button for the few brave people within established governments and organisations who might be willing to try new things. There are many sides to Edgeryders, and many things to love. I love the evidence-based discussion and decision-making, I love the ‘who does the work, calls the shots’ working method, I love the experimentation with different formats, for communicating, collaborating, financing and community building. I love ‘free and open’ as a default. But mostly, I love the people, a huge network of talented, engaged people from all over Europe, and some further afield as well. The video above is from the 4th annual gathering of the Edgeryders community (Living on the Edge 4), held at the first unMonastery prototype in Matera, Italy, where I also ran a session on motivation and participation in open source projects. The video below is from the 3rd gathering (LOTE3), in November 2013, when I spent a week in Matera, taking part in the process of planning the unMonastery project, and gave a video post-production workshop using Kdenlive. Meeting the community there kicked off a fruitful continued collaboration, and interesting opportunities like heading to Armenia and Georgia to work with the UNDP and...
