Sounds familiar?

At Edgeryders, we keep meeting people like you. You are smart, dedicated and daring. You are the Helliniko Metropolitan Community Clinic, dispensing free health care to the many Greeks who, having lost their job, also lost their access to public health care. You are the Urban Shepherd of Stockholm, inducing your neighborhood to come together by re-introducing husbandry to urban environments.

You are one of the unsung heroes running the Cytostatic Network to provide cancer patients with life-saving drugs unavailable in Romania. You are active in the NightScout project, contributing code or schematics to the open source, DIY insulin pump freeing up the lives of Type 1 diabetes patients. You are building a public transit map for the chaotic informal transit in Cairo. We have hundreds of these stories, and we are sure there are thousands more out there.

These initiatives are so effective because they cleverly deploy local resources: skills, mutual trust, capital, institutions, focusing on the here and now. This is the source of their edge, and they would be well advised not to lose it: they should attempt to scale as far as these resources extend, but not more. We believe that one part of the solution is an integrated global network of local projects, equipped with open source knowledge and technology.

Because we know that diversity is critical, we are exploring how we can build “smart swarms” - decentralised strategic collaborations between of hundreds of small communities and organisations across countries and sectors. Join us for this workshop if you wish to learn more about how Edgeryders is building such a solution and how your project or ideas can benefit from it. Participants are eligible for our first ever MENA fellowship program.