The Camp in Medenine

Hello everyone, I wanted to ask about the possibility of having these workshops in the camp:
1- Effective Communication
2- Social Innovation
3- Community development and involvement
4- Prototying
what do you think? and is anyone from the Edgeryders team will be able to deliver one of these workshops ?
Also, due to visa restriction I am not going to be able to attend the festival :confused: , so hopefully I will meet you in Medenine in the camp soon :slight_smile:
@nadia @johncoate @matthias @alberto @noemi @hazem @zmorda

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Yosser can you maybe explain a bit the thinking/discussions you had in choosing these topics for workshops?

Sure :slight_smile: , so:
Communication: This came after the workshop we had in Medeninie, as we spent a lot of time talking about communication, and how people in here donā€™t know how to properly communicate with anyone and how they always find difficulties to communcate themselves and their ideas, also they have mentionned the problem they face because of that (being judged and judge people without even communicating to them as they are afraied to communicate in the first placeā€¦)
Social Innovation: This comes from the different workshops we had in Tunisia, as we have discussed in them the unability to satisfy the current needs using the same old shcool that we have inherited, and how we are facing currently a severe economic crisis / high rate of unmeployment / people working on things that they donā€™t love or not knowing how to find their ways to find what they love / and on the other hand we find the high involvement in the civil society from basically all of the participants in the workshops in the different provinces eventhough there are different backgound for each provinceā€¦ So we can feel from one hand a sense of insecurity towrads the current situtation and the way of living, and from the other hand we notice the involvement of the people in the civil society looking for other ways to fix the current situation and working on being innovative.
Community Development and Involvement: when going to the Belgium embassy I saw a motto that says ā€œUnity makes strengthā€, this is so true, and taking the example of the Edgeryders makes it even clearer, learning how to develop the community and involving together in an Idea will help the whole community, also we noticed in the workshop some cases of people not being able to engage the community with them neither know how to approach them.
Prototyping: People should know how to prototype their ideas, products, servicesā€¦ since people in here are afraied from investing and doing what they love, so when learning about prototyping people would start to consider starting small and then developing their ideas, when protyping people will know how to take things step by step to avoid the risks and learn moreā€¦
So basically, the idea of the workshops comes from the what was mentionned,

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I can help with Community Involvement - with @Johncoate we are now developing a 2 day training for cultural developers and cultural program managers around a specific region in South Italy, which would be adapted to other contexts in the future - so it needs to be structured using standalone bits. In about 3 weeks I will have something to send to you Yosser, and we can discuss what fits this context.

From the list above, I find the social innovation a little weak: it exists in each of the others and seems like it deserves a different format.
An idea on the fly: I could see it work by making it into a project gallery: deep storytelling about house projects and local community projects in a critical way - showing the story behind the projects, the peopleā€™s aspirations and what resources they bring to the community, how each changes the landscape. Once you have a gallery (exhibits, live/recorded talks) you would think of a way where everyone can interact with them critically, by groupwork in key aspects each project needs (ie using MethodKits). A little like a project clinic to support the project and the ecosystem in which it lives.

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Hereā€™s a thought.
Why not make the objective of the camp to develop together a number of strong projects, rough prototypes and teams to participate in the OpenVillage academy?

Then we can shape the training you mention above as learning by building around something real. What do you guys think?

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So the project clinic is about collecting the project gallery? and then the interaction about it is it going to be in the camp or in the Edgeryders platform?

So the target of the camp is idea / project makers? and the genral idea is that we spend the first day working on the projects, finding a way to prototype them? and the second day will be about the trainings mentionned made around the ideas / projects studied in the first day?

mm yes, they can propose the projects online. And then we can have online discussion and settle on 3 projects to work on together during the camp.

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That just does not work. The only way (that I know of) to use 4-12 hours of available worktime of many people in parallel productively on a project is ā€œNASA JPL Team X styleā€. But that is called ā€œextreme project managementā€ for a reason and I donā€™t think we want to even go near that right now :smiley: Their secret is that a team removes all the roadblocks / latency-inducing issues for the next concurrent design session, and that preparation takes weeks.

In all normal tech conferences including CCC, no actual work is done on projects. I think thatā€™s wise. Tech development projects work, with all the intricate details and waiting for parts and boring admin work etc., are meant to happen spread out over several months.

Whatā€™s fun and interesting though is to have detailed idea collection sessions to design various competing concepts for an OpenVillage House, or for similar initiatives where there is no clear way forward in terms of business model / financial sustainability.

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Are you thinking about prototyping that involves code? Iā€™m not - more scenarios & lo-fi prototyping with materialsā€¦could be paper or whatever

Hmm, ok, could make sense for some projects. Letā€™s see if this is applicable for projects that come up.

(For most tech-related projects I can think of, this type of prototyping is not needed ā€“ only ideas, discussion, decisions, and actually building it. So it rather feels like wasting peopleā€™s worktime if a group produces results on paper ā€¦ that are then discarded after the event.)

So @nadia @matthias do you think people will still be interested to come to the camp knowing that they will not be working on their projects, but other peopleā€™s projects? Donā€™t you think we should keep it general? and then after the camp (where we will introduce the Open Village Academy) people will relate to the open village academy because they will know more about what they need and have a clearer thinking methodology? however, when we work on a certain projects, the needs and thinking methodology will vary from one to another? so maybe we should keep it general?

Yosser and I had an online meeting where we discussed the objectifs and the program of the camp :

Objectifs:

  1. Growing the edgeryders community in tunisia
  2. Building a community to launch the reef house in tunisia
  3. Present Medenine as a low cost city that we can easily work and prototype in it
  4. Giving the opportunity to the participants to work on their ideas ( make a progress receive feed backs online (during the camp) and offline (on the platform after the camp)

The main participants (around 60 persons) of the camp are:

  • Edgeryders community (20-25%)
  • New entrepreneurs (30%)
  • Talented people / students/ social actors (50%)

Planning

  • Day 1:

    • Project Gallery ( people present their projects)
    • Skills Gallery (people present their skills )
    • Workshop About Communication and pitching
    • LunchBreak
    • Data Collection and Outputs
    • Workshop About Community Involvement
    • Data Collection and Outputs / Updating the project gallery
    • Matching The Skills Makers With The Idea Makers
    • Walk Back Home And Dinner
    • Preparation For Pitching The Project For Tomorrow
  • Day 2

    • Breakfast
    • Pitching The Projects (Q&A)
    • Modification of Project Gallery (Re-Matching)
    • Lunch
    • Workshop about Prototyping ( team work )
    • Workshop About Financial Sustainability ( team work)
    • Data Collection
    • Dinner
    • Movie Night: Where Do We Go Now

Yosser suggested two extra days for those who want to visit the city ,

We already have Noemi with the community involvement. How can you help with other workshops ? Which workshop will you deliver?

We need an answer as soon as possible so we can finalize the program and hand it to the local administrations to get some sponsoring.

PS: Yosser will go to France Next week (29th of October) so we would love to hand it to the governor and mayor before she goes, to gain time.

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@Sohayeb @nadia @matthias @noemi @hazem @Yosser

Iā€™m so intersted with two topics, commuication skills and prototyping. These are the important thing to develop our own

Ok this looks good.

Maybe the workshop about financial sustainability @Sohayeb could do along with @matthias?
I think the two of you together could be a very good match because you are coming at the issue from completely different perpespectives: one is about minimising dependency on money and another about generating revenue. You need both and they are offering different strategies and models.

Maybe @matteo_uguzzoni could be up for the workshop about Pitching and communication? It would a question of the terms and conditions for doing something like this as itā€™s what Matteo does professionally for a living. So letā€™s seeā€¦ if/how it could be done.

Then Maybe the prototyping could be myself - this is more of a design workshop.

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Thanks @nadia we will be waiting for the confirmation , next step should be the preparation of the training session /workshop by the recommended persons.

If @matteo_uguzzoni is not available, we can help out and do a session on communication & storytelling based on our workshop material and experience pitching projects

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Or we do a combo communication jam workshop, Iā€™d like to come and help either way.

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Hey everyone, that sounds great!

We have different workshop for different time-span, it really depends how deep we want to go on doing a real workshop vs a lecture.

The PowerPitch Masterclass is a two days long workshop (12 exercises) that is very helpful for designer and project leader that already have an clear idea about their project, maybe in this Camp we can think about something more general that explain theory and have 2/3 exercises to ground the concepts.

I didnā€™t find the days of the Camp, when it will be happen? :slight_smile: