academy

About the Academy Webinar F.A.Q.

Introducing a toolkit for the engaged citizen.

Welcome to Edgeryders Academy. Find out what we are building and how we are doing it collectively..

Take a peak at what you can learn..

From community building to network science to ethnography, browse our current curriculum..

Introduction

Our Courses

  • Community Building & Management
  • Open Ethnography
  • Harness Graphryder
  • Frequently Asked Questions
  • Video Gallery

What is the Academy?

We're building a common sense curriculum that upholds the rights of citizens online and pushes towards a more transparent and informative landscape of connected communities.

With electoral systems being targeted, filter bubbles polarising news channels and the increasing echo chamber of social media, we believe the current systems in place represent a hindrance rather than a path to collective intelligence.

At Edgeryders we know that collective intelligence has the power to tackle the challenges facing our society. We build systems to channel this power for the good and demonstrate to others how to do the same.

All of these learnings go into our online academy for people to discover and learn the new practices and skills, and replicate the results. The courses are produced by peers for peers through a collaborative effort and then shared beyond the network.

Community Building & Management

  • Open Ethnography
  • Harness Graphryder
  • Video Gallery
  • F.A.Q.

Community is a word with many definitions.

“Online community” means different things to different people too. What we mean in this toolkit is a collection of people, joined together mainly through an networked asynchronous computer platform, in which the participants develop various individual & group relationships in ways that make sense to them, either personally, professionally or both.

It achieves its community status through the weaving of those relationships, and its sense of community is held in common by the will of the participants themselves. A true measure of it being a real community is if the people using it consider themselves to be part of a real community, even though most interactions take place in a virtual space.

At its heart, an online community is all about relationships. It is well proven that it is possible for people to experience authentic depth in these relationships, even when chiefly communicating via networked computers.

Discover this course

Discover this course

Introduction Video

Meet your instructors

John Coate

Widely recognized as the world's first online community manager, John was employee #2 at The WELL - the place where online community began.

Noemi Salantiu

Community director and co-founder at Edgeryders, Noemi is a community builder enthusiast, specialising in network weaving & content curation.

Q&A with Noemi Salantiu and John Coate

Who is this course aimed for and what can they expect to get out of it?

Noemi

The course can be taken with confidence by communicators, marketers, researchers, managers and planners, both newbies in community management or people who have considerable experience in online or offline environments and would like to probe some of their assumptions.

Online communities open up a space for compassion as well as conflict. How much of this is aligned with the conflicts that appear in a physical community? How can real connections bridge the gap between the two?

John

It is essentially the same as in-person in the emotional value of compassion and conflict, but because it is based on the written word, more care in one's word choice is necessary to develop and maintain real understanding. And, on the other side, it helps to remember that the other person might not be saying perfectly what they want to say. Oversupplying understanding as both writer and reader leads to better overall quality of the experience for everyone.

The Edgeryders community, now 4000 members, spans multiple time zones and age groups. Where do you see the commonality between the members, what brings them together as a community online?

Noemi

I see the online often builds up the anticipation - being asynchronous as it is, it allows people to show up on their own schedules and have complete freedom over who to interact with, comment, reach out to, or simply ignore. But meeting in person is a wholly different experience and I've seen it play out mostly as a celebration, as if there is a secret people are happy to share. After a while spent together chatting they can see friendship play out in real life. The best for us is having team members fairly acquainted with each other meet face to face and resume connection immediately, due to the in-built familiarity.

With most community networks and management tools now locked into a proprietary platform, where do you see the place and viability of independently managed communities today?

John

The Well was founded in 1985, before there was an internet, and a year before Mark Zuckerberg's first birthday. It started as an inexpensive way for people to converse online for whatever purpose the people using it wished. Over time, through innumerable online conversations and in-person gatherings, many of those people bonded into relationships deep enough that they described themselves as a community. That people talking through networked computers could form such lasting bonds served as an influence and inspiration for other online communities.

If there is a vision to draw from this course, how would you like to see networked communities evolve, what would they look like? A return to the early days of independent messaging boards, centralised platforms or something entirely new?

Noemi

It is hard to predict the future, but the direction we are rooting for is the one of decentralized platforms with considerable member autonomy, where rules of engagement and participation costs are clear for most people and the benefits accrued by all those who make the leap and give themselves to openness, collaboration and generosity towards peers on the other side of the world fighting the same struggle. This has implications for new political movements and a counterbalancing citizen act to today's gloomy crises playing out at all levels and corners of the Earth, from climate timebombs to infowars, rising authoritarianism and so on.

Open Ethnography

How does a community think, feel and see the world?

Ethnographers do participant-observation, spending a lot of time in the social environment that they are studying. As a result ethnography is really good at capturing nuances and understanding how and why communities behave the way they do.

With this course we want to move away from the idea of ethnography as a lone practice. We want to explore a new way of research, open and collective, that we call Collective Ethnography.

Open Ethnographer is one of the most important tools that we use for doing this and we believe that it enables a powerful and scalable way to allow online collaboration and find deeper discoveries in data analysis.

Discover this course

Watch the video

Meet your instructor

Amelia Hassoun

Amelia is a senior researcher at Edgeryders and PhD student at the Oxford Internet Institute. Her research interests include smart cities, digital & medical anthropology and healthcare technologies.

Harness Graphryder

We have a vision for collective intelligence

Coming in Q2 2018, unlock the power of the semantic social network with Graphryder, a new tool developed by Ethnographers in collaboration with Edgeryders. Understand conversations like never before using rich data visualizations, tags and co-occurence.

What is Graphryder?

Graphryder is a dashboard tool that allow us to analyze the conversations that are happening in a community through reading of ethnographic data. Graphryder is based on innovative academic research which has led to publication in scientific journals.

Discover this course

Watch the video

Meet your instructor

Alberto Cottica

Co-founder of Edgeryders, apostate economist, world citizen and network scientist-in-training. Ex-low grade rockstar.

F.A.Q.

Who is behind the Academy?

Academy assembles the lessons and experience gathered through a network of over 4000 members of the Edgeryders community who experiment, connect and organise their own projects using the platform. You can join them at edgeryders.eu

How do I sign up?

Edgeryders has partnered with Teachable to deliver your courses. You can get a syllabus overview, follow your progress and receive updates indefinitely after your purchase. Get step by step instructions on how to join by enrolling using the link in the course overview.

When do the courses start and finish?

The courses start when you sign up and never end! They are completely self-paced online courses - you decide when you start and when you finish. However we also host scheduled seminars - you can be notified about them by following us.

How long do I have access to the course?

How does lifetime access sound? After enrolling, you have unlimited access to your courses for as long as you like - across any and all devices you own.

What if I am unhappy with a course?

If you are unsatisfied with your purchase, contact us in the first 30 days and we will give you a full refund.

Contact Us

Have any other questions? Contact us at info@edgeryders.eu

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Join the platform

Connect with your peers and mentors on the Edgeryders platform and join 4000 other social innovators open to collaboration.

Video Gallery

Community Building Trailer

John Coate

Open Ethnographer Trailer

Amelia Hassoun

Graphryder Preview

Alberto Cottica

Community Management Preview

Noemi Salantiu

Community Building John Coate

Open Ethnography Amelia Hansoun

Graphryder Alberto Cottica

Community Management Noemi Salantiu