Dear *|FNAME|*,

We have made it: Edgeryders has successfully spinned itself off from its mother ship, the Council of Europe. It is now independent, driven by its members for its members. That would be us.

After #LOTE2 event in Brussels several of us have been racing behind the scenes to build new partnerships with organisations other than the Council of Europe. One reason is to raise some money to cover the costs of organising the next #LOTE event and some small capital to put into a crowd-funding campaign for the community. The other is that we started Edgeryders not to just have conversations and collaborations amongst ourselves, but to facilitate members collaborations with all kinds of organisations and institutions all over Europe. And to build legitimacy for ourselves as a collective. The third reason being that we can see that Edgeryders is moving more towards action and it would be cool if it could better support concrete collaborations between members on projects coming out of the collectivity. This requires a lot of coordination, is extremely time consuming and quite unglamorous work.

Less than two months later we are super proud to be announcing the first funded project! We are collaborating with Swedish think tank Global Challenge, and have been tasked with hosting an online conversation with young people about the future of the labour market in Europe and the challenges we face. By the way, we want to practice radical transparency with this and all other project budgets as soon as we figure out a sustainable way to do it. 

Don't be a stranger! Building a real community, growing it and making participation in it more valuable for everyone involved is a lot of work. The logistics of organising events like #lote2 are really just the tip of the iceberg. Asta, Alberto, Matthias, Arthur, Thomas, Vinay, Ben, Ola, Helene, Eimhin, James, Petros have been all volunteering their time. And those are just some of the people who’ve been very active recently. Do you have some time to spare and would consider helping with one or more of the areas below?  You get to learn something new, pick up a couple of valuable skills and grow your personal network while helping to keep the Edgeryders community going and growing stronger. Also, increasingly often opportunities for paid travel to conferences (see below) are popping up and obviously community volunteers are first in line. Now, if everybody was up for sparing a couple of hours per week, we’d probably get things done in no time. Much needed are:

• content managers: curating content coming out from project collaborations; writeups of current progress; we need you here especially if you’re interested in one of the ideas that made a bid for the Social Innovation Competition; James (#ekip), Ben, Ola (#unMonastery), Vinay, Nadia (#sc4sv) are already doing that. Ping them if you want to help with this!
• network weavers: welcoming new members, keeping track of the things that come out of the network, emphasizing community-generated content and feeding relevant information to interested members; do a little bit of social media outreach; Noemi is already learning that. If you hurry you might get a paid trip and ticket to the Virtual Community Summit in London on February 7. Ping her today if you want to help with this!
• Community members who’d like to learn how to effectively present interesting projects, people and places coming out of Edgeryders at conferences and other events with help from other edgeryders; this helps you navigate smoothly between networks and build social capital. Alberto and Nadia have been doing that successfully throughout all of the last year. Ping Nadia if you want to do this!
• Drupal developers: helping Matthias migrate content to the new platform; customization and admin work are hardly a work for one person, also help him test the new site staging.edgeryders.eu. Ping Matthias if you want to help with this!

Share early and share often. You know where we are on twitter or on facebook. Do you know people who should be made aware of our community? Maybe well-connected individuals who might get excited? A specific online group that you participate in that should hear about our projects? You can just forward this email.

With love,
Nadia and Noemi