Edgeryders - Executive summary

Edgeryders is a think tank of citizen experts working on a policy document concerning the transition of youth to an independent active life, on behalf of the Council of Europe and the European Commission. It is massively collaborative, distributed, self-selected and experience-based.

• Massively collaborative, because it has over 1,000 participants (and counting). New members come on board at a rate of about 150 a month.
• Distributed, because participants don’t share the same physical space. They coordinate their work through an interactive online platform built by the Council of Europe using free software (http://edgeryders.ppa.coe.int).
• Self-selected, because European young people don’t need permission to participate: they simply sign up to the platform, pick a task and carry it out. This makes sure that participants are passionate about their participation, and they carry out precisely those tasks that they feel they are good at.
• Experience-based, because the emphasis is on sharing personal experience: Edgeryders is all about trying to map what young people are actually doing to complete their transition: where they are investing their time, energy and resources.

A small team of researchers is carrying out ethnographic analysis of the experiences shared on the Edgeryders platform and comparing it to existing European policies that hinge upon the transition of youth.

The Council of Europe views Edgeryders as the prototype for a general-purpose tool for the engagement of citizens online. Preliminary evidence indicates that such a tool can be:

• cheap: free software is flexible enough to accommodate most needs on a limited budget.
• fast: results in six months from launch.
• scalable: additional users do not jam the system, they actually make the experience more rewarding.
• transversal: has shown it can deliver relevant input across a diverse array of issues.
• inclusive: high participation of underprivileged individual, who contribute great content. Everybody is an expert at something!
• serendipitous: diversity of participants leads to exploring unexpected approaches and creative solutions

More info: contact: nadia.el-imam@coe.int

Edgeryders in figures

As of early June 2012

• 1,000 registered users
• 400 mission reports
• 3,000 comments
• 1,600+ pages of high quality ethnographic data collected
• 23,000 unique visitors from 151 countries.
• 50,000 visits
• 200,000 page views
• 1,000 Twitter users mentioned Edgeryders 9,000 times since February 2012

In the past month, Edgeryders has attracted on average 6 new users, 3.5 new mission reports and 27 new comments per day, seven days a week.