We got an email from Anna Tari - the founder of the Circular Economy Club. I had a call with her and she invites OSCEdays to join the club as a member.
The Circular Economy is a global network and about running events - just like us. It is an organization of volunteers and they help their members to connect to other members and with promoting events or content for example.
CEC is the international non-profit network of circular economy professionals and organisations. The club is run voluntarily by its own members with the aim to spur collaboration among like-minded peers from all around the world.
The membership is free. We would share their Logo on our page and they would share ours. And they will also send out tweets or blogpost to help us to announce our global call for example.
Another interesting future collaboration could emerge around their upcoming mapping project. They plan a Mapping Week and a tool to collect data about circular stakeholders in a city. Longterm vision is to create a global participatory map about such institutions. They are in the process of creating a step by step guide to get people on track to start the mapping.
I told her that this is a project we would really like to support (add the guide to our guides etc.) as long as the produced data is open data. She said that is what they are planning. Great!
So I don’t see why we should not connect. Any objections?
yes, at a first glance I do see how we could contribute to add OS to their scope and it does like a good move for us, too, to become connected with them. But I feel I know far too little about them. Who finances their activities, what kind of members do they have? How did this collaboration come about and is this really all they expect? can we discuss this on the next bost-call or should we decide on it through loomio? It would be a good test-case for that decision making tool.
Description of who can join and what they do here:
They don’t seem to have membership dues,It seems like a mutually beneficial arrangement. At the very least, it’s another platform that can promote us and bring more traffic to us and we can do the same for them.
It is all self-funded and run by volunteers. I asked if there are any business plans for the future of the club. The answer was no. My impression is really this is a group of ppl. that want to make the world a better place without an “evil scheme behind” But yes. Let’s discuss it in the next call.
When we organise bigger events we would need sponsorship from
companies or someone that helps to cover our expenses but our first choice
would be in-kind sponsorships (offering venues, catering, etc)
No intention to move into other fields like consulting or anything, we
just want to connect people to support this economic model, in which we
believe in. And I personally want to go back into research and teaching.
Members: it varies a lot… from startups, researchers, professors, to
organisations like The Circulars, Globechain, C2C Marketplace, C2C Expolab,
CircularIQ, Wizeimpact, etc. Next month we’ll update the members page with
some of the organisations logos, we are getting permission to use them at
the moment
Regarding the question about expectations: we prefer to just not set
expectations xDD just want to support anyone working on the field
The mapping week will be to create the content for a database of
circular economy stakeholders to which everyone will have access. The
essence is that if each of us maps our city, we all together map the world
and then there will be more understanding of who is doing what and more
opportunities to join forces to advance in implementing the circular economy
I think it is not on top of their list. But I think they are not against the idea. They are about to create a project that will generate a lot data on circular stakeholders in cities across the globe. And they are going to open up that data. That is what they told me. Good enough for me for now
But yes. Let’s discuss it in the next call.