WAO’s 2023 in Review, originally posted on the WAO blog
2023 is drawing to a close, so we thought a reflection and roundup on life inside of WAO would be a nice thing to do before we take some time off to reset for 2024. It’s been quite a full year, with a lot of amazing experiences that have pushed us along towards what we call a practical utopia. Our utopia is a working environment where our members and collaborators work within the intersections of things they care about.
Community is everything
Not only are members of WAO expert community builders, we are lucky to move within various communities that help us learn and grow. We consider ourselves a community, and as leadership in communities change, so does the culture. This year, Bryan stepped back from being a founding member of the co-op and became a collaborator. He came to a final IRL meet-up in Amsterdam to celebrate his membership.
As we said goodbye, we were all worried about how our relationship would change. While it was certainly an adjustment, and while we do miss Bryan in our internal channels and meetings, WAO still gets to work with him all the time! This year, we pulled him into several projects to help us find the right metaphors and visuals. We look forward to working with him in 2024 too.
As Bryan stepped back, Anne stepped up. Anne moved from being WAO’s intern to being a collaborator last year already. But this year, she spent more time “in the office”. She also finished her Bachelor of Arts degree in Media Education and Culture Studies, an accomplishment that fits in perfectly with our Learning and Development Department*.
Anne’s educational story has become a way for us all to talk about the need for Open Recognition, and her interest in gender equity and feminist workplaces has made WAO even more equitable and inclusive. We’re pleased to collaborate with Anne on her interests and looking forward to sharing her ePIC talk “Open Recognition is for Everybody — A feminist practice for more equal workplaces”.
*We don’t have departments ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This year, we were also lucky to collaborate with others in our network. There are too many to name, but we are ecstatic about our deepening relationships with many from Participate and the Open Recognition is for Everybody Community, members of Workers.coop and the world of cooperatives, as well as individuals in activist communities like WEAll and Greenpeace.
We have an awesome network
We kicked off the year helping some folks at Change.org rock their workshops and presentations. Early in 2023, we also worked a bit with passbolt to help their budding community team plan for the rest of the year. We talked about anti-transactional relationship building and, of course, Open Recognition. We also helped WEAll think about their digital strategy through the lens of “People, Product and Process”, and facilitated a hackathon for Historic England to allow their developers to get their hands dirty with AI. Each of these projects helped us learn more about our network and the organisations in it.
We returned to Amsterdam in the early summer, when we went to the Mozilla Festival and talked about co-ops, AI Literacy, transparency and the power of open. We ran sessions, talked about the politics of technology in Europe and reconnected with the Mozilla ecosystem (where WAO members originally met).
Our amazing partner, Participate, helped sponsor WAO attendance at the Badge Summit in Boulder where we learned the importance of a front porch. It was on that porch in Boulder that WAO was asked to help the Digital Credentials Consortium, hosted at MIT, to communicate more clearly the fairly technical concept of Verifiable Credentials. It was on that porch that we started thinking about how the Open Recognition is for Everybody (ORE) community should show up at ePIC. It was there that we raised a glass to continuing our attempts to change the way people are recognised. We’re looking forward to see what the ORE accomplishes in 2024.
Keep talking about the work
A special thanks to the small group of individuals who donate to our community work, including the Tao of WAO podcast, our Learnwith courses and Badge Wiki. We’re pleased that we find some support for these initiatives and are always looking to make them more sustainable. We hope that by talking about the work and offering this stuff for free and as a way for others to connect it, we are able to keep the fires burning.
This year the Tao of WAO podcast released 3 (!) seasons. We also have transcripts for all our seasons now! We spent Season 6 focusing on the cooperative movement, Season 7 focused on AI literacy and hype, and Season 8 was a contribution to the Journal of Media Literacy, an initiative that included a paper and meant we returned (a little) to our academic roots. Special thanks to Ian O’Byrne for pulling us into his research!
As if these bits and pieces aren’t enough, we also published new courses, were interviewed for an episode of the Curious Advantage podcast and did webinars, talks and courses all over the internet.
On to 2024
Over the years, we’ve really leaned into a variety of systems thinking approaches with clients, leading Doug to start a MSc in the area. We’ve reestablished our own interest in the advancement of social learning, and we’ve doubled down on our commitment to using Open Recognition as a way to map real world skills and attributes. Let us know if you are interesting in helping us fund or build this!
We’re going into 2024 with a variety of ambitions. But first, before we get to the future, we’re going to take a few weeks in the present, reset and eat a lot of cookies. Then, we’ll be ready for what the coming year has in store.
Do you have a project that looks WAO sized? Send us a message and let’s see if we can still squeeze you into Q1, 2024!