We are now two full weeks into May, quite a lot of things have changed around here and I didn’t have time to write about them yet. But sometimes all the things happen at once and as I’ve had covid, I could’t work much. Instead stared at the walls of my room and hoped the symptoms would end soon. I am feeling much better now and have charged my batteries for the new things ahead because <drum roll> since the end of April my internship at WAO is officially over! But we’ve all enjoyed working together so much that we just couldn’t stop doing it and I am now a collaborator with We Are Open 🙌

I’ve made the decision to postpone some courses at university as well as my thesis which will give me the opportunity to continue working on projects with WAO, which makes me super happy. There is so much cool stuff happening and it would’ve been very sad to stop just because the internship is over.

And I thought it is always a good idea to recap things before starting new ones, so let’s do this now.

What was it like to be an intern at We Are Open?

I started working with WAO last year in August and since then have been involved in great projects. I’ve learned so much about myself, the way I want to work and the world of working openly. One big lesson was to understand that I can trust my own instincts and that the stuff I do and think about matters. This might sound a bit pathetic but I’ve never been in a working environment where collaborative working has been recognising and inspiring.Usually I’ve worked on my own, showed it to someone and got told that the stuff wasn’t good. Also in university you usually just submit your work, receive a grade and never get any feedback about what was especially good or what needs improvement. How are you supposed to feel self-efficacy if you never get any good feedback? Long story short, working with WAO has changed this a lot and I now feel confident (most of the time) about my work and the things I am creating.

In the first month I was mostly a fly on the wall. Laura and Doug were finishing off one of a number of Catalyst projects that they’d been involved with during the pandemic. I joined them on the last few support calls with some of the charities they were helping. In addition to being a fly on the wall I fell down multiple rabbit holes while onboarding to catch up on all the things that WAO is working on, advocating for and talking about. I listened to episodes of the Tao of WAO podcast, read the WAO Wiki and got familiar with their way of working.

By the end of August I got more and more involved in the current projects and we developed a way of co-working that I thought was great. Each day of the week was kind of dedicated to one of the projects, we met in the morning over zoom to discuss the to-do list, everybody got a task to work on individually and then we reported back after a while. If you are working mostly home alone in front of your computer this is a great way to work together, get a lot of things done in a short time and also stay sane. This was one of the ways that my internship acted as a way for WAO members to reflect on, and improve, their working practices.

Introducing some of the projects I was involved in

A great project but also a challenging one has been the Web Strategy implementation project for Greenpeace International. We tried to wrap our head around strategies to communicate with certain audiences, how to develop resources that help them create stories and communicate with intention. We had a look at the very complex information landscape that is the Greenpeace global network and tried to make sense of it. We organised workshops and community calls for the Greenpeace Comms Team. Sometimes I felt I wasn’t accomplishing anything in this project because I just kept falling into research and didn’t get any “work” done. But in the end we came up with awesome ideas and it worked out pretty well.

One of my favourite projects is the Keep Badges Weird community and working with Participate. I learned what a Community of Practice is, how to create one and what tools and methods you can use to sustain one. I was involved in my first community calls, did some community work like facilitation, posting things inside the community or on social media and learned a lot about Open Badges which members of WAO have been involved with for over a decade. I like to work on things that give me the feeling that the work matters. With Keep Badges Weird I get this feeling because there are so many people involved from all around the world, it is about changing things and it has the vision to create a better future. And it went from joking around with the client to having super meta and philosophical discussion around taxonomies.

CC BY-ND Bryan Mathers

From the beginning of the internship I got hooked on Open Badges and regularly fell into rabbit holes trying to understand all the things around them. I decided that they will be part of my bachelor thesis next year and I am currently writing my first email course about feminist pedagogy that also uses badges to recognise the participants.

Speaking of the course I am currently writing, it reminds me of another project that I enjoyed working on so much and really made me want to put all my energy into it. The “Learn with WAO” platform. The opportunity to redesign and rethink this platform was so much fun, and I learned how to take over responsibility and manage my own projects. I am very thankful that WAO trusted me with this and supported the steps I took because now there is something that I’ve created that I am very proud of!

Open Badges and recognition during the internship

Before I began my internship, Laura and the other members of WAO created an outline for the whole internship programme, including Badges that I could earn and milestones that I can achieve every month.

CC BY-ND Laura Hilliger

In the end we didn’t stick completely to that plan but it was still a great way to keep a common theme and figure out what my next steps will be. We also realised that not all of the Badges in that document were necessary for me and we combined them or thought of new ones that serve my portfolio for university and also maybe future employment or other places where I want to reference certain skills. Laura reflected on this and wrote a wonderful blogpost about the benefits of co-creating badges.

In the image below you can see an overview of the Badges I earned but you can also visit my Badgr Collection if you are interested in the reading the criteria and descriptions of them.

Big thank you to all the WAO members

As I said before but will say again and again: I am very happy that I can continue working with We Are Open because I feel so comfortable working with them. We found a great flow of working together and it is great we all had the capacities to keep doing it.

I am thankful for this great mentorship I received from every single member and hope it will go on because I am certainly not done learning. I enjoyed the very different conversations I had with them and every single one has influenced me in their own way. I am looking forward to all the things that we will work on together AND also looking forward to maybe meeting some of the members in real life soon at the Badge Summit in Colorado!