AHOI!
As we sail new seas on our ARK every member of the crew is important. For the activation of new eco- and bioregions – the largest organizational unit on the ARK – it is required to have a team of expert sailors who understand both planet and people in this specific part of the world. That’s what an Ecoregion Mentor is for, and we need a team of Ecoregion Mentors in all 844 ecoregions of planet Earth.
What skills should an Ecoregion Mentor have?
An Ecoregion Mentors understands eco- and bioregions as the natural map of the world
An Ecoregion Mentor has a deep connection with one specific ecoregion and feels confident to curate and review species entries
An Ecoregion Mentor is ideally a proam, i.e. somebody who has facilitated experimental education sessions and therefore knows about the value of this SaaS platform.
An Ecoregion Mentor is a role model user online & offline.
The Ecoregion Mentor and other ARK roles
The ARK is designed as a social and environmental network that drives offline connections with plants and people. The central roles of the web-app are:
- Learner: joins activities, collects Impact Points and grows his/her Bioregional Identity; every Learner can create species and specimen entries in his/her Learning Space
- Facilitator (guide, teacher): facilitates activities within a Learning Community and awards Impact Points for observed species and specimens to Learners; facilitators review the specimen submissions of learners
- Community Mentor (lead teacher/principal): moderates a Learning Community and is responsible for its appearance on the ARK
- Commons Mentor: reviews and curates the specimen entries of a Learning Space.
- Ecoregion Mentor: reviews and curates species entries of an entire Eco- and Bioregion (if no Ecoregion Mentors are available in the same Bioregion, then an Ecoregion Mentor assumes the responsibility of the entire Bioregion)
Online Organization and Personal Relationships
Ecoregion Mentors are the top layer of a representative democracy of global dimension in which communities are the smallest cell of organization. Communities are embedded in territories of human scale, which we call commons. Commons are part of ecoregions which in turn make up a bioregion.
While Community Mentors are supposed to know all community members personally, Commons Mentors should have a personal relationship with all Community Mentors in their commons. Likewise, an Ecoregion Mentor shall have established a personal relationship to all Commons Mentors in his/her ecoregion.
Watch our manual video on Bioregional Identities and the Overview Effect to learn more about this organizational concept.