During 2016 and 2017, Liliana Carrillo (CollectiveUP) visited several Agile Learning Centers in the US and in Europe, and finalised her three Agile Learning Facilitator trainings in New York, Charlotte, and Sacramento. She organized in 2017 the first Agile Learning Facilitation camp in Northern Europe in the city of Ghent, Belgium. Via those activities, Liliana got to know part of the current team of partners. The current partners that were part of that first proposal are: Universidad Francisco de Vitoria, RHIZO School, ProWork and the associated partner ALC Network from the US. Partners continued to exchange information, and Liliana organized a face-to-face meeting with the partners in Belgium in the summer of 2019.

Liliana met Soenke (K8.Design) in November 2019 thanks to their shared interests that reflect in several shared networks of collaborators in areas like culture creation, collaborative environments, collaborative design, participatory systems, co-creation, peer-to-peer tech, open source, and governance. Liliana invited Soenke to join this project and support the effort of bringing this knowledge to the next level.

The Agile4Collaboration proposal was born. The open technology ethos also resonates powerfully with the project’s emphasis on strengthening the cultures of collaboration in a variety of educational contexts. It is important to the project that the actors involved (coaches, educators, learners, researchers) not only participate in project-specific activities, but experience that they are part of a broader community dedicated to the co-creation of methods and infrastructures for collaboration. Such a comprehensive understanding of collaboration in turns helps raise the profile of STEM-related subject areas and facilitates the integration of social and technological innovation.

Such a holistic view of collaboration – including contexts, methods, and infrastructures – contributes to a change in perspectives of the actors involved – they can see themselves as co-creators rather than only users of the socio-technical systems that structure the way we learn and work.