The digital world as a uniting force

This week we begin to draw our digital citizenship strand to a close with Alison Kaye looking at some of the various ways in which our digital world can bring us together...

The internet, and social media in particular, has broken down tremendous boundaries.

Once, if we wanted to talk to someone at the other side of the world, we would probably do it through a pen-pal scheme. Conversation would be a slow process. We could perhaps make an international telephone call, but that would be terribly expensive. Now we can (and do) engage in live chat, send photographs and other media to each other, even talk by Skype: global friendships and global relationships have become a real, present, instantaneous thing. Many of us are now genuinely engaging in a global community (or at the very least an anglophone global community - the Tower of Babel has not quite been rebuilt, although translation systems become more advanced by the year).

Communities of interest have been able to come together in ways they never could before. It's really easy to find other people who are into that thing you're into. And that has benefits not just in terms of communication, but also in terms of organisation.

Crowdsourcing

Common crowdsourcing activities include crowdvoting and crowdfunding, but essentially it can be used for all kinds of purposes: to gain collaboration on creative or research projects; to gather ideas; to collaborate on a product; to gather data; to raise funding… It can be used for profit-based activities (and big businesses are certainly using these methods) but there is also a big potential for not-for-profit activities. Perhaps one of the most well-known crowdsourced activities online is Wikipedia, which we've been linking to liberally in these posts. This free online encyclopedia allows anyone to go in and add and edit entries for items, and at the time of writing it has over five million English language articles.

While such collaborative activities happened before the digital age, the internet provides an excellent platform to target many people who can be geographically very distant but share a common goal or interest. Of course there are risks: An infamous example was when The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) launched an online campaign asking the public to name their new £200 million polar research vessel. Thanks to the mischievous efforts of social media, the public collectively chose the name Boaty McBoatface. This frivolous name was felt to be in conflict with the credibility of the NERC, who ultimately decided to shun democracy and risk offending public opinion by selecting the name RSS Sir David Attenborough instead (fifth-placed in the vote), though as a compromise, the name Boaty McBoatface was assigned to the ship’s high-tech, remotely operated sub-sea vehicle.

Crowdsourcing ideas

Idea competitions or innovation contests provides a way for organisations to move beyond the limited capacity of their employees and gather fresh inspiration from their wider customer base. Customers move from being content consumers to content-creators. Lego saw the great potential they had in their very active community of fans by collaborating with Japanese website Cuusoo in 2008 to create Lego Ideas. The concept allows anyone to submit an idea for a Lego kit and potentially see that idea brought to life. If enough support is gained (10,000 votes), Lego’s marketing and design experts review your idea. This allows Lego to not only gather new ideas from customers, but also to see which ideas are the most popular with the community (and theoretically most marketable), while simultaneously making customers feel more connected to the company. Sets generated through the project, like the Minecraft and Ghostbusters builds, have since gone on to spawn their own Lego ranges, including some of Lego’s best-selling sets.

Crowdfunding

In their 2010 article “Crowdfunding of small entrepreneurial ventures”, Schwienbacher and Larralde define crowdfunding as…

…an open call, essentially through the Internet, for the provision of financial resources either in form of donation or in exchange for some form of reward and/or voting rights in order to support initiatives for specific purposes.

In simple terms, it allows people to raise monetary contributions from a large audience who are interested in the product or goal being delivered at the end. It can be seen as a form of alternative finance. Offline, this has taken the form of benefit events and the likes, but it is now increasingly performed via internet-mediated registries. Several crowdfunding platforms have been created, such as Kickstarter (so successful as to be effectively synonymous with the concept), allowing the public to support specific projects without the need for large amounts of capital. In some cases the platform can be medium specific, like Unbound, a crowdfunding publishing house for books.

Crowdfunded projects can range greatly in both goal and magnitude, from small artistic projects to entrepreneurs seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in seed capital as an alternative to traditional venture capital investment. However, according to research by Mollick in 2013, crowdfunded projects tend either to succeed by small amounts or fail by large amounts, so this kind of overwhelming success is rare.

Crowd campaigning and cyberactivism

Crowdfunding can also be used as a means of raising money for charity. GlobalGiving is a platform which allows individuals to donate to a selection of small philanthropic projects proposed by nonprofit organizations worldwide for humanitarian and charitable causes. Meanwhile, sites like JustGiving serve as the modern equivalent of a sponsorship form, giving platform to individual members of the public who are raising money for charity. A recent high-profile example in the UK is The Helen Titchener (nee Archer) Rescue Fund which raised over £170,000 ostensibly for a fictional character from a radio soap opera, but in practical terms for the domestic violence charity Refuge.

This example serves as a reminder that online crowdfunding is still tremendously reliant on transmission of message, and that old media like radio and television can still have a role to play. Nonetheless, digital tools have opened up a host of new ways for activists to propagate their message. Electronic communications like social media, email, and podcasts allow activists to communicate very quickly and get their information to a large audience.

Petitioning is another old approach given new blood by the strength-in-numbers to be gained online. Platforms like 38 degrees and change.org provide a space for people to create petitions, gather support and organise events. If a large enough number of people support the petition, the organisations who can influence change may be more inclined to listen and consider taking action. The UK government even has its own petitions platform, with a guaranteed government response (albeit not necessarily a positive one) should the petition gain 10,000 signatories.

There are many examples of other creative ways in which people use online communications and digital tools effectively to campaign for change. The BOBS (Best of Online Activism) were a series of international awards to honour “creative and brave projects online that cross language and cultural barriers and thereby showcases the best of what the ever-expanding World Wide Web has to offer.” A look at some of the past winners will give you a flavour of just some of the ways people have harnessed the potential of digital tools and online communications to make big changes in the world.