Hi all, we're trying to introduce a new way of solving collective action problems: Crowdacting. We want to build the first official crowdacting platform. In other words, we would like to build the 'Kickstarter' of crowdacting.
Crowdacting is 'coordinated, conditional, collective action to achieve a positive social and/or ecological goal'. Or, in simpler terms, with crowdacting we ask: Would you take action if you knew that a [hundred/thousand/million] people would also do it?
The concept is quite simple: It's very much like crowdfunding, but people commit actions instead of money. For instance, someone can start a project where he/she proposes: "If 100,000 people commit to changing to a 100% renewable energy provider, we'll all do it!". This takes away the feeling that your actions are just a drop in the ocean. Your actions are part of something much bigger, and our coordinated actions can potentially have massive positive impact.
In practice, crowdacting follows three steps:
- A project initiator (this could be any individual or organization) launches a project (e.g. at www.collaction.org). The initiator defines an action (see examples at www.crowdacting.org), sets a target (minimum number of participants) and a deadline (when the target needs to be met)
- Project supporters commit to taking the proposed action on the condition that the target is met (i.e. there are enough people other people that commit to taking the action).
- When the target is met before the deadline, all supporters act collectively. If the target is not met, nobody needs to act (but of course they can choose to act individually anyway).
The term (with its current meaning) was first coined in 2015 by our nonprofit called CollAction, which was founded to address collective action problems by promoting this new approach. CollAction has also set up the first official crowdacting platform in the world: www.collaction.org. CollAction.org functions both as a platform and curator (a bit like 'the Kickstarter for crowdacting'). We have defined a set of criteria that potential projects need to meet before they can be posted on the platform.
We have built a prototype at www.collaction.org and have run a first pilot (sorry, it's in Dutch, as we're based in the Netherlands, but we would like to make it multilingual asap!)
Now we would like to develop the platform further in earnest, and we could really use your help!
We already have found some great back end developers via socialcoder.org, but we could really use some help on the front end!
By the way, we're currently building in ASP.net and expect to make this platform open source.
Looking forward to getting in touch with all you social coders out there!
Warm regards,
Ron