I just learned about IfWeRanTheWorld via Craig Newmark’s blog. He writes:
It’s still in process, but Cindy Gallop was thinking about one of the biggest of problems, how to turn the good intentions of millions of people into actual action. The idea is to use crowdsourcing to get people together.
But it gets really interesting when you read more about IWRTW from the folks at Wired, who do a more in-depth profile of the proposed service:
Their unlaunched site, IfWeRantheWorld.com, should succeed in giving online activism some sorely-needed teeth. Rather than raising awareness, the site is set up to convert intent into action, to get things done. As a side effect, it could reinvent advertising as a transparent interaction between corporations and individuals.
“The single largest pool of untapped resource in this world is human good intentions that never translate into action,” said Gallop, who founded the company with Davis two years ago after digital guru Esther Dyson introduced them. Gallop says current do-gooder networks make it too hard to find achievable, concrete tasks that fit one’s skill set, time and budget — and that offer instant gratification.
“For a large amount of the world, doing good is fundamentally very, very boring,” explained Gallop. “If you go to the homepage of something like DoSomething.org, or any one of the many [like it], there is an instant yawn factor -– ‘I know this is really good stuff, I should be doing it, but I’m half asleep already.”
The premise of their online service is to facilitate breaking down action into simple tasks that are easy to accomplish (read the Wired article for more details).
But here’s the part I especially like:
There’s no shortage of sites dedicated to online activism, but this one lets individuals contribute time, ingenuity and other resources with greater efficiency, while exerting a sliding level of control. Davis and Gallop studied World of Warcraft to create a structure in which a rotating cast of leaders might direct a given project at different stages — the same way WOW teams self-organize around different people, depending on how their areas of expertise stack up to the task at hand.
How cool is that?!
I’ve got mixed feelings about this being run as a for-profit enterprise (in fact, the Wired folks are also excited about how this could “reinvent advertising” … BFD), but hey, let them shift a paradigm or two and then others can imitate.
