Archive for January, 2010

Civic engagement is the part of the gift economy that struggles with the often contradictory nature of giving relationships, many of which have formalised over time and become steeped in tradition. When does the promotion of giving spill over into forcing someone to give? And anyway, how much sense does it make to force someone to give?

Civic engagement lives on the edge of the gift economy in a starker way than the other activities. Free will is, after all, a knotty problem that philosophers have taken on down the ages. Civic engagement wrestles with the not insignificant question, posed originally by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his 1762 treatise “The Social Contract“: can you be forced to be free?

whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal dependence

A discussion of the finer points of Rousseau’s ‘Social Contract’ are way beyond the scope of this post, however it points to the issue at the heart of civic engagement and volunteering: the relationship between citizen and state.

In 2006, Linda Graff led on the writing for Volunteer Canada of a discussion paper ‘Volunteering and Mandatory Community Service: Choice – Incentive – Coercion – Obligation‘.

Mandatory community service is mandatory unpaid (or paid less than the prevailing wage) work undertaken in the community, usually to the benefit the community other than those performing the service.

The Volunteer Canada paper tackles the confusion and blurring of notions of volunteering and community service. It argues that community service that involves effective coercion, through significant penalties or compelling incentives, warps any sense of acting freely. Freedom, so the argument goes, is a prerequisite to being able to volunteer. As a result freedom becomes the marker separating volunteering from community service.

Susan Ellis and Steve McCurley rightly (as it’s turned out) observed in 2002 that the oxymoron of the ‘mandated volunteer’ would steadily increase as governmental policy across different countries looked more to compulsory community service programmes.

What’s interesting is the report highlights a great number of models of community service, all come back to the relationship between citizen and state. In most of the models cited, it’s the state that is curtailing the liberty of its citizens giving activities by enforcing obligations, constituting threats and presenting incentives. Whether it’s through court mandates, school rules, or social security conditions, the involvement of the state tends to produce giving activities that achieve beneficial social impact first. Concerns for personal freedom, such as there are, come second.

An offender taking part in community service may be giving back to the community (social impact), but the fact that they’re ordered to give by a court sentence obviously waters down the extent to which community service for offenders can be judged a free expression (personal freedom) of their desire to give. However, the sense of freedom is not extinguished entirely. There may be an element of choice for the offender in the type of community service they do depending on the sentence and degree to which they throw themselves into the spirit of giving.

Role of the state in promoting giving

The role of the state in the gift economy is hugely controversial. So often government policies aimed at promoting giving, resort to heavy-handed carrots and sticks. Attaching such artificial pros and cons to giving opportunities often cannibalize volunteering activities’ social impact at the expense of the giver’s personal freedom.

In the UK, the Government’s Community Payback scheme, run by the Probation Service, brands community service as punishment. Offenders work on projects, some of which are nominated by the public, that provide tangible benefits to local communities. The scheme demonstrates why state-sponsored giving is problematic: it tends to reduce opportunities to give, down to straightforward transactions. Rebranding community service as ‘payback’ is an obvious attempt to counter the uncertainty of community service as a giving activity. For example:

• What’s the value of a gift to the community from someone who’s been coerced into giving it?
• How can giving service be a punishment for offenders, when in plenty of other situations giving service to the community is an honour and a privilege for free citizens?

Community Payback is an attempt to couch community service in more certain terms. The metaphor of ‘payback’ is tantamount to a formal exchange, with the offender paying off their debt to society. This tactic is clearly an attempt on the part of the Government to resolve the anomalies of forced giving. To take the two questions above as examples. In response to the first, Government policy appears to be saying the value of the gift is irrelevant, the experience is a punishment with the state stepping in as guarantor to ensure that is the case. In response to the second, Government policy appears to be saying this service is not on a par with the service offered by free citizens. To underline the point offenders are required to wear orange high-visibility jackets marked ‘Community Payback’.

Community Payback as a scheme is not unusual in taking this approach. Giving activities become straightforward transactions between citizens and the state, with a view to maximising their social impact. It’s ironic that as the state’s increasingly reductionist approach to harnessing the gift economy (reducing ‘giving’ to ‘exchanging’), many in the private sector are increasingly expanding their exchange relationships with customers to include the gift economy.

Google and cultivated reciprocity

Take Google for example. This is a company that is investing significantly (certainly relative to others in the search market) in the gift economy through embracing the philosophy of open source projects and programmes. This is actually not that surprising as Google’s core business, online advertising, has developed thanks to ‘cultivated reciprocity’ (that’s reciprocity that can be assured to a greater degree than generalised reciprocity left to grow in the ‘wild’ in unstructured gift relationships- we’ll return to this concept in a future post).

Here’s the deal with their search product.

1. You give Google your eye balls.
2. They say, “thanks, that’s potentially useful to us. We can sell advertising based on you letting us know what you’re looking for and doing it on our pages. We’ll give you a great search experience”.
3. It’s a reciprocal relationship, not a formal exchange as no money has to change hands between us.
4. The money that sustains the giving comes from a third party (the advertiser).

It’s a model termed the ‘three party market’ by Chris Anderson in his book ‘Free’, and it’s known by economists as a two-sided market. It’s very similar to the model used by free newspapers and ad-supported television, only it’s more attuned to the nature of the web. It scales more effectively on the web for Google as they don’t have to pay for content creation or distribution/broadcast. In addition, as this two-sided market model scales on the web there is some equivalence with gift economies.

Google has an incentive to give back: greater user experience, more users, more revenue, and so on. The same is true for the RSPB with their Garden Birdwatch activity that we mentioned in a previous post. The RSPB has an incentive to make the results of their data available: greater user understanding, more users engaged, more data, better collective understanding of bird populations, etc. The obvious difference is that most users of Google search are not conscious that they are giving Google anything, or at least don’t factor that in to the way the use Google’s search product. With the RSPB we are very consciously giving the organisation our information.

Another point is that Google’s scale means it can leverage the best of both the worlds of giving and exchanging. It gets the scaling potential of giving, combined with the high degree of certainty associated with exchange relationships due to the way it cultivates reciprocity across its network of users. In other words, the more total users there are running searches, the greater the probability that they sell AdWords, the less pressure to sell to individual users, the closer the product gets to being a gift without strings attached (generalised reciprocity).

This level of certainty is beyond the reach of most charities, who work on a very different scale. Certainly nowhere near millions of users! First though, let’s consider the similarities of giving through volunteering for a charity or nonprofit.

1. You give the charity a helping hand.
2. They say, “thanks that’s potentially useful to us. We can meet our objectives and perhaps get support for our service users and perhaps further charitable funding to support our mission goals. You’ll get a great volunteering experience.”
3. It’s a reciprocal relationship, not a formal exchange as there’s no contract, no money changes hands between us.
4. The money that sustains the giving comes from a third party (the charitable funder).

The big difference between Google’s model of cultivated reciprocity and volunteering with a charity, is that volunteering with a charity typically hits scaling issues. Each new volunteer comes with a resource implication, in that their involvement needs to be managed and supported. It is easier for Google to scale and cultivate reciprocity because there is much higher degree of consensus around what makes a great search experience, than there is around what makes a great volunteering experience.

Language problems

A big part of the controversy surrounding the issue of mandatory community service and volunteering, is due to the fact that often community service is inaccurately presented as volunteering. This is probably due to the fact that as volunteering is the best known form of giving for the uninitiated, so different giving activities are frequently confused with volunteering. Giving is rarely used as a word to describe volunteering activities, as it is a word that has become a euphemism for giving money or making a financial donation.

Volunteering has, as a result, been increasingly used as a way of simply conveying the message that a giving activity is taking place. Even though very often it is very difficult to explain just how giving is reciprocated, due to the unknowns involved. We resort to big, well known terms from the gift economy. To be sure, there aren’t many that cut through the mainstream. So the few words that are broadly understood, like volunteering, seem to get recycled a little too often.

The Volunteer Canada paper reflected a general worry that partly due to lazy use of language a “careless blurring of the distinction between volunteering and mandatory community service may pose a significant risk to the long-term well-being and availability of volunteer resources in Canada”.

Language matters, but the issue cannot be resolved by clarifying the meaning of volunteering alone. It requires a better understanding of the broader context in which volunteering takes place as a whole.

Honour and duty

The word volunteering, in the UK at least, stems from a tradition tied up with the concepts of honour, duty and service to the community. It’s worth noting that many of the more traditional volunteering roles are often carried out more in the spirit of civic engagement, than as hands-on volunteering activities.

An example of volunteering blended with this aspect of civic engagement is the role of trustee or member of the board of a not-for-profit. Civic engagement frequently encourages giving through appealing to an individual’s sense of status or prestige. Especially when it comes to taking on a role that is usually more about providing strategic oversight, than services direct to service users.

The history of volunteering in the military, in healthcare and the emergency services point to the deep roots of giving in civic engagement. In many more established roles in civic engagement, the person involved receives money as an allowance, such as councillors (local government representatives in the UK) and magistrates (magistrates or Justices of the Peace (JPs) deal with around 95 per cent of criminal cases in England and Wales). However, in many cases, attempts have been made to stick to the principles of giving, even though many of these civic roles have developed more in line with the exchange model.

In many cases, the language used to describe payments harks back to a tradition of giving, using words such as allowance, reimbursement and stipend. Money and payments is after all, a red line for most definitions of volunteering. If you receive payment beyond the reimbursement of out of pocket expenses for your activity, this is an exchange relationship rather than a gift relationship. But where does this notion come from? To get some insight into this, it’s worth returning to theories of giving.

French sociologist Marcel Mauss, author of The Gift in 1923-4, was fascinated by why gifts were never “free”. In this book he asked the question: “What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?” (p.3)” Mauss’s answer was:

The giver does not merely give an object but also part of himself, for the object is indissolubly tied to the giver: “the objects are never completely separated from the men who exchange them” (The Gift, p.31). Because of this bond between giver and gift, the act of giving creates a social bond with an obligation to reciprocate on part of the recipient. To not reciprocate means to lose honour and status… [quoted from Wikipedia article]

Mauss provides another way to distinguish between exchanging and giving that helps enlighten the debate about civic engagement.

In a commodity economy there is a strong distinction between objects and persons through the notion of private property. Objects are sold, meaning that the ownership rights are fully transferred to the new owner. The object has thereby become “alienated” from its original owner. In a gift economy, however, the objects that are given are inalienated from the givers; they are “loaned rather than sold and ceded”. [quoted from Wikipedia article]

From this perspective, civic engagement is an attempt on the part of the state to counter the alienation of citizens from their surrounding community caused by the dominance of exchange based on commodities. Interestingly as well, if there’s no such thing as a ‘free’ gift, if giving can nudge those who receive to reciprocate, giving activities are political acts.

Civic Engagement and Participation

What’s interesting is the amount of policy proposals that link civic engagement with the new participation agenda, inspired, in part, by the growth in participation driven by social media.

Governments move slowly. Social media and the web moves fast. As a result, it’s not government-sponsored civic engagement that’s leading the way in social media adoption. It’s certainly true that since the success of Barack Obama’s US election campaign in 2008, politicians of all colours have become much more aware of the role of social media in campaigning. However, it’s a new looser, broader range of individuals and groups motivated by social and political change that are leading the way in social media adoption as a way of reinventing giving relationships in civic engagement.

There are a whole host of online communities using social media to build platforms to affect change on issues and problems people care about as citizens, some on a local scale, some on a global scale. Change.org, Causecast, Global Voices Online, Idealist.org, NetSquared and #4Change are a few examples that suggest the range of approaches taking place.

Activism is certainly a dominant subset of this, leading the charge in the adoption of social media tools as a means to effect social change. Critics question the practical application and effectiveness of social media in activist cause aka ‘slacktivism‘.

It’s important to be conscious, therefore, that giving activities in the area of civic engagement may take place beyond the state’s agenda, but may actually directly challenge it.

Further resources

John Searle visited Google’s Mountain View, CA headquarters to discuss his book ” Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power.” This event took place on October 30, 2007 as part of the Authors@Google series.

Participation is referred to incessantly across the sectors, but is one of the least defined types of activity in the gift economy. The pitfall with participation as a concept is its lack of precision. It’s used to cover all manner of activities, typically ad hoc and of short duration.

Participation in the ‘giving’ ecosystem should not be confused with the politician’s buzzword, referring to the involvement of citizens in decision-making processes of government (inform, consult, involvement, collaborate and empower).

Give us ‘x’ and we will give you ‘y‘

Governments and corporate entities have tended to see participation in overly passive terms, e.g. paying focus groups to participate or for consumers to participate by consuming, is not a strong giving kind of participation. Hard incentives, such as paying someone to take part in a focus group or consultative process, are examples of a formal exchange relationship, often presented as a gift relationship.

“If you give us about your thoughts on shampoo for two hours, we will give you £20.”

In the focus group example, it’s an exchange pure and simple: give us ‘x‘ and we will give you ‘y‘. You provide a service (your personal insight) and they remunerate you for the trouble.

Alternatively, take the example of the RSPB’s Garden Birdwatch which is a good example of participation based on giving.

“If you spend an hour next weekend counting bird species in your garden, you can give us your data. We will reciprocate by sharing with you, and others, the bigger picture of what’s happening to different bird species across the country.”

An exchange is clearly built between two parties, the contracter and the contracted, the buyer and the seller, the supplier and the consumer. A gift relationship, on the other hand, is between the giver, the receiver and the world.

Gifts provide the receiver with incentives to share what they’ve been given. Booze, chocolates and flowers are popular gifts because they themselves can be easily shared. Back to our example of Garden Birdwatch, given all this data by willing participants about bird populations around the UK, the RSPB knows that by sharing their results, apart from anything else it makes it more likely for people to give again. Giving scales. So often the greater the giving taking place, the greater the potential sum value of all the gifts given.

Law of participative production

And so here’s the thing about participation. It’s almost a law of participative production. The more specific the goal of the crowd’s production, the greater the pressure to simplify the task at the heart of the call to action. While if you’re more willing to be more fuzzy about what you want to collectively produce, the greater the range of tasks available to participants in the project.

The Extraordinaries’ Haiti Earthquake Support Centre is an example of the former, while Wikipedia is an example of the latter.

Giving or taking?

A large part of participation is made up of activity where the individual takes far more than they give. St John Ambulance, a voluntary organisation in the UK, makes a distinction between activities where volunteers are receiving training and when they are providing service. When you are providing a service to the organisation you are volunteering; and when you are receiving skills, learning and training you are participating.

The growth in interest in participation originally preceded the rise of social media, but now social media is increasingly seen as the key to achieving greater participation. As a result social media has transformed the terms of the participation debate into one of opening up and improving democratic structures of government. As Tom Steinberg of mySociety points out, the social web is and should be transforming the way governments work. Tim O’Reilly in the US and Gov 2.0 Summit has also helped expand public discourse and understanding on this subject.

In the Digital Britain report by Lord Carter, digital participation has come to mean this merging of the digital content consumers and digital content producers. Blogger Michael Grimes on the Citizensheep blog points out the need to put such talk about digital participation in more active terms. Digital participation is not just about passive consumption, but also about participants or volunteers actually taking part in the delivery of services to others.

Participation or volunteering?

Where participation becomes volunteering is a particular area of controversy in the gift economy. There’s a noticeable trend to merge or at least close the gap between participation and volunteering. Websites like Acts of Kindness, We Are What We Do, Pledgebank and Leap Anywhere are just a handful of initiatives inviting users to take part in giving activities. What many of these new initiatives have in common is that they deliberately avoid the heavy use of terms like volunteering and participation to describe what they offer.

Twestival has been a really interesting example of how social media has generated a more spontaneous kind of organised volunteer driven events. Beth Kanter interviewed Amanda Rose, lead Twestival organiser. The example of Twestival emphasises the strength of participation as a form of giving. It’s ad hoc nature, makes it lightweight enough to organise in the world of the real time web. Participation offers givers a way to respond to prevailing events and express the mood of the moment, in a way more structured, volunteering-oriented giving finds hard to keep up with.

Building paths between participation and volunteering

In the UK in 2008, government-funded youth volunteering charity v launched a sustained campaign to rebrand volunteering (PDF) as ‘favours’, volunteering with a strong flavour of participation. Through the Favour Farm website young people aged 16-25 can get involved by “giving a friend a hug or cooking breakfast for their family through to taking part in a charity campaign”. Hannah Wright of vInspired explains the strategy to merge participation and volunteering as viewing participation activities as a pathway into volunteering activities for many young people today.

Hannah Wright’s post on the vlabs blog called ‘Reimagining Volunteering‘ which links to a piece of research by Timebank and v looks at precisely the way in which the line between forms of participation and volunteering are increasingly blurring.

Distributed participation aka ‘crowdsourcing’

The growth of distributed participation is one specific way in which social media has increased the scale on which giving relationships can operate. British newspaper The Guardian’s crowdsourcing experiment for investigating expenses claims of members of the UK Parliament gave a good example of how social media and the breaking up of massive tasks into smaller tasks, created an opportunity for many to participate in the content of the newspaper.

Crowdsourcing has become shorthand for participation activities built on social media. Jeff Howe introduced the term “crowdsourcing” in a 2006 article for Wired magazine. Many, however, see the advent of crowdsourcing style volunteering as not necessarily a good thing. For example, Jayne Cravens’ blog is a great example putting forward a skeptical view on whether crowdsourcing is in any sense volunteering.

There are many examples of websites exploring the hinterland between participation and volunteering opening up through crowdsourcing. Here are some gathered by Scott Stadum on Idealist.org: The Point, Groundcrew, The Extraordinaries and Amazon Mechanical Turkvia Idealist.org.

It’s interesting that as we become more conscious of the collective value of the smaller giving activities that have always been a part of our lives, social media is presenting more opportunities to give in bitesized chunks as in the case of crowdsourcing.

Jonathan Zittrain in ‘Minds for Sale’ flags up problematic questions with making the goal of participation so precise that it’s reduced to micro tasks so mind-numbing that they need to be disguised as games, incentivised with micro-payments or bundled into other processes. Crowdsourcing raises new questions for participation as a form of giving. What happens when participants are unaware of where there gift is going and that they are giving to anything to anyone at all?

Further resources

Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, dives into the ethics and issues surrounding cloud labor in this talk from the Berkman West reception at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California on November 18, 2009. He’s just published ‘The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it‘ (available for download).

Gift relationships are built on the twin ingredients of freedom and impact: positive personal freedom and beneficial social impact. An example of a gift relationship is someone volunteering (giving) support to a user of a socially beneficial service.

This is positive freedom in the sense of freedom to do some kind of activity, rather than freedom from some activity, which is the negative conception of freedom. See Isaiah Berlin’s lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty“. In addition, this is personal freedom in the sense of personal expression, responsibility and commitment freely entered into and of a non-binding nature.

‘Beneficial social impact‘ refers to whether the intention of the individual carrying out the activity, could reasonably be understood to be aiming to have a beneficial social impact, rather than whether a particular activity results in a beneficial social impact or not.

What is giving?

Think about the qualities of a great gift:

• It is freely given, i.e. not a response to an explicit demand from the recipient or some formal obligation [personal positive freedom]
• It meets the desire/needs of the recipient and has an impact (emotional, practical, etc.) [beneficial social impact]

The theory behind the gift economy is complicated and not everyone agrees on what makes a great gift.

Increasing visibility and the scale of giving relationships (PDF) are undoubtedly bringing about positive changes in how the gift economy works. However, social media has resulted in a paradox for the gift economy.

Social media is making giving more simple, and yet more complex.

Perhaps this paradox is one of the reasons for much of the ambivalence about social media amongst volunteer managers.

Non-profits with few resources and vulnerable service users may well have good reason to be more risk averse than private companies gambling with venture capitalists’ money. Seth Godin, an online marketing guru, asserted that non-profits were slow to adopt social media because they were afraid of change. This provoked an interesting debate about how non-profits have used social media.

Another reason is that given the importance of scale for social media to be most effective, it’s often a winner takes all situation. It’s no coincidence then that many of the social media land grabs (of market share) have been won by big multinational corporations.

Coming to terms with the paradox

In many ways, the use of social media has increased the social impact of giving by: helping to improve understanding on needy issues; enabled more specialist giving by increasing the quality and quantity of information; and, by increasing the technical simplicity of how to support causes directly.

However, social media has increased choice (personal freedom) of where to give in the gift economy. Now the giver is easily confused, where before messages may have been clearer (if more basic). Now the increasing diversity and complexity of issues makes it hard for the giver to evaluate the effect of their giving with the huge range of ways in which giving time, in particular, can be done.

Mapping giving relationships

Let’s look more closely at activities where the individual’s intention is a balance of positively expressing their personal freedom and creating beneficial social impact. We can begin to understand how the human activities behind the ‘giving’ ecosystem are related and how they are distinct.

It’s clear that these activities are closely related if placed on a scale according to two variables: positive personal freedom and beneficial social impact. Activities can be plotted on the x axis according to the extent to which positive personal freedom is the intention of the activity, and on the y axis according to the extent to which beneficial social impact is the intention of the activity.

Participation, volunteerism

Let’s explore this philosophically by looking more closely at the intent behind such ‘giving’ activity. What’s interesting is that a basic pattern emerges where participation activities predominate in the bottom left and volunteering in the top right.

Activities such as writing a letter to a newspaper, making a small donation or attending a public meeting, on the whole, are not primarily motivated either as an expression of personal freedom or as an attempt to bring about beneficial social impact due to their typical ad hoc nature and degree of personal commitment to the activity required.

However, activities that we can recognise as volunteering, where an individual freely makes a commitment and aligns with a cause, on the whole, are primarily motivated by a sense of personal freedom and the prospect of making some kind of beneficial social impact.

On this basis, participation and volunteering activities can be defined in the following way:

Participation is a type of giving activity where positive personal freedom and beneficial social impact are not the primary intention of the giver

Volunteerism is a type of giving activity where positive personal freedom and beneficial social impact are the primary intention of the giver

It is important to underline, this is not a measure of actual social impact or personal freedom that results. This would depend on many factors beyond the scope of this discussion. This is simply a philosophical attempt to understand the intent of the individual behind these types of giving activity, volunteering and participation.

Civic engagement, professional amateurism

When we turn to the outliers, activities based on civic engagement and professional amateurism (Pro-Am), we see a similar pattern. Professional amateurs, enthusiasts and hobbyists’ activities are primarily motivated by people following their passion and doing what they want. These tend to be activities whose intent is primarily about expressing personal choice, rather than about bringing about social change. These activities can range from inventing, creating cultural works or producing goods or services based on a hobby. This is not to ignore that massive social impact that professional amateur activities can have, it is simply to suggest that in relative terms and in the main, social impact is a secondary consideration.

Activities centering on civic engagement on the other hand, are primarily motivated by an intention to bring about some kind of social impact. These activities tend to be set up in a way that puts the creation of a beneficial social impact ahead of the relative freedom of the individuals involved to express themselves through the activities. Civic engagement activities can range from community service programmes for offenders, students serving their community as part of their studies or emergency services staffed by those giving up the time to serve their community in formal disciplined roles.

On this basis, Pro-Am and civic engagement activities can be defined in the following way:

Professional amateur activity is a type of giving activity where positive personal freedom, and not social impact, is the primary intention of the giver

Civic engagement is a type of giving activity where beneficial social impact, and not positive personal freedom, is the primary intention of the giver

Knowledge and understanding of how these giving activities fit together has never been very comprehensive. On the whole, each area of giving has been approached by area or sector rather than as part of a larger ecosystem of giving. Now with the growth in social media, it is the increasing visibility and scale on which gift relationships can operate that is causing traditional markers between the activities to shift and blur.

Perhaps these shifting sands are another reason in addition to the paradox of giving that have something to do with why volunteerism as a field seems ambivalent about this increasingly social web.