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).

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paddaniels has content marketing with Arkayne Socialize.

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