In 2004, Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller wrote a paper for UK thinktank Demos called ‘The ProAm Revolution: How enthusiasts are changing our economy and society‘. Professional amateurs*, or ProAms as Leadbeater and Miller refer to them, are:

“innovative, committed and networked amateurs working to professional standards”.

There are a number of examples of ProAm activity offered in the paper: gardening, sport, campaigning, DIY, volunteering, writing and researching amongst many others. They give specific examples of ProAm achievements:

  • Development of open source software by largely unpaid amateurs, e.g. operating system Linux and Apache web server software which both successfully compete with commercial products
  • Sharing of knowledge and networking by those passionate about science and research, e.g. astronomers
  • Gamers that developed mass participation computer games like Sims
  • Writers, musicians and artists fundamental to the evolution of rap music
  • Invention and development of mountain bikes

In each example, small numbers of passionate and dedicated individuals gave their time to develop something that later grew and made a significant social, economic and cultural impact.

It’s fun

Professional amateur activity underscores why many people participate in the gift economy: it’s fun and it’s interesting. Enthusiasts give, share and collaborate with others because it’s fun and interesting. It offers people the freedom to express who they are, that paid (contracted) employment might not necessarily allow them to do.

Social media has enabled these empassioned ProAms to network better and learn from each other, increasing their reasons to give. They are taking advantage of distributed organisational models that are more flexible and less expensive than more formal organisational structures. The giving activities of ProAms are beginning to significantly challenge the ingenuity and capacity of their professional peers stuck in more formal exchange-based relationships.

Isn’t this another form of volunteering?

In many cases, activities driven by enthusiasts or hobbyists have a beneficial social impact, although it’s more than likely not their primary motivating factor. The starting point for ProAm giving activities is more often the desire to express a passion, a skill or a conviction, even though it may end resulting in beneficial social impact. A keen gardener may improve the environment for their local community. A keen sports enthusiast may help run a sports club for others to get involved.

Leadbeater and Miller make a somewhat arbitrary distinction between ‘private’ (more individualistic pursuits) and ’social’ ProAm activity, where ’social’ includes volunteering activities. Leadbeater and Miller are clear that there’s a strong link between ProAm and volunteering activity, but they are less clear about what that link is.

In fact they imply that volunteering is just a subset of ProAm’ing. Although, I’d argue that they’re interlinked, one’s not the subset of the other. In volunteering activities, the goal of achieving beneficial social impact is equally as important as being able to express a passion, skill or conviction. It’s worth noting as well, that Leadbeater and Miller also include campaigning and canvassing as ProAm activity. Both crossover with civic engagement activities which we will look at in a future post.

Where’s the altruism?

Whether giving activities, like ProAm activities, are selfless or selfish acts is a blind alley. The best gifts in the world, focused entirely on the needs of others, can at the same time have unintended benefits to the giver. It’s actually much more interesting to understand how giving relationships with those around us, enlighten our view of our own self-interest.

The point about giving activities is that the costs and benefits are harder to predict, than they are when you exchange. Formal exchange-based relationships, like customer-vendor or employer-employee, are effectively an ongoing experiment in how far we can nail down the uncertainties in our relationships with those around us.

The money thing

On occasions, ProAms earn money from their passion, Leadbeater and Miller define ProAms as those who never earn the majority of their income from their ProAm activity. In other words, they give much more than they get. But hey, let’s not gloss over the money thing. Money has frequently been cited as a red line that can be used to separate what’s giving and what’s exchanging.

I think this may be historical, as giving activities have tended to be put in the catch all category ‘not work’ (at least work for economic benefit). The word ‘leisure’ has frequently in the past been used to describe this ‘post-industrial’ category of activity. In Robert Stebbins’ book, ‘Amateurs, Professionals and Serious Leisure‘, published in 1992, the case is made for the concept of serious leisure.

Notwithstanding the oxymoronic aspects of serious leisure (as with serious games I think active and passive is better distinction), Stebbins, writing 20 years ago, defines leisure in relation to work, usually as the ‘antithesis to work as an economic function‘ (see also research by Max Kaplan and Stanley Parker). However, today we’re more used to the idea that fun and games have ’serious’ applications. Equally, we understand that giving activities, cut across both work and leisure. We can give while we’re working, as well as while we’re at leisure. Employer Supported Volunteering is a general example, but Bright One, a volunteer-run communications agency for not-for-profits, is a more specific case, one of many, highlighting the crossover between work and leisure.

Anyway, getting back to the money thing. The Oxford English dictionary defines the word amateur as:

1. a person who takes part in a sport or other activity without being paid.

2. a person regarded as incompetent at a particular activity.

Putting the issue of competence to one side for a moment, there is broad agreement, as with the concept of volunteering, that amateurs receive no or very little financial incentive. But as with the concept of ‘not work’, ‘not financially rewarded’, means defining these activities in the negative, by what they’re not, rather than what they are.

It has also meant that the links between ProAm activity and volunteering have been overlooked, because the emphasis has been on what differentiates them, i.e. it’s common for Professional Amateurs to receive money, if only very little, from their giving activities. The links stem from original reason for the giving in the first place. Just as the original French word amateur suggests, both types of giving are motivated by the love of it.

ProAms have a different relationship to money. In many cases, ProAms are in a position to give, only after investing their own money in their activity. For example, many have to shell out to buy equipment, to fund courses, to raise awareness amongst the public, to join groups and associations, and also put on events or performances, are amongst typical costs. In one sense ProAms trade the security of patronage from a larger organisation that volunteers may have, for the certainty of personal control. ProAm’ing has a personal flavour, while volunteering is more social in comparison.

The culture in volunteering, pretty universally, considers it good practice for giving activities to be financed by the organisation or group seeking to involve the volunteer. This includes the responsibility to reimburse the volunteer’s out of pocket expenses, so there is minimal to no personal cost to the volunteer. However, for ProAms, assuming the costs of the experience are a given, as the  independence from bigger organisations and the personal freedom to follow their passion, are fundamental.

This different approach to money can create a cultural clash between volunteering and ProAm’ing, but both are fundamentally about giving. For ProAms, the opportunity to recoup costs by charging for services rendered (such as training, performances or commodities) is a practical necessity, rather than a moral dilemma. Any income helps to pay for more services in the future. For example, informal profit share schemes for actors who only receive money if their production makes a profit doesn’t void their giving spirit. The actors concerned, perform for the love of it, and the improbable payment is most definitely secondary.

Giving is not the preserve of not-for-profits

The concept of the ProAm is important in understanding the gift economy and how it’s affected by social media. It’s an area of significant activity that is most often divorced from other forms of giving, due to the prevalence of categorising activity in terms of professional sectors, i.e. non-profit, public and private sectors.

Just as competence is not the preserve of the professional, as Andrew Keen would have us believe, giving is not the preserve of not-for-profits. Perhaps because of the difficulty in defining what volunteering is, there’s an over reliance on using charities or not-for-profit organisations to authenticate what is and what isn’t formally volunteering. In Ivan Scheier’s classic definition:

“volunteering is doing more than you have to – because you want to – in a cause you consider good”

In this definition, ‘good’ is fundamentally subjective.

Intermediaries, such as charities or not-for-profits, can help set a framework for defining what ‘good’ is. Of course, what fits the legal requirements to become a charity or not-for-profit is highly controversial. Many would accept that volunteering can take place outside the framework of a legally grounded ‘good cause’. Giving is not the preserve of any one sector of the mainstream economy, giving relationships touch all sectors. One case is the growth of social entrepreneurship which arguably has it’s roots in ProAm activity. UnLtdWorld is an example of using social media to better network and raise the visibilty of social entrepreneurs in the UK.

Amateurs working with professionals

ProAm activity provides many examples where social media is revolutionising giving. The development of citizen journalism is one such example. Journalism is a profession that is going through the social media revolution. As the internet has provided a low cost content publishing and distribution system, writers willing to share their passion are stepping in to fill gaps that professional journalists are not filling, e.g. niche subjects, hyperlocal coverage, etc. As the internet is enabling networked communication in real time through sites like Twitter and Facebook, so witnesses to breaking news with a mobile handy are replacing the journalist reporting from the scene of the action.

Citizen journalism is where “members of the public play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information”.

We Media sums it up as:

“Armed with easy-to-use web publishing tools, always-on connections and increasingly powerful mobile devices, the online audience has the means to become an active participant in the creation and dissemination of news and information”.

It’s a complicated picture. Citizen journalism grows out of the idea of civic journalism where readers are not treated as spectators, but as participants. It’s a participatory approach to journalism, where professional journalists are increasingly collaborating with amateur journalists to produce their work. It’s worth looking at different journalists working in this area such as Nick Booth with Podnosh and Paul Bradshaw with Help Me Investigate.

This is taking journalism into the gift economy where it’s no longer a simple exchange between producers and consumers, writers and their readership. This new form of journalism is confronting issues familiar to many in volunteerism and others who’ve worked for many years in the gift economy.

  • How, as a professional journalist benefiting from information gifted by citizen journalists, should you recognise or reward their contribution?
  • How can professionals and amateurs work alongside each other?
  • How can journalists, that straddle the exchange and gift economies, fund their activity without changing the nature of the relationship they have with those who give to them?

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*I’m using the term here coined by Miller and Leadbeater advisedly. There are not many terms that really cover the broad range of activities involved. I’m using Professional Amateur as I think it’s the best we’ve got at the moment.

Further resources

Charles Leadbeater at TED Global – filmed July 2005

More From paddaniels

paddaniels has content marketing with Arkayne Socialize.

Related posts:

  1. Giving activities – Part 1: Participation
  2. Giving activities: Part 3 – Civic engagement
  3. Professional values
  4. Mapping giving relationships
  5. Giving paradox: personal freedom and social impact