Exploring Volunteering

We’ve all seen the headlines: many exaggerate and distort how we can use the web.

Imagine for a sec that we learnt how to fly thanks to some amazing piece of technology. How would the newspapers cover the story? How would the media cover the emergence as the uptake grew of wholly new piece of technology?

Substitute the word ˜flying’ where the papers talk about the web and you get the picture. Not much would probably change. This emphasises the point that much of issues are to do with the fact that the web is new. The behaviours associated with the technology and how the new possibilities influence our social relationships transpire later. The serious point here is that we are living through a period of profound social change, not just technological change. We’re all looking for answers. To find those answers we need to introduce a modicum of balance into the debate.

Take the example of technology that has become mundane. Learning to ride a bike was terrifying when we fell off for the first time, terrific when we were let to go solo. It was amazing when we learnt to play games and be with our peers, shocking if you consider cycling accident statistics! Revolutionary when we realised the significance of being able to go off our own away from our parents, and mystifying when tried to mend our first puncture.

Balance comes inevitably from experience, we need to give it time. However, web technology moves so fast we need to get this balanced perspective by carefully considering the issues.

Is there too much information?

Before looking at the web’s potential for changing how we can build new information and support services, it’s worth asking the fundamental question: is access to more and more information always a good thing?

We’re living through a Googlefication of our culture. There’s a belief that the web’s mission is to make more information readily accessible. Google’s seventh point in it’s explicitly stated philosophy is: “There’s always more information out there.” The right approach for a technology company, but is this the right approach if we’re concerned with the human value of information? Information can be empowering, but it can also be overwhelming and even anxiety provoking. Perhaps the real challenge is not technological. Information is a human issue, not a technical problem after all.

Mark Charmer made the analogy between Twitter and the invention of radar during the first half of the Twentieth century at the Media140 conference. Social media, like Twitter, is a new more powerful way of making the previously invisible life around us, visible. Just as radar did in its day. In fact, it’s an analogy that works for social media in general and the web. Radar’s battle is with ˜clutter’ things like rain and sandstorm that sometimes get picked up. Some of this peripheral vision information captured in social media can be useful, but plenty can lead to false alarms and worry.

Let’s look at three new capabilities that the web’s given. Although there are many others.

Anonymity

Anonymity is not new – writing – helplines – fax – but the web has opened up new opportunities for practitioners to make particularly early interventions that were either not practical before or did not offer a very complete form of anonymity.

When we look at the issue of how we ensure the security of the identity of users crucial for the effectiveness of information and support services, it’s striking how much of a shift is taking place. The rise of anonymity is significant because it empowers the service user. Unlike with confidentiality, anonymity is within the service user’s sphere of influence. It’s also subject to very personal drivers like feelings (such as embarrassment), rather than formal drivers such as the laws and organisational policies, as with confidentiality.

Ruthie Henshall, the singer and actress, said recently, “We’re constantly judging our insides on everyone else’s outsides”. She was describing how she coped with her own mental health difficulties. As a celebrity, the difference between how she felt on the inside and how people perceived her on the inside was perhaps even more pronounced. Anonymity gives you the opportunity to share what they are feeling on the inside, with others on the outside (it needs to be a safe environment to be able to facilitate this).

The strengths of friends as advisors are that they are emotionally supportive, acknowledge feelings and are non-judgmental and trusted. All things that it is difficult to feel about a trained advisor who you may typically only approach at moments of crisis. Trained advisors and professionals strength is in how they understand the options, provides accurate information and offer an external perspective on your situation.

Friends are crucial for relationships issues- when mental health problems involve relationships- users are less likely to reach out to mental health service providers. Health concerns are less likely to be discussed with friends, kept private and not shared.

Choice

Is there too much choice or can personalisation overcome the overwhelming threat of too much information? Young people are used today to using a whole range of online tools. It’s important to understand how these differ and compare if we want to offer a range of options to service users. Up to now, online information and support has previously often be about developing ‘oceans’ that can be accessed wherever and whenever the service user needs them. These vast oceans of information and support exist online where space is no longer a storage issue and communication can be asynchronous.

At the same time, and increasing as technology improves, the web provides information as a stream. It’s allowing much more synchronous information and support services to take place such as voice-based technologies, web cam and chat as user uptake grows and they become more cost effective. The web is also allowing more broadcasting or live streaming of events or conferences that can provides information and support.

Given the choice that now exists both for service users and providers, the challenge is to offer a balance of services or to understand better what you specialise in so that you can build partnerships with organisations that complement your work/services.

“Online is good if you want to remain anonymous and don’t feel comfortable talking to someone face to face, or if there is no services to help you in your area.” – Participant, Self Harm project talking about the discussion boards on TheSite.org.

Participation

Finally, participation is a significant new capability offered by the web because of how it is shifting the relationship between service users and providers.

“Young people are creators not consumers of the services.” – Sally Carr, Leader in Charge, Lesbian & Gay Youth Manchester

“It’s great as it allows you to get advice from people that have been through the same thing and makes you feel good when you can relate and give advice to others.” – Participant, Self Harm project talking about the discussion boards on TheSite.org.

Services are no longer just about the delivery, they are also now about enabling users to feedback and be part of the continual improvement of the services themselves.

Three examples demonstrates three different ways in which participation can work. This models can broadly be distinguished by what the aims of the participation are. Namely:

Improving public services

Patient Opinion is a great example of this work to rethink the way the knowledge and experience of service users can help transform public services if it is understood and recognised by service providers.

Mapping of all services, both public and community

The Aliss Project is a great example of this drive to use the web to better map what services are available both in the public sector and the voluntary sector, so that sufferers of long term conditions can more easily access services available.

Developing communities for social change

Mind Apples is a great example of how the web can bring together communities of individual inspired by a call to action. In this case, helping to reframe mental health as the pursuit of health, rather than the overcoming of illness. In this campaign, Mind Apples calls on people to share what five things can contribute to a healthy mind.

Challenges

• How can we use new technology to offer early intervention?
• How can we use new technology to widen access to our services?
• How can we use new technology to change the relationship between service users and service providers?

I’ve summarised my thoughts so far on thinking about how the concept of the gift economy can help us understand giving activities, such as volunteering and participation, in the context of the social web. I’ve done this ahead of the Volunteering Counts Conference March 1st-2nd in Manchester organised by the Institute of Volunteering Research where I’ll be presenting.

Abstract

The rise of social media and digital networks is contributing to the return to prominence of the gift economy. As the web has enabled social networks and online communities to grow, so values such as sharing, openness and collaboration associated with the gift economy, are increasingly influencing the relationships and connections between us. From business strategies through to public policy, giving relationships are seen as offering credible and valuable contributions.

This revolution in values offers volunteerism and other forms of giving such as participation, civic engagement and professional-amateurism, an opportunity to play an even greater role in a ever more networked Britain.

This article attempts to unpick the increasing number of connections between these different modes of giving, rendered both possible and visible by a more networked Britain and world beyond. Focusing our attention on how these different giving activities are interconnected, rather than separated, opens up a new way of understanding participation, professional-amateurism, civic engagement and volunteering. The connecting thread between these activities played out on the social web, are the twin components of positive personal freedom and beneficial social impact.

Understanding giving activities in terms of the intention behind the giving and extent to which they are driven by personal freedom and social impact, provides the basis for a new framework to understand how the web is changing the way we give today.

Two patterns of how these different giving activities are connected should be noted:

First, social media has meant giving activities can take place on a much bigger scale than before the digital revolution. There are a growing number of examples that point to how different modes of giving can scale. Added to this is the new visibility of giving activities increasingly mediated by the web, as more users take up social media. As givers share what they are doing with others, so it becomes increasingly possible to assess the range of giving activities taking place. This new sense of range and scale is what offers us a new opportunity to establish a framework that makes sense of how we give today.

Second, as giving activities are reconfigured across brand new networks of people and groups, the role of the state, institutions, corporations and organisations in promoting, sponsoring and facilitating giving activities is changing. Whether givers are participating, volunteering, engaging or Pro-Am’ing the increased scale and visibility of giving opportunities means more and more are taking place out of the direct control of the state, institutions, corporations and organisations, bodies that shaped the giving activities of the last century.

Full article

Is Web Changing Way We Give – Patrick Daniels

I’ve been looking at how to make sense of the different kinds of giving relationships when mapping them against personal freedom and social impact.

First, here’s a map of the four types of giving activity that I’ve been looking at particularly: participation, professional amateur, civic engagement and volunteerism.

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.

More information on this here. The box above split into four (simplified below) is an attempt to understand how this ecosystem of different kinds of giving activities fit together. It’s meant to help identify general trends and patterns, rather impose a rigid structure as on the ground the links between the different kinds of giving are many and varied.

The diagram’s weakness is that it generalises and airbrushes a lot of the complexity and diversity within how the giving activities overlap and blend together.

For example, to say the role of the state features heavily on the top left of the map, doesn’t mean the state doesn’t play some kind of role in the bottom right. Or, that fun is a big element of particularly ProAm types of giving activities, doesn’t mean civic engagement isn’t fun. It simply means that fun is generally not as big a driver as is sense of duty to the community or wider society in these kinds of activities.

This is all pretty early ideas which certainly need a lot of developing so any feedback would be really gratefully received

Social impact and personal freedom

First, let’s look at the top left of the map that really covers mainly civic engagement, a little bit of participation and volunteerism. This is dominated by an aim to cause social impact, influenced by the role of the state and punctuated by many of the rights and responsibilities that we each have as citizens.

On the bottom right of the map, these giving activities are dominated by the giving of the professional amateur, with a smaller proportion of participation and volunteering giving-based activities. Here these activities revolve around the aim to explore personal freedom, play to the rules of free enterprise and are often entrepreneurial in spirit.

Values

In terms of the prevailing values that influence and guide these giving activities in the top left, honour, duty and looking to the social aspects of the giving activity to find meaning in it. If it’s social, the drive and support for the giving primarily comes from without.

In contrast, in the bottom right of the map it’s the allure of the passion, fun and putting your personal sense of self to the test and exploring who you are. It’s personal, the giving comes from within.

Structure

Search for structure to the giving activities comes from an affinity with the structure of work towards the extremes of civic engagement, professional amateurs and volunteering in the top right of the map.

Underlying this are giving activities that are structured more in alignment with leisure. They are looser, less involved and less specialist in appeal. In a way, this represents the division between the formal and the informal parts of the voluntary sector (particularly true in the UK). Many giving activities towards the top right are sponsored by formally constituted and established bodies and organisations.

As well as being informally structured towards the bottom left of the map, the giving activities found here are often much more generic in appeal and loosely defined.

Sectors

There seems to be a clear separation between many of the giving activities in terms of sectors in which they operate. The giving taking place through the middle may have its roots in a mixture of two or more different sectors. Whereas the giving towards the bottom right (ProAm) leans predominantly towards the private sector, the top left (civic engagement) towards the public sector and the top right (volunteering) towards the third sector.

Social psychology

The giving taking place on the map focuses very much on the reciprocity that’s either one-to-many, many-to-one or generalised (see Wikipedia).

One-to-many and many-to-one reciprocity often lies somewhere between direct reciprocal arrangements and generalized reciprocity…

Generalized reciprocity is even less precise. Here donors operate within a large network of social transactions largely unknown to each other, and without expectations about getting specific benefits in return ” other than, perhaps, the sort of social insurance provided by the continuance of the network itself.

Giving that is reciprocated one to one as with a financial transaction or within a family is not included in this map of giving activities:

Some reciprocal relationships are direct one-to-one arrangements between individuals, or between institutions, or between governments. Some of these are one-time arrangements, and others are embedded in long-term relationships. Families often have expectations that children will reciprocate for the care they receive as infants by caring for their elderly parents; businesses may have long-term contractual obligations with each other: governments make treaties with each other.

In addition, this map of giving activities only includes that kind of participation of which the giver is actually conscious of.

Giving for the love of it

This map of giving excludes giving that is the result of a formal exchange. Giving included on the map can be reciprocal, where each party is focused on the needs of the other. However, it is not dependent on a legally binding exchange or even an explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards. A giving relationship often looks to the collective interest and breaks under the weight of a legally enforceable contract.

In addition, the giving activities mapped are done for the love of it, not because they are means to earning a living. 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.

Varying degrees

Giving activities as they move from participation into volunteering involve increasing responsibility, commitment and ownership for the person giving. Many activities range from giving that can at one end of the scale include attendance, observance and taking part. Right through to the other end, where the giver becomes fully responsible for the activity, that is becomes responsible for the participation of others and for giving over a longer period of time demonstrating commitment.

Coercion and incentives

Giving activities are not mapped if they are primarily due to the profit motive or due to legal compulsion.

Money

In the main, givers only receive out of pocket expenses for their giving activities. However, there are examples where giving is sustained or incentivised with money, but only where it is not the main source of income. This is not the case with volunteering activities and only rarely with participation activities. However, it is much more common with civic engagement and ProAm giving activities.

A big part of understanding giving in the voluntary sector, is understanding the role of groups and organisations in organising giving activities. A lot of the literature on gift economies considers giving between individuals, but there’s a lot less attention given to how organisations and groups can facilitate giving activities.

Down the ages, across different cultures, the modes of giving have changed. It is important to understand more about how giving has developed through different phases, to better understand the present context.

Individual giving (one to one)

The dynamic when one person gives to another is very particular. It’s true that when giving of a service or a commodity takes place between two people, the pressure to reciprocate (even if not directly back to the person who gave and over an indeterminate period of time) is greater, if on a smaller scale, e.g. in a family or in a small community.

On a fundamental level, giving is a way of creating a bond with another. By giving a gift, you give create a connection. Individual giving is something we are surrounded by. It is what we are born into. Giving between individuals is what pulls families together and builds friendships with those around us.

It’s giving on a very personal scale. Individual giving can present all kinds of issues. When one person gives to another, it is a way for the giver to create a bond with the receiver. Through reciprocation relationships grow and develop. It is through giving that people come closer together. Perhaps, as Mauss suggested, in essence giving is one person giving a part of themselves to another.

For this reason traditionally, it’s seen in many cultures as potentially highly offensive to reject the gift from another. It’s in effect a rejection of the very person themselves. For others who feel unable to refuse, accepting a gift from someone may feel uncomfortable because they have no desire to feel indebted to the giver. Some give because it’s an opportunity to show off talents and increase their reputation amongst others in their community. Others my give for strategic advantage and political expediency. In short, giving between individuals is fraught with complicated social rules, games and etiquette.

Communal giving

I suspect communal giving has taken place since the very first communities of people. It has a long, long tradition. Modern anthropology has been a study of many of these cultures promoting reciprocal giving across the world. Some of the most studied include the Kula Exchange ring from Papua New Guinea. Another is the potlatch ritual praticised by native Americans primarily in the Pacific Northwest. In Mali today there is the tradition of dama as Beverly Bell summarises:

Dama is a vibrant economy and culture propagated primarily through a strong, though informal, women’s social network. Gift-giving is not based on exchange or equivalence between giver and receiver. The person who receives a gift will probably pass it on to someone else. Another person altogether, on down the line, will give back to the original giver. Dama involves return, but from within a broadly defined community to which the gift has moved on.

It’s interesting that many micro-finance schemes are built on the foundations of communal giving. Repayment of loans is typically encouraged through making all the group receiving the micro-finance liable for money they are loaned as a group. Meaning that if one defaults, all must step in to fill the gap. As a result, it’s in the interest of all to support their fellow members of the group to repay their own individual loans. At the same time, each member’s allegiance to the group is tested by whether they repay their loan or not. In a twist on the model of communal giving, repayment is not just purely out of self-interest, it is also a way of giving back to the whole group.

A point to note though about individual giving and communal giving is that in the majority of cases the giver will know the receiver and vice versa. There is a personal, human touch to the connection, but it’s also giving with physical constraints imposed. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar actually thought you could put a number to this phenomenon, the so-called Dunbar’s Number. Wikipedia has this:

Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.

Whatever the number is, the idea that there is a finite number of relationships that we can sustain due to physical constraints seems pretty logical. And this is where the idea of being able to give via a proxy kicks in.

Institutional giving

One form of giving via a proxy that developed as communities grew into societies, and giving activities had to scale, was giving through institutions governing behaviour and social order.

The church and religious centres were some of the first to act as proxies for the giving of others. Giving through the church remains strong to this day. The concept is simple. By giving to the church, you are giving to God. Over time faith-based giving has merged with distinctly spiritual concepts such as sacrifice, almsgiving, zakat or dana amongst others.

The effect has been in many cultures to convert the act of giving into something sacred. But it has also turned giving into a virtue in its own right, regardless of its ultimate consequence or how it benefits the recipient. With institutions growing in power, so giving activities began to introduce a breach between givers and receivers.

Intermediaries, such as the Christian church in Western societies, acted as a proxy for givers to reach receivers. Different parts of the bible identify where alms should be directed cited by Martin Chemnitz, 16th century Lutheran theologian, in his work on almsgiving (PDF). The hungry, the thirsty, the naked, exiles, the sick, those who are not able to look for work, those who have been bereft of their property because of their confession of faith or because of some misfortune. Yet, as Christianity promoting giving out of duty it meant that there came a duty upon the Christian giver to understand whether the receiver ‘merited’ (met the criteria mentioned above) the gift in the first place.

Perhaps for this reason, or perhaps out of practicality, almsgiving in the Christian church was increasingly organised. Alms were given to the institution of the church, for the church identify, sanction and distribute gifts to recipients, rather than encourage the one-to-one almsgiving that characterised the early church. Giving was becoming increasingly political.

Giving through the state

Historically, the state has imposed giving through coercive mechanisms such as taxation underpinned by the law. Paraphrasing Robert Dahl, the state in this sense refers broadly to all the authoritative decision-making institutions of an entire society, to which all other groups, institutions and persons are legally subject. Through the idea of a social contract that gained traction during the Enlightenment, forced giving was justified. Giving by the individual to the state was coerced, however, conceptually at least, after raising revenue the state gave via state spending with the aim of achieving beneficial social impact for its citizens. In practice however, giving has arguably never been the principle reason for taxation.

The citizen is forced to pay taxes, which in turn pay for resources, such as education, health and public facilities like parks. These are some senses given back to the community as a whole. This is ‘giving’ not so much in the sense of personal freedom, but in how it encourages beneficial social impact.

The significance of this as giving is through this theoretical leap in understanding of the role of the state. It meant that giving as a process, was abstracted and generalised. Giving was not about individual relationships, or even communal relationships you happened to be part of. Giving became something you had to do as a citizen of a society. Just as earlier institutions had done before, such as the church, the state became a proxy device for facilitating giving throughout society. Taxes were no longer just a mechanism for the state apparatus to operate, as with medieval kingdoms. Taxes were increasingly justified as the most practical way for citizens to give back to the society they belonged to.

As an aside to this, it’s interesting now that Governments (certainly in the UK) have moved away from giving and state-owned gift economies, to more exchange-like modus operandi, contracting services on behalf of the tax payer, or even enabling citizens to contract out services on their own.

Also interesting, is to consider the counter argument to taxation that claims it is theft. Theft being the exact inverse to giving. To rephrase: taxation isn’t giving, it’s taking. This argument usually emphasises the coercive nature of taxation and queries whether the state can efficiently turn tax revenue into beneficial social impact. There’s a sense in which these questions are arguments about which is the most conducive political set up for fostering giving relationships? Voluntaryism is one example of the philosophical challenges to the imposition of tax as a way of giving back to society.

Voluntaryism regards “government as coercive, and calls for its abolishment, but, unlike a number of other anarchist philosophies, it supports strong property rights which it regards as a natural law that is compatible with non-coercion. The goal of voluntaryism is the supplantation of the state by a voluntary order, in which political authority is reverted to the individual, and association among people occurs only by mutual consent.

This idea of personal freedom of association for people by mutual consent around projects for beneficial social impact has been part of the narrative of the 2oth century.

In recent years, corporate social responsibility giving activities has worked in a similar way to this model developed by the state, monies raised by exchange later are gifted back to societies and communities in which the corporation is often present or has affected.

Non-governmental organisations

And so we come to the rapid rise and development of non-governmental organisation and civil society groups both transnational and national (that is organisations that are neither profit-making or governmental), in particular in the last 50 years since the Second World War. According to Kathryn Sikkink and Jackie Smith, the number of international non-governmental organisations promoting social change goals sextupled between 1953 and 1993.

Non-governmental organisations and civil society groups covers a broad range and there are huge gaps in our knowledge and research frameworks that are used to understand this range. There is often a divergence between the formal and informal parts of the voluntary sector. Internationally, there’s also a seemingly arbitrary distinction that’s often made between studying these organisations  (usually termed non-profit organisations or similar) in industrialised countries and studying them (usually termed non-governmental organisations or similar) in developing countries.

Both track the development of organisations as proxies for giving activities, away from more traditional institutions, the state and between individuals. However, now with the growth of social media the role of organisations in this repartition of giving, is being replaced by citizens that are now more networked with those they wish to give to. Givers and receivers are increasingly atomised as more loosely formed groups and networks are growing. Charities work as an agent matching giver with receiver, synthesising cause with practical deliverables on the ground.

The act of giving is changing

In what Yochai Benkler terms ‘social production‘, decentralised activities are playing an increasingly important part in our economy. They are activities that are non-monetary, not state owned and not organised by institutions or formal organisations. In his 2006 book ‘The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom‘ Benkler explains how networks are turning individuals into connected peers with both the desire and the opportunity to share and give to each other.

I like Clay Shirky’s observation in Here Comes Everybody where he points out the fifteen most popular groups on Meetup (witches, Slashdot, Livejournal, etc) the year after it was set up, that the convening power of Meetup lies not in “recreating older civic groups but in creating new ones”. The groups represented ways people saw themselves (not simply activities), who wanted to meet and who, with the advent of a website like Meetup, suddenly had an easy way to meet up. In other words, they were groups of individuals with the desire, the capacity and the opportunity to give to each other.

As Shirky concludes the web made creating groups a whole load easier. As a result of all this change and the loosening up of many of the physical constraints, so the dynamic is continuing to change. It was Tim Berners Lee who wrote back in 1999 that:

‘the web is more a social creation than a technical one’.

Benkler, Shirky and Berners Lee all agree that we should be focusing our attention on the social consequences of the technology, not the technology itself.

Information-isation

The social impact can be summed up as a kind of information-isation of human relationships. As digital information becomes the mode of publication and distribution, so the role of organisations is shifting. Organisations that previous acted as huge clearing houses of giving activities are seeing new smaller, more flexible outfits reordering the landscape of organised giving.

Information is, as the economists would say, a non-rival good. In other words, it can used be used sequentially or concurrently by multiple users. We’re seeing the way towards networked giving being led by activities, goods and services that can be atomised into bits of information.

Unsurprisingly really, information services have led the way in building on networked giving, such as search, tagging and other classification activities. Communications and marketing have not been far behind. Transactions, matching and brokering of services that can be delivered in an information format have followed. So to have entertainment and broadcast activities. Now our private lives are being chopped up into pieces of information with profiling and social networks.

Networked giving as applied in volunteerism

For an example of this process from the voluntary sector take a look at volunteering websites, e.g. Volunteer Match, Do-it, etc. Many sites like these have simply transferred the volunteer brokerage service online, narrowing in on recruitment, promotion and volunteering opportunity search, the part of the volunteering experience that requires information giving. It’s been much harder to move other aspects of volunteering, such as learning from service users, sensing the difference your volunteering has made, supporting the most vulnerable and disadvantaged, etc.

It’s relatively easy to give money, give information about ourselves, give digital property, give products and services that can be sent, captured or posted in digital format. However, it’s becoming clearer that giving, mediated by the web, plays out very differently in the realm of human relations.

Online giving ranges from very public to very private

For example, online an individual can give publicly (sometimes very publicly) at one end of the scale and stake their reputation on what they give. Alternatively, at the other end, an individual can give privately taking full advantage of the available anonymity offered online, and give with zero consequence for their reputation. This means that networked giving online is subject to very different social rules, as with giving in the offline world.

Giving on a human scale

In this discussion, it’s worth considering the recently launched website Aardvark which aims to make the technical networking power subordinate to the humans in the network. On the surface, Aardvark is a fresh approach to online question and answers. Under the hood, Aardvark way beyond simple Q&A and represents a new way of thinking that builds on how individuals give and help each other in personal situations. Here’s a link to some of the more technical theory behind the website.

We’re learning the lesson that the power of technology, can come at the expense of our own humanity. For this reason, giving needs to become more human again, just on a scale, potential and with a level of possibilities that we had hitherto never dreamed of.

Further resources

Here’s Damon Horowitz Aardvark CTO on the theories for artificial intelligence: