Thinking about volunteering and the social web
Organising giving
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:
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