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:
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.
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.
You give Google your eye balls.
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”.
It’s a reciprocal relationship, not a formal exchange as no money has to change hands between us.
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.
You give the charity a helping hand.
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.”
It’s a reciprocal relationship, not a formal exchange as there’s no contract, no money changes hands between us.
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.
“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”.
“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?
=============
*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
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.
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.
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).
The ‘giving’ ecosystem of which volunteerism is a part, is notoriously difficult to define and poorly understood. Giving should be understood in a broad sense. Giving relationships are built on giving all kind of resources of value, not just financial such as donations, but time-based and skill-based resources as well, such as volunteering.
So what is the gift economy and what is this ‘giving’ ecosystem? According to Wikipedia (itself a gift economy), the concept of the gift economy is:
“a society where valuable goods and services are regularly given without any explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards (i.e. no formal quid pro quo exists). Ideally, simultaneous or recurring giving serves to circulate and redistribute valuables within the community”
Giving 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.
That’s not to say that giving can’t be in a person’s self-interest. But it is without the formal quid pro quo of an exchange of goods or services that began with the barter economy and lies at the heart of the free market economy in modern industrial capitalist societies.
To be sure, this is the tip of a debate which has a rich tradition in the theory of political economy. It’s a debate going back in modern times looking at the relationship between citizen and state that includes in Western thought thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Tocqueville and many, many others. Professor Steven B. Smith has a lecture series on this subject on Open Yale courses.
Typically giving relationships have predominated where contracts are difficult to enforce and/or where relationships between the parties are already strong and it would introduce unnecessary complication or serve to undermine the gift itself, as with families and tight-knit communities. Marriage is an interesting case study fusing the gift and exchange model. Controversy and debate surrounding prenuptial agreements in part revolves around the clash of models between those who see marriage as an exchange and those who see marriage as a gift.
The gift economy can struggle to deliver goods and services where either party requires a high degree of certainty. It’s likely to be a while before we see houses or other kinds of property given away through Freecycle – a site that brings together groups that match people who have things they want to get rid of, with people who can use them.
Different gift economies
The experience of many in the newspaper industry as they’ve moved online has demonstrated that when they use social media, giving is more effective than exchanging. A willingness to share and be open (as when giving to each other) is a more effective strategy than limiting supply and being closed (as when formally exchanging with each other). Jeff Jarvis believes that these giving relationships online amount to what he terms as a ‘link economy‘.
“Links can be exploited and monetized; get links and you can grab audience and show ads and make money. Content is becoming a cost burden, what you have to have to get the links, but in and of itself, content can’t draw value without an audience, without links.“
How do online newspapers get these links? They are given them by their audience, amongst them participants, enthusiasts and volunteer bloggers, by opening up their content and inviting people in. They can’t oblige consumers of their product to link. Instead they can make it easier and more worthwhile to link. It’s the gift economy in action.
The tradition of giving
In fact, the gift economy has become big business, more than it ever was at previous times in history such as in the case of the tradition of potlatch. The potlatch is a festival or ceremony practiced among Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. At these gatherings a family or hereditary leader hosts guests in their family’s house and hold a feast for their guests. The main purpose of the potlatch is the re-distribution and reciprocity of wealth. It is also interesting to consider the more modern tradition at the Burning Man festival in this idea of building community based on giving.
Chris Anderson in his recent book ‘Free – The Future of a Radical Price‘ explores the new business model of giving products away for free. What’s fascinating from a volunteerism perspective is how Anderson grapples with the hinterland where giving relationships and exchange relationships meet. For many in the business world used only to the culture of exchange relationships, his ideas are unfamiliar. He essentially sets out how the take up of social media has led to the culture of the gift economy becoming mainstream for many businesses.
The comparative advantage of giving
In this book, Anderson touches on two critical points that can help us understand what is happening with volunteerism as social media grows.
“[Lewis] Hyde (author of The Gift) focused mostly on gift economies of things”actual objects exchanged… But there has always been a much larger gift economy of deeds, the things we do for each other without charge. As with the attention and reputation economies, this ephemeral gift economy has suddenly become explicit and measureable as it moves online.” (p.137)
Suddenly all this activity that previously happened below the radar, is increasingly visible and measurable as these giving activities transfer to the web. Giving relationships work better when transparency and openness are preeminent. One example is charity: water shows donors where their projects are on Google Earth. Sharing and collaboration (giving relationships) rewards openness, and mitigates against a lack of transparency and an effort to maximise comparative advantage, as with an exchange model.
The other point that Anderson makes is the new scale at which giving via social media can operate:
“If only 1 percent of the hundred people in some school˜s sixth-grade class volunteer to help make the yearbook, it doesn˜t get done. But if just 1 percent of the visitors to Wikipedia decide to create an entry, you get the greatest trove of information the world has ever seen. (In fact, it˜s closer to one in ten thousand Wikipedia visitors who are active contributors.)” [see history of Wikipedia]
Participation rates that previously would have been a disaster on a smaller scale, are suddenly viable now as they take place on much bigger scales. We are becoming more aware of the huge social impact as the social web gets better at aggregating the many tiny acts freely given by individuals across the globe. Unprecedented access to the social web means giving goes further than before, and the ‘long tail’ distribution of giving can be more successfully leveraged.
The ‘network effect’
Typically there’s an imbalance when people participate in all kinds of social activities: there are a few who are very active and a larger proportion who are a lot less active. Clay Shirky wrote about this power law distribution in “Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality“.
It is difficult to discuss volunteerism and the gift economy and ignore the huge literature on social capital and volunteering. For example check out “Volunteering and the concept of social capital” by Dr Judith Sixsmith, and Dr Margaret Boneham. Much has been made of the contribution that volunteering can make in building social capital.
Reciprocity and Exchange
Perhaps the most popular notion of social capital within this debate was identified by Robert Putnam. For Putnam, social capital is defined as the:
features of social organisation, such as networks, norms, and trust, that facilitate co-ordination and cooperation for mutual benefit (Putnam, 1995, page 67 [Bowling alone: America's declining social capital])
Putnam in his classic book on the subject ‘Bowling Alone’ argues that the cornerstone of social capital is the principle of ‘generalised reciprocity’.
I’ll do this for you now, without expecting anything immediately in return and perhaps without even knowing you, confident that down the road you or someone else will return the favour (Putnam, 2000, p.134)
In this Putnam is effectively explaining the basis for the gift economy is reciprocity rather than exchange. For Putnam social capital holds out the possibility of putting a value on the social networks that we have. The key then is understanding the difference between exchange and reciprocity which we look at in a post on here soon!
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.
Social media is making the gift economy of today more visible. A good example of this new visibility is to run a simple keyword search on a website like Twitter.
I’ve just had an article published on the e-Volunteerism website: “Social Media and the Gift Economy: Volunteerism in the Vanguard”.
To follow up, I’m going to be posting on here unpicking the different aspects that I covered or touched on in the article itself.
My starting point when I began writing the article was looking at how social media is changing the field of volunteerism. Quickly though, it grew apparent, there was a recurring theme that promised to shed light on a lot of the issues that are hot topics in volunteerism today.
That theme had to do with a line of thinking about social media, volunteerism and the broader context of the gift economy:
Social media has led to the reemergence of the gift economy on a whole new scale
Volunteerism is one of the most developed forms of giving in many societies today
Social media is rewriting many of the rules of engagement for volunteerism because it’s rewriting the rules of the gift economy itself
I really interested in looking and better understanding the way social media is changing the gift economy, and beginning to chart some of what the impact might be in the world of volunteerism.
To give a really quick example. A few years back, as the concept of online volunteering gained traction in the UK, it became clear in the organisation I work at (online charity YouthNet) that the process of coming to a common understanding of what online volunteering was, was challenging the more traditional concept of what volunteering was.
How for example could you distinguish between someone who responded to an online call to action to sign an online petition and an online campaigns volunteer? Or, how could you distinguish between active members of an online community of discussion boards who posted supportive comments to others, and volunteer moderators in place to support the running of the discussion boards?
Up to a few years ago this was a non-issue, until that is, funders got interested in online volunteering and wanted to know the amount of online volunteers that an organisation involved (amongst other metrics) so that they could distribute funds accordingly.
This is a quick example, but it really just alludes to the tip of the iceberg. As the web has become increasingly social, it has in turn began to change the way people volunteer and get involved in social change.
What those changes are and how they affect volunteerism will be the focus of a series of posts on this blog over the next month.
How do you plan to celebrate the day? With a few fireworks? Since 2006 volunteer managers around the world have had their own day to raise awareness about the role of volunteer management and mark the contribution that volunteer managers make in fostering volunteering initiative and energy.
Increasingly in recent years, the growing campaign to establish volunteer management as a profession in its own right has spread and gained momentum. All sorts of questions have been raised by this debate. Some concern social status and formal recognition touching on sensitive, yet, fundamental issues such as earning potential, pay and conditions and career progression. In the same breath, this campaign for social status has explored the issue of merit and the value volunteer managers bring. This has raised questions about the role of qualifications, training and National Occupational Standards in defining better the very particular skill set and professional knowledge of volunteer managers.
However, for all the campaigning, I sense that many in the volunteer management community are reluctant campaigners. Any effort to put volunteer managers in the foreground takes many out of their comfort zone, away from what they are more used to: putting their volunteers’ needs and their beneficiaries needs before their own. Julia Neuberger’s characterisation of the profession as ‘volunteer organisers’ rankled because it mistook this reluctance to step into the limelight, with the fundamental value of the role itself.
The issue of words and the values we attach to them reminds me of how the word ‘organiser’ cropped up in the US Presidential campaign last year. Sarah Palin, seeking to denigrate the now US President Barack Obama’s professional experience, underlined his work as a ‘community organiser’. I remember seeing a poster from around this time. It was an image of Martin Luther King’s March on Washington in 1963. It showed Martin Luther King speaking in front of a quarter of a million people from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. The caption said: “Not bad for a community organiser”.
There are moments that, while I agree with the need to campaign for greater recognition of the role of volunteer managers from the rest of the society, part of me thinks that we could make a pretty good start if we began by simply reassessing the way we see ourselves and each other as volunteer managers. I’ve been working in volunteer management for over a decade now, but I have to confess that I still have a fairly limited, and if I’m honest, limiting perception of what volunteer management is. Am I capable broadening that vision of volunteer management so that it could include the likes of Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi or Barack Obama?
Getting back to International Volunteer Managers Day, the key to what makes this day special is that it is international. Seeing volunteer management internationally can only broaden our horizons. What’s special about this day is that it has begun to draw a line between all those around the world who help support and developing volunteering. One way to renew and reassess the way we see ourselves and the volunteer management we practice, is to learn more about what are colleagues are doing in different countries and settings around the world.
In my time working abroad, it’s been fascinating discovering the different ways volunteer management is perceived and how it is practiced. In Guatemala, I was struck how people in volunteer management roles were often valued as teachers in local communities, training others to engage. In Tunisia, I saw how many volunteer managers spent much of the time steering clear of political controversy, to ensure they had the freedom to further the social cause they believed in and worked for. In France, the volunteer manager was often responsible for communicating and instilling the passion and the message for the cause that volunteers committed to. In the UK, since I’ve been back, it’s noticeable how many volunteer managers take on a really practical role of fixer and coordinator in their groups and organisations, solving problems and getting things done, often with few resources.
International Volunteer Managers Day is a moment to take stock and learn from each other. At the same time, we can also learn about ourselves and rediscover a part of ourselves as volunteer managers and to paraphrase a famous volunteer manager from India: ‘be the change we want to see’.
Over the years there’s been a progressive trend towards valuing content over context in how we communicate as a society.
Ever since writing took over from our rich oral tradition, contextualised communication has been increasingly sidelined by the content of what we communicate.
The history of Christianity in Western society is a case in point where historically after the Reformation, debate turned on whether the content or the context of scripture was the right path to spiritual understanding.
Today, the focus on content is really a battle over how we communicate as a society. Is it better to keep our communication clear and singular in meaning? Or is it more accurate to accept that what we communicate is always multi-layered, nuanced and requires reading between the lines?
One way to understand the Enlightenment is as a movement that argued passionately for the former, while the fightback with the Romantics a century or so later, was a passionate defence of the latter.
With the dominance of content, the lack of context in communication is problematic to say the least. Again, a popular observation about the social web is that a key characteristic is the cross-cutting context in which much of the communication on it takes place. For example, a blog post can be written in a particular time, reacting to a particular stimulus and shaped by the author’s particular mood of the moment. However, that blog post can be found by readers later on in very different times, places (thanks to searchability and durability of the web) and replicated within very different contexts. Web content loses it’s context even quicker than other forms of modern communication.
Online support and advice where content is king, on the face of it, is even more problematic than just simply communicating a message.
Online support services: out of context
How do we understand content without the context of body language, vocal intonation, personal connection or understanding of the author’s past history, personality and behaviour? Albert Mehrabian’s much misunderstood observation on content and context is a great example. Mehrabian understood just how context (verbal and non-verbal cues) can be critical to understanding the content of our communication when we’re expressing thoughts laden heavy with emotion and feeling. Surely this tendency of the social web to emphasise content over context, poses an enormous challenge to any online advice service seeking to support users emotional, as well as information needs.
For this reason online advice services must play to their strengths. Through our work on askTheSite on TheSite.org responding to questions posted by users in confidence online, it is clear that putting content before context can have its benefits.
Context can act as a barrier or cloud to understanding the content or heart of the matter. The style of delivery and the packaging of the message can distract, mislead or detract from an advisor’s understanding of what the author of the content might intend to mean. Presented with just the content of the issues, with the context of the user’s personal history, personality and rapport very definitely in the background, an advisor is in a better position to be able to respond to the user’s issues and concerns at hand.
Secondly, enabling service users to concentrate on communicating content anonymously, can liberate them from the embarrassment and anxiety of the context they’re in, that may have prevented them from talking in the round about the issues they face. Online support can offer the user the safety of anonymity and confidentiality that may help persuade users to speak up about issues affecting them that they may not have been able to share with anyone else. This makes online advice a vital plank in any strategy to improve the early intervention and support we can offer young people.
Interestingly, stripping out the context, removes most incentives for service users to ‘test’ the support service, posting joke, blank (silent) or hoax questions. The issue of test callers is a non-trivial matter for many telephone support services, where test callers can place a huge burden on scarce resource and capacity.
Contextual communication: making a comeback
Perhaps as the social web matures, so contextually-based communication is just starting to make a comeback. What to many is Twitter’s banality, is misunderstood phatic communication putting the context before the content. Foursquare, on the other hand, is a reminder of the power of communication that comes with a built-in geolocational context.
For all these advances, it is worth noting how utterly dismal current software is at processing contextual information. Content is still king. You only have to look at how it’s possible to build a multi-billion dollar business on keyword search of content to understand that. Given this current landscape, it’s important that online advice and support services play to their strengths and understand their weaknesses in this content vs context battle going on around them.
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.
How do you plan to celebrate the day? With a few fireworks? Since 2006 volunteer managers around the world have had their own day to raise awareness about the role of volunteer management and mark the contribution that volunteer managers make in fostering volunteering initiative and energy.
Over the years there’s been a progressive trend towards valuing content over context in how we communicate as a society.