Another Approach to Collective Action – Community Goals
I just got off the phone with the founder of Community Goals who discovered Spot Us through the Knight News Challenge page. I love meeting other people around the country who are tackling similar problems. Especially because, in this day and age, it’s so easy to find each other.
The low-down on Community Goals: It works like a listing service, so if I understand it correctly, there is a small fee for launching a project or responding to a project.
- Projects have no vertical: A project can be an investigation or a plea to help wash a car.
- People can join projects and agree that they would support a potential solution.
- Solutions are proposed. There can be more than one solution proposed.
- The community votes on all the solutions.
- They all agree to go ahead with the whatever solution wins the votes. In this way some people will be unhappy with the results, but in this situation the majority of people have their interest served.
It isn’t hard to see how this could work for Spot.Us and journalism. Anyone can propose story ideas and commit X dollars to whatever pitch is agreed upon by the community. Journalists upload the pitches that match the original story ideas. Community votes – winning pitch gets the money and has to deliver the work.
In fact, it is not at all dissimilar to how I originally envisioned Spot.Us working. As things are now I’m going to have a stripped down version of this for the beta. It will also be a version where you are never locked into donating money to a pitch unless it is the EXACT pitch (solution) you want. It’s your money – and you will only be charged if the specific pitch you support meets the final campaign goals. I will also have editors who act as independent third parties attached to each pitch.
Still: I wanted to highlight Community Goals as another project and approach to organizing collective action. That’s essentially what Spot.Us is trying to figure out: Can collective action (through donations) empower individual journalists to work on stories. How can you motivate and organize collective action? I think Community Goals has a nice approach and I hope to stay in touch with them to learn from (and with) them as we both push forward with our projects.
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Thanks for the write-up.
You are correct that not everyone who contributes to a goal on CommunityGoals will get precisely what they want. In my vision, community projects are not about about pure self interest — they should be about enlightened self interest.
What I mean is this — when describing a goal, be flexible enough in your objective to attract lots of interest. Bring a lot of people to the table. Once people have given, give them a voice and let them discuss. This is “divergent” thinking. Next, use discussion and voting as mechanisms for “convergent” thinking. At the end of the process, everyone had a say, and the group should be wiser than the individuals.
This is different from “micro”-lending. I think it is really important to build processes where people compromise (instead of getting exactly what they want). It is this give-and-take that helps build buy-in and gets people engaged in the long run — resulting in a larger shared successes.
I’m glad to to the see the explosion of philanthropic tools on the Web.