WeDo: Exploring Participatory, End-To-End Collective Action

Collective intelligence and social computing systems play an increasingly important role in collective action—that is, “actions taken by two or more people in pursuit of the same collective good” [Marwell and Oliver 1993]. Social computing platforms that advance collective action connect crowds and communities of participants, lower the cost of communication, facilitate deliberation, and help to coordinate action, thereby enabling new forms of collaboration and collective mobilization. Numerous social computing platforms facilitate distinct pieces of collective action or context-specific collaborations. We take inspiration from these platforms to design a system, WeDo, aimed at supporting simple participatory and end-to-end collective action, in which a crowd or community comes together to surface opportunities, formulate goals, brainstorm ideas, make plans, and mobilize a critical mass of participants to take action. We created and deployed WeDo as a technology probe [Hutchinson et al. 2003] to identify possibilities for, and barriers to, building and deploying participatory, end-to-end collective action systems. A Twitter app combined with a complementary web interface (see Figure 1), WeDo supports: the creation of high-level “missions;” collecting ideas from a community for accomplishing the mission; browsing and voting on ideas; and following through on actions. The system automates the transition through these stages, so as to promote progress and follow-through. Our experience with WeDo underscores opportunities and challenges for designers of end-to-end CSCA systems.