Social Change and the Internet

OpenBusiness interviewed Geoff Mulgan, director of the Young Foundation, a space in which innovative and progressive social entrepreneurs can come together and try to change their world. OpenBusiness is itself situated within the Young Foundation. Geoff is known to be an insightful thinker on social change and the drivers which encourage progress. Given that our remit includes a consideration of how social entrepreneurs can use digital technologies to further their projects, we asked Geoff about his take on how the web could be employed to promote social, organisational and structural change. Founder of OpenBusiness, Christian Ahlert, who also co-founded Creative Commons UK, could not resist the opportunity to throw around some ideas about Creative Commons’ status as a social movement and its prospects for growth.

OB: What is the role of the internet in producing social change?

Mulgan: That is a broad question! The Internet certainly reduces transactions costs and makes it easier for people to organise, collaborate and conspire. In that sense the net solves one important problem in facilitating social change: change relies on mobilising relationships, which were traditionally separated by spatial geography. It involves what the social scientists call collective action problems – the problems of bringing together and motivating a diverse bunch of people in a common cause, and this is where new models like Pledgebank offer important solutions.

What still needs to be better understood is which forms of management and leadership are most appropriate to this open environment. For me one of the most interesting recent developments is the development of new interactive services which effectively encourage and structure social relationships, such as reputational devices, that provide an alternative not just to traditional hierarchy but also to some of the less satisfactory aspects of traditional cooperatives. We’re also beginning to see a much greater variety of web based platforms which make it much quicker and easier to organise, share information and campaign (and also quicker and easier for new organisations to die as well). I’m particularly interested in what I call new membranes for cities, using googlemaps to overlay things like history, voices, events and discussions, making public space much more publicly owned than it ever was in the past. And we’re also seeing new tools for directness – like the broken civic infrastructure website we’ve been developing as part of our neighbourhoods work.

OB: That brings me to the question of how social entrepreneurs can use the internet to make their particular mission and organisations more sustainable. It seems that beyond the wider forum that the net provides to small organisations to promote their cause, it can also be used for managerial purposes.

Mulgan: That’s right, the internet is not only a tool for promotion, but also for collaboration. Even though organisations can now bridge geographical boundaries much more easily, these groups usually also require some leadership – some form of an organised centre. Networks often need a fair amount of nurturing, steering and motivating to work well. Their great virtue is that they can help social entrepreneurs reach much wider pools of potential customers, collaborators and members, or for that matter link buyers and producers as is happening with the more radical fair trade projects.

OB: Can you also see how the internet can help sustaining the income of social organisations?

Mulgan: Yes, but probably more important is the way in which the internet reduces the costs of running such organisations. Social enterprises will still rely on a mixture of funding from the state, trading, donations and membership fees. Where it gets interesting in this regard is whether the balance between these sources of income can be changed, and even more interestingly how different strategies can be used to find potential donations, or to actually generate a membership. I think we’re going to see new forms of cooperative investment – groups of philanthropists and donors clubbing together to back social ventures, and using the web to match needs and enthusiasms, rather as has been happening for some years around volunteering through things like Time bank.

OB: The internet still seems to await the first social movement which was formed truly online, as opposed to those which merely exploit the online forum. Greenpeace, Amnesty, Oxfam – all the big NGO players – make excellent use of the internet for campaigning and fundraising, but they are not borne out of the net. This brings me to Creative Commons – it now exists in more than 60 jurisdictions around the world. It has grown to become a global organisation in less than 4 years, but it faces immense challenges in becoming a ‘real’ movement….

Mulgan: It has some of the conditions for becoming a global social movement. It is based on concentrated passion and discontent, a critique of how things are and a set of solutions showing how things could be better. There has never been a movement built around creativity and culture. In that sense it is novel and it has identified an enemy – the current copyright regime and the industry which defends it to their financial advantage. It has an ideology and enemies. Every social movement relies on at least four elements: shared values, unity – to be coherent -, numbers and commitment…

OB: Well, that’s where I see a problem. There is certainly commitment, there are also shared values as well as a sizeable number of individuals around the world who are active supporters, but it seems to lack coherence. There are those who would like only to provide legal tools that partially resolve problems inherent to the current copyright regime. Yet on the other side of the spectrum are those who actually want regime change, and are prepared to be far more radical. For example, there are some who would, even in public, support ‘piracy’. However, Creative Commons as a whole lacks a clear position on these issues. These difficulties are further compounded by the fact that some parts of the organisation want to be some kind of pro bono legal service – providing only legal tools free of charge – whereas others want to promote much broader change by developing an enlightened view of the commons….

Mulgan: Well, that is not uncommon. Many movements contain within them very diverse positions – just think of feminism or thre green movement. Individual organisations have to define some coherence but usually movements transcend any one organisation. So as an organisation Creative Commons will have to make choices – but it can think of itself as part of a broader movement of ideas that’s bound to include some more radical outliers, whose ideas may in time become mainstream.