What if I could change the world during coffee-break?

June 18, 2007 12:31 AM

I have an idea for a blog that might actually make the world a better place. Could it actually work?

I am consistently impressed with the general...um...goodness (for lack of a better word) that frequently comes out of Ask MetaFilter...and it just occurred to me that something similar could be harnessed to change the world for the better, one suggestion at a time.
What if there was an online community/blog/whatever-you-want-to-call-it, that worked like this:
A member of the community (we'll call her/him "Member X" adds a description of what they do for a living. Say, they work in a coffee shop.
Other members of the community post suggestions for little ways that Member X could, in the course of their job, do some good. I'm thinking that these suggestions should be extremely simple and easy to accomplish. They should be suggestions that Member X would actually do, without having to spend significant hours, or dollars. (like, contributing a small percentage of their tips to a charity)

Now, along comes Member Y, who has a completely different job. (say they work in a small grocery store.) But the community posts a few little ways that Member Y could help make the world a little better. (i.e. they could start suggesting to the management to promote products that are "grown locally")

The net effect of taking these actions would be very small, insignificant really...until the community started getting more and more members...within a broad range of occupations. Pretty soon there could be hundreds or thousands of suggestions detailing how hundreds or thousands of people could, within their occupations, do a little bit of good.

The trick would be that if this community started building some momentum, it would make it easier and easier to motivate people to take part. If I work in a coffee shop, donating a few bucks of my tips to a charity is going to seem pretty small potatoes. But If I know that hundreds or thousands of other people working in coffee shops are doing the same thing...or taking other small suggestions and doing small bits of good...then maybe I'll be encouraged to keep doing these things.

The idea would be to harness online community both to come up with lots of cool little suggestions on doing good...but also to give those who partake a true sense of community, to give them a sense they're part of something bigger.

A couple caveats...no, I'm not promoting some blog. No, I'm not a sneaky marketer. No, I'm not going to Get My Own Blog (well, maybe later). I ask this here, because I'm not looking for ideas on how to make the world a better place... I'm purely curious as to whether members of a community like this one would consider an idea like this interesting.

I apologize if this question breaks a rule. But I'm hoping that because no actual community like this exists, I won't be considered guilty of trying to leverage mefi to start another site. That ain't my intent.

posted by Ziggurat to human relations (8 comments total)

Heh.
I won't agree this is chatfilter, but I won't disagree either. Time will tell.
However, in the meantime...why would it have a negligible chance of making anything more than a negligible difference? Because it would never become popular enough to achieve any critical mass? Or because lots of little bits of good doesn't add up to anything significant?
posted by Ziggurat at 12:48 AM on June 18, 2007

Some of the best "doing good" websites, even though the whole point is voluntarism and generosity, have some kind of market-like incentive or enforcement structure, which people actually seem to like. Pledgebank is a fantastic example of this: you agree to do something good but only if x number of other people agree to do it too. Without a mechanism like this it is hard to see how it would gain momentum - wouldn't most people sign up feeling full of good intentions, then just forget? But if you can think of a mechanism like this, I really like this idea.
posted by game warden to the events rhino at 1:53 AM on June 18, 2007

Some suggestions regarding your idea:
Rather than the profile just listing the person's job, list the 2-3 things that that person spends most of their life doing.

This may help (very very slightly) with an obstacle you'll face - people hate "everyone thinks they're an expert" behaviour. For a nasty example, just watch what happens if someone dares to make a child-rearing suggestion to a parent. :)
In that sense, your concept is the opposite of AskMefi. Here, someone who doesn't know much about X asks about it in the hopes that someone who knows a lot about X will answer. In your scenario, someone who works a job (and thus has some expertise in it) is risking soliciting the annoying "advice" from the same clueless morons that make the worker's day worse by telling the worker how to do a job that the moron knows less about than they think.

So a good community will be key - you need to find a way to continually steer and motivate the comments to be considered and clever ideas, rather than someone's personal complaints about poor service at a coffeeshop last week being thinly reworded as "helpful tips". The website experience has to be rewarding and empowering, rather than just making someone feel worse about their job regarding issues over which they are powerless.

Perhaps a rule could help, such as excluding client satisfaction from the kosher topics. That's problematic, since, for example, behaviour among co-workers is both an important area for improvement, and a hotbed of pet peeves. Or maybe just a "no pet peeves" rule.

Or perhaps encouraging pet peeves is the way to go, and perhaps have some voting or moderator system to weed out the peeve-posts that fail to offer a really clever and practical solution to the peeve?

I don't really have any good suggestions on how to best approach the problem, but hopefully there is some food for thought in here somewhere.
posted by -harlequin- at 4:12 AM on June 18, 2007

Here is how is your community/blog/whatever going to look like at the beginning: go to back to MeFi archive, to first month. See who’s posting, how often, how much feedback they get. Notice for how long the initial group had to keep things going, very slowly building momentum. Do you have that much spare time? And, remember, the MeFi example is self selection bias, there are many other sites that did not last this long.

Second thing: you lack a clear goal. You describe how it would work, but you cannot explain it in one single sentence. When writing this reply I had to go over and reread what you wrote. Not good.

Finally, similarly to -harlequin- said (and to give you expert unsolicited advice about how to do your job), why not build a database/community of best ways to do a certain job, best industry practices? If you are working in a coffee shop/teach/deliver mail you should be able to see a list of what other people say about doing that job. Keep the suggestion box simple, do not allow people to write more than one idea; have other vote on that suggestion. Soon, you are going to have a top of suggestions. If you want, you can have people self categorize themselves as customers or workers in the field to make the distinction between the two kinds of suggestions. Since the general advice (top suggestions) does not apply very well to each particular situation, you can record who voted up/down what and then cluster analyze/categorize the suggestions. Also, you might want to break it down by country, what works in a coffee shop in US might not work in Canada.

Yeah, it’s a different idea, it will not save the world, maybe it will not make it worse (no “best practices for being an evil genius” suggestions allowed). There are many questions on Ask MeFi where people asked “what can I do to be better at what I am doing” (your question is almost of the same type), so there is some support behind it.
posted by MzB at 6:45 AM on June 18, 2007

It would be worth it just for the trainwreck that would happen the day that an abortion clinic employee signed up, or a veterinarian that declaws cats, or a pediatrician that circumcises children, or any profession that involves work where there is no clear consensus on what constitutes making the world a better place. There are more of those types of positions out there than you might think too.
posted by ND¢ at 7:02 AM on June 18, 2007

I think it's a good idea, but I'm not sure I'd sort it by career - if for no other reason than because there are tons of "good deeds" that apply to many careers.

I'd approach it as a one-good-deed-per-thread thing, and make it a photo blog - allow people to post photos of themselves doing that good deed. New good deeds can be suggested at any time.

I think adding the voyeurism aspect of the photos might take the edge off of the "nobody will do it" worry.

Like I said, I think it's a good and interesting idea ... hope you do it, I'll sign up!
posted by jbickers at 8:33 AM on June 18, 2007

My first thought on reading this was "man, the last thing I need is a bunch of strangers trying to tell me how to do my job, or even worse, telling me how to live my life". How can a bunch of random people know enough about me and what I do to offer meaningful advice? I am smart enough to work out obvious stuff like 'donate some of your income' by myself, and what else is a layperson going to be able to suggest?

You have the added problem that I can't go into details about my job anyway, it's confidential and there are intellectual property concerns, and that goes for pretty much all the professionals and students that I know. This will affect more people than you expect and often limit your audience to low level jobs.

Plus a huge helping of what ND¢ said, since my job would qualify for that for at least some people.
posted by shelleycat at 11:26 PM on June 18, 2007

My opinion was like shellycat's ("the last thing I need is a bunch of strangers trying to tell me...") First, let me say, any effort to do good is great, and you should definitely carry through with this idea if it inspires you. But here are my concerns --

1) Making any kind of change is hard. Eg, just changing what kind of paper my organization prints on would probably take like 5 meetings of 3-4 people, research time in between, etc. etc., and the place I work is small (15 total employees). Imagine if I worked at General Electric, where they've negotiated huge discounts with certain distributers! I know one governmental agency that's trying to incorporate climate change calculations into what they do, and it's probably going to take them 1-2 years just to get the right people on board, then another 1-2 years to get the program up and running. Meanwhile, that was just one of the hundreds of suggestions that this Internet board might generate. I'd look at every solution as something to add to my enormous to do list, something that would slow me down from accomplishing something else I put on that list because I thought it would also help the world.

2) No one knows someone's situation better than they do. Haven't people already thought of these ideas and either done them or decided against them? "Donate to charity:" I walk by a dozen homeless people every day and constantly re-evaluate how much money I can give away versus how much I need to save for other purposes. "Local produce:" I called a grocery store owner and asked why they didn't buy local produce. Turns out they'd tried that twice, four years apart, and both times it failed miserably because the local growers' crop wasn't sufficient and they'd missed their chance to lock in a lower-cost contract with someone else, the only way it would work is if about 12 local growers' made a co-op, blah blah blah.

The problem is not a shortage of ideas or do-good desires. It's fun and easy to come up with ideas about how, say, Nike should do business. But every good idea I've heard about how my organization should do business is either an idea we've tried and found ineffective, one that is outside our mission (ie, it would take time away from our other do-gooder activities, since we're a nonprofit), or one that we're in the slow, slow process of actually trying to make happen.

So, here are some possible ways to deal with the problems:
* For every suggestion, let the person "talk back" so the commenters get feedback and can revise their ideas.
* Make it easy, and no shame on the suggestion-receivers, to turn down suggestions, with options like "too much time," "tried it and failed because __," "not what I do" (ie, "I don't personally make the paper purchase decisions")...
* Give commenters "respect points" (or "rank" or whatever) based on how practical their solutions are, so it discourages pie-in-the-sky suggestions.
*Another way to possibly discourage crazy ideas would be to say that making a suggestion obligates you to help. Say, someone can "call" you on a suggestion and then you have to meet them halfway. So, if they suggest "buy better paper!" and I say "I barely have time to organize the staff meetings about this, much less research low-toxicity brands," then the commenter should say "okay, if you'll organize a first meeting, I'll send you the info you need (costs, where to purchase, etc) on paper brands." If I offer to meet them halfway and they bail and don't do it, they get negative "respect points" or whatever. This discourages crazy suggestions because the huger their suggestion, the larger the potential burden on them. If they say, "you should build a coalition of all the coffee shops in town!" I could say "Good idea, I'll set up the project and send you a brochure about it, and you can be the one to hold 40 meetings with other coffee shops." Maybe all suggestions come with an "I will help by ___" section, and that's part of figuring out which suggestions make the cut. Or maybe another way to meet this "shared burden" expectation is, rather than by helping to implement my own suggestions, I could accept someone else's suggestion for my own line of work. In other words, I could counter-propose "instead of helping you organize the coffee shop coalition, what if I began a four-year process of getting my government agency to incorporate climate change calculations?"
* Have a special form or option for people who are in the same biz. They don't have to offer to help, and they can just share what has worked for them ("actually, I did switch to compostable coffee cups, and they didn't dissolve in my customers' laps.")

Sorry this was so long, but it's kind of an interesting idea. Good luck!
posted by salvia at 11:01 AM on June 19, 2007