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Building a Community of Modern Abolitionists
Challenges Entered:
Abolition Central will be home to the growing community of abolitionists fighting modern day slavery. It will combine the best practices of the physical world’s social organizations with the best community building/social networking tools.
The Emancipation Network (TEN) is building Abolition Central – a community that brings together and helps recruit and inspire individuals committed to ending slavery and human trafficking. Abolition Central will combine the best practices of the physical world’s social organizations (like Rotary or Kiwanis clubs) with the best online community building and social networking tools. We have members all over America, but for the most part they are working as individuals. We want to use online community management tools in Abolition Central, to help modern abolitionists work together, share resources, innovate, and coordinate their efforts.
Only a few hundred years ago, it seemed inconceivable that slavery would be made illegal. In 1787, a 12 member community met in a printing shop in London with the goal of ending the slave trade. Along the way, they pioneered community and political action techniques that are now commonplace, including postering, mass mailings, boycotts, and lapel pins (the livestrong bracelets of the day). It is exciting to imagine the innovations that will be created by the members of Abolition Central.
WHAT WE NEED:
To create Abolition Central, TEN needs an internal or outsourced IT staff, an internal community manager, and the hardware and software required to run the community.
Location
E. Sandiwch, MA
United States
See map: Google Maps
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Preliminary Requirements for Abolition Central
Mission: Provide social networking tools that can assist in building and managing a community of modern abolitionists. We are building this with the intent of having members physically work together, not just meet online. We want to take the best practices of groups like Kiwanis and Rotary, focus on the common cause of abolition, and provide the social networking tools to manage and recruit members.
Users can either be:
Features available to individuals who browse but don't join:
Features available to individual members:
Features available to group members:
Features available for group management
Clarifying the mission and goals of TEN
The willful ignorance of many in wealthy countries about the persistence of trafficking and slavery is repugnant and deplorable. The premise of TEN, that slavery still exists and should be abolished, is sound. The need is clearly there.
What is less clear from this proposal is what TEN hopes to achieve by its activities. If two of the obstacles (self-identified) are ignorance and lack of resources, I'm not sure either are addressed in what TEN is doing. Far be it from me to diminish the importance of empowering survivors -- I support this.
Yet, when it comes to addressing the causes of slavery (which emancipation would require), TEN has not proposed a strategy. The national and international policy dimensions of the problem, for instance, would appear crucial. It would be important to know TEN's strategic approach for fostering public will and influencing policy change.
Thank you for this great
Thank you for this great question. It is going to be a challenge to keep my answer short so please ask folowup questions.
Core premises of our program:
1. While there are many factors influencing slavery, lack of economic opportunity is almost always a core factor.
2. Survivors of slavery want to have normal lives but usually lack the ability to support themselves
3. Most people in the US that learn about slavery will only be able or willing to take small actions so we have to make it easy for people to make a difference
4. The problem is too big for one solution it will require many different approaches and cooperation between abolitionist groups.
The first three points get to the core of TEN income programs, 1) we help prevent slavery by creating programs for at risk communities (like children of prostitutes) 2 we provide income and opportunity to survivors, and 3) we make it easy for anyone to host an event and thus educate their friends and directly an immediately help survivors.
From the very beginning, we linked our selling of Made By Survivor products to education we don't wholesale or sell anywhere we cant educate people about slavery and, hopefully, recruit them to do more.
So our "business" incorporates education, but you are right there has to be a greater strategic approach. The first part of our strategic goals is to make this an issue of mass concern we need it to be like breast cancer or AIDS. That is, we need it to be an issue that most educated and people know and care about. In my opinion, most of the policy or consumer action tools available to abolitionists will be more powerful if we first focus on building a larger base.
This is a KEY GOAL of building Abolitionist Central giving us and all other Abolitionist the tools needed not just to work together, but to recruit others and build the movement. The movement needs to grow and to have a space for creative innovation and collaboration.
It is really important to note that groups like Polaris Project, Free The Slaves and others are already doing great policy and advocacy work. We partner with these and other groups and we want to support them, not replicate their efforts.
Right now - when someone goes to a TEN awareness event, or sees a Free The Slaves film, there is no real way to say to them "welcome to the community come join us and share and learn".
This is why I said in the our proposal we want to "combine the best practices of the physical world's social organizations (like Rotary or Kiwanis clubs) with the best online community building and social networking tools". This effort cant be done online only, we need to help people meet each other and work together in their community. Groups like Kiwanis have hundreds of thousands of members who pay dues so they can meet and work together to help others. We want to do the same thing for slavery so we can have enough abolitionists to but the needed muscle behind the larger policy and social actions
Addition to proposal - open nature of our community
Because of space constraints I did not go into this in the proposal:
I want to be clear that even though this is being developed by TEN, our plan is to make it available to any abolitionist group. The idea for the community came to us as a solution to an internal problem, how to manage our Ambassador community. Once we are done with this it make sense to me that we should open it up to other like minded groups. We also hope to be a source of funding for other abolitionist groups. They can sell our products or we can outright donate to them (100% of our after tax profits are dedicated to other abolition groups)
awesome project!(i posted
awesome project!
(i posted this earlier ... but not seeing it ... so reposting below)
i'm curious how many people you have on the ground. you say a "large number" ... but how many is large?
also, from a project management perspective ... your timeline is very aggressive and i'm wondering if not perhaps unrealistic (no disrespect here). can you talk more about how you came up with this timeline and what roles / resources you see participating in this rollout?
thanks and looking forward to seeing this project progress!
-------------------------------------------------
Erin Denny aka "Handy"
erin@techsoup.org
reply to Erin
Sorry it took so long to reply to you.
There are a few different ways we can count our membership. We have about 500 party hosts and Ambassadors, and another 300 that have signed up but not had their first event. Seperatly we also have a college network we are building in partnership with two other groups (Polaris and Fair Fund) that has about 1000 students now and is rapidly growing. We also have added about 1000 more customers in last 6 months that have purchased from us either online or at an event - many of them will become party hosts. We have a series of other large partnerships where we are working with other groups with large memberships to get their members to host events -the average membership of theses groups is at least 5,000 per group. Some of these partners have even helped us get overseas volunteers to visit and work with our NGO partners.
As per the time line - the rules of the proposal guidelines stipulated the timeline so I agree it is aggressive. But we are already well along the way to getting a version of this up in running in Drupal. Its not our ideal tool at this point, but we have scoped it out well and we can get 70% of what we want done in Drupal. We don't have a large staff as we are self funded, but we do have a great set of volunteers who have good IT skills who are helping us with this.
But we really need more resources to build this out the way we dream, thats the reason we are so excited about this opportunity.
Great Proposal
John,
As ever ... clearly articulated.
Even without the benefit of our Omidyar connection, the proposal is intensely engaging.
Happy to support as most helpful.
wiki tool
Sandra Dickinson
I see that your project lists WIKI as one of the technology tools you will use. Would you say more about how you plan to use the wiki tool and how you see the wiki tool will support your work to stop trafficking?
I ask because a wiki tool (along with blog) is the basic starter tool for my own project, Selearninggames. I'm very interested to find out more about how our different projects plan use similar tech tools to accomplish our different social purposes.
( actually, I was already familiar with the TEN project, from Omidyar network FoodChain discussion. I hadn't realized a wiki tool was an integral part of your implementation/materialization)
I hope you'll take a look at my project -- and the wiki -- please let me know what you think about how I'm trying to use the wiki tool. Thank you.
(P.S. Also blog tool (now that I see you list blog as one your tools, too)
reply to Sandra
I wil take a look at your project. We do plan to have a wiki - or at least one available at the group level. I would love to see more example of how they can be used for community organization.
Some thoughts from the UK on a very interesting proposal
John I read with interest your proposal and indeed your responses to some of the excellent points raised, particularly about how you envisage this contributing to the strategic aim of ending slavery in all its' forms.
I would certainly agree with your view of the importance of helping survivors as well as raising awareness of the continued existance of the deplorable and dehumanising practices of human trafficking and slavery.I am unaware as to the extent of US media coverage of what in the UK is being "celebrated" as the bicentennial of the "abolision" of slavery when William Wilberforce succeeded in his campaign and a Act of Parliament was passed. Although accepting the disputes that rage over whether or not this actually brought to an end the slave trade 200 years ago, the point I would actually like to make is that the media coverage in the UK has been almost exclusively historical. The chance has been missed to highlight the continued existance of practices that diminish all humanity.I would be interested to hear more about what you see as the benefits of the emergence of new web based technologies and if you see them being able to influence the media agenda in the US to tackle the issue of ignorance you so rightly identify.
Answer to Terry S
There has been a little bit of press about the bicentennial in the US. Walden Media has done a great job wiht Amazing Grace and have set up a seperate group, Amazing Change, to link the history to the current problem and show people what can be done.
But there has not been much else. You asked " I would be interested to hear more about what you see as the benefits of the emergence of new web based technologies and if you see them being able to influence the media agenda"
While it would be great if the media was willing to take the lead in telling the story of modern slavery, I think it is more likely that it will be a bottoms up process. That is, I think the media will more likely be reacting to the grass roots work that is growing here in the US.
I have been watching with great interest the great use of media by the anti-genocide groups. They have done a good job and there has been a lot of creative work done both in traditional media and in newer media (like youtube). We have media plans at TEN, and we will be happy to work with anyone who has good ideas.