Thanks! Always helpful to know what the actual term is. I did a couple minutes of googling… the one contemporary player I turned up is https://collaction.org. They seem to be playing from the modern web startup playbook (design aesthetic is Kickstarter-lite), but they don’t seem to have much traction: they claim six people on their team, but no evidence of revenue or fundraising, and their website is slow and a little clunky.
Their demo projects are pretty uninspiring; they don’t seem to be going after genuine collective action problems, but rather they’re just trying to see if they can get 50 or so people to commit to something: for instance “Random Act of Coffee: If 50 people pledge to buy an (extra) coffee for the next person to order, we will all do it!”
If I were trying to launch something like this, I think I would take on one project at a time, and pick something inspiring and ambitious enough that it might actually go viral, rather than try to get lots of small wins that aren’t really wins.
Soooo.… why doesn’t someone build an app for this??
I mean, seriously. As Part 1 pointed out, we have Kickstarter, but Kickstarter only solves problems where it’s obvious that directly applying cash is what is needed. As soon as it gets more complicated than that, you need to trust the person who is going to be spending the cash, and then you get back into assymetric information land.
Let’s take the subset of problems where a) no one is afraid to be publically affiliated with the hard-to-coordinate action, they just can’t rationally take it without expecting everyone else to take it, and b) getting a sufficient number of people to agree to do it makes it rational.
A + B constrain the set of problems a lot. There are a lot of coordination problems where there are social and reputational costs to being outspoken prior to your side winning. But there are still plenty of important, hard problems where A + B apply. I think stuff around academia and the academic job market has a lot of things in this space. For instance, academics don’t seem to get penalized for publically saying “hey, wouldn’t it be great if we all stopped using p-values”, they only get penalized if they actually stop using them.
So, for this constrained subset of problems, what if there was an app that let you manage a campaign to coordinate, with increasing levels of escalation, from:
Expressing anonymous interest and being on the ping list
Expressing public interest
Expressing public commitment to take a specific action if X number of people also commit
Actually confirming (via taking a selfie or something?) that you’ve taken the action
The app helps you promote and manage a campaign such that people are only called upon to take action when there’s credible assurance that enough other people are taking it to make it successful.
I don’t see this is a panacea for all problems, but this certainly seems like it would knock out a large subset of messt ones. Anyone see any reason this wouldn’t be a great idea?