Incentivizing Cyber Participation

In his piece The Internet and Virtual Civil Society, Kittilson claims that “interactions on the internet build cyberskills that lead to online participation, but not traditional forms of participation.” Project PERIS, however, hopes to accomplish exactly the opposite: use interactions on the internet to facilitate and increase traditional forms of participation or service. As I see it, users of the map may virtually participate in one of two ways: either passively, simply providing contact information and waiting to be presented with an opportunity, or actively, using the map as an advanced tool to mobilize. In order to encourage the latter usage, it is important that users truly view the map as a valuable resource so they virtually participate on a regular basis. To achieve this, we should incentivize active usage by providing access to advanced tools for community organizing. As an example, organizations joining the network could opt in to including a “service” component on their window. This component would then add some kind of pop-up or page that appears when an individual links to the organization, asking them if they would be interested in being added to the equivalent of an ‘activist’ elist for that group. Individuals could further specify what types of activities they would be interested in participating in. Then, when the organization is in need of volunteers or is hosting an event, they would be able to send out a message to all those who opted in, either on the website or directly to their email. This is just one example of a community organizing tool the map could provide to organizations to incentivize them using the map (requesting volunteers, posting events, etc.), but it is something we may want to explore because this map will be most functional only if all parties are actively participating.