WeDo: Exploring Participatory, End-To-End Collective Action

TL;DR

WeDo is a sociotechnical system designed to facilitate participatory, end-to-end collective action by supporting community engagement from opportunity identification to action, highlighting both potentials and challenges.

Contribution

This paper introduces WeDo, a novel system that enables comprehensive participatory collective action, addressing gaps in existing tools by supporting all phases from goal setting to mobilization.

Findings

Supports automated phase transitions in collective action

Identifies challenges like leadership elicitation and norm accommodation

Demonstrates feasibility through pilot deployments

Abstract

Many celebrate the Internet's ability to connect individuals and facilitate collective action toward a common goal. While numerous systems have been designed to support particular aspects of collective action, few systems support participatory, end-to-end collective action in which a crowd or community identifies opportunities, formulates goals, brainstorms ideas, develops plans, mobilizes, and takes action. To explore the possibilities and barriers in supporting such interactions, we have developed WeDo, a system aimed at promoting simple forms of participatory, end-to-end collective action. Pilot deployments of WeDo illustrate that sociotechnical systems can support automated transitions through different phases of end-to-end collective action, but that challenges, such as the elicitation of leadership and the accommodation of existing group norms, remain.