A global, multilingual web portal allowing people to collaborate on social projects such as building schools, campaigning against pollution or helping disaster victims, is set to be launched at the UN Climate Change conference in Copenhagen in December, with President Barack Obama and Microsoft founder Bill Gates invited to back the project, E-Government Bulletin has learned.
The work is being led by PoliticsOnline, a US-based consultancy and internet campaigning solutions provider whose founder Phil Noble advised the Obama Presidential campaign on internet activity.
Entitled ‘Hope Plus’, the project – run independently from the US or any government – will create “a place where people can meet, congregate, and participate with NGOs to change the world online,” Noble told E-Government Bulletin in an exclusive interview in Paris, where he was attending the World Forum on e-Democracy, a conference he helped to found 10 years ago.
Referring to the Peace Corps, a US public body set up by Senator John Kennedy in the 1960s to recruit thousands of volunteers to help projects in developing countries (http://www.peacecorps.gov), he said: “The idea is to create a world online Peace Corps, or a global ‘eBay for caring’.” The name Hope Plus is derived from the premise that “If you take hope, people’s desire to do something, plus action, that equals change”, Noble said. “We expect to unveil this project at Copenhagen (http://en.cop15.dk/).”
The concept has been in incubation for some years, and was partly inspired by past work carried out by Noble in the UK for the BBC, he told E-Government Bulletin. Noble was a key advisor in the development of the now defunct BBC ‘Action Network’, a national portal for community activism which the corporation eventually decided was not a function best served by a public broadcaster (see our report on its demise at http://www.headstar.com/egblive/?p=99).
“I’d been throwing out the idea for a global network at conferences from time to time, and I mentioned it recently at one hosted by [US social leadership body] the Aspen Institute, and the consensus was – now was the time.”
With seed money and technology obtained from several big name corporations, work began in earnest earlier this year.
The portal will consist of a network, activism tools and a platform allowing others to create their own new tools, Noble said. “It will be a user-generated site, in terms of content and the site’s development. Most NGOs are still quite web 1.0 – we want to apply the web 2.0 technology that Obama used so effectively to the whole helping world.” One advantage it might bring for people already working in the developing world for major charities and NGOs might be a chance to launch new projects without having to go through the bureaucratic processes of formal decision-making within their organisations, Noble said. “So if you are an Oxfam worker and want to try to build a school, I hope you will come to Hope Plus, separate and distinct.”
Asked if he anticipated problems with regimes in non-democratic countries with the concept of people helping each other and organising themselves online separately from government, Noble said: “There are always issues of where you draw the line, but we don’t view that as a defining principle. There will be issues, but that is what a governing board is for.”
NOTE: Article originally published as a world exclusive in E-Government Bulletin issue 299.
Click here to visit/return to issue 299 index.
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Wow, What an exciting project! Scaling up the facilitation of positive social action on a global scale is long over due. Add to that open-source, user-generated content and we are witnessing a widening and deepening of democratic engagement. Hope I can be involved in some way. Plus, great branding with ‘online Peace Corps’! I look forward to the launch next month.
It’s great to see the Web being used to promote such an ethical project. This is something I’m very much in favor of and will be following the progress with interest.
Lets just hope that accessibility is built into the specification for the website to begin with this time…post-launch repairs to various major Government initiative websites coming out of the US lately have been swift but unnecessary if they had been planned properly.
This also sounds very “Web 2.0″ so it could also be a global landmark for accessibility in that area.