To address the declining willingness to engage in democracy, we aim to empower EU citizens to be change makers through networked community participation. We envision a platform where citizens, information and collective intelligence meet to imagine and create real community participation.
Our idea is not limited to any particular community or country within Europe. Rather it is a vision to change the whole EU for the better. We want to remain open for collaboration and act as a facilitator of ideas and initiatives, continuously be fit to react to needs and changes in conditions.
Our value and differentiation is the focus on the individual and trying to create a movement where citizens act beyond “likes on facebook” to displaying actual engagement, action and results. We want to touch and move the masses today. It comes down to understanding motivation and behavior that constitute the tipping point to choose engagement before apathy. If we can achieve this, we hope that many established organizations will be beneficiaries of our initiative.
As a quantified measure, our short-term aim is to grow the number of citizens in community projects across the EU by connecting common causes. This can be measured through metrics on the We the Community platform, such as:
• Number of users
• Number of projects
• Growth in campaigns
We the Community will achieve this by providing a gamified platform that enables people to take action on matters that are important to them. The more active users we can count, the more people we hope to reach with this paradigm shift: individual citizens have valuable ideas for their local community, and communities must work together to demand and demonstrate to decision makers what it is they want. We anticipate that this will lead to increased citizen participation in local and national elections.
• Create the team (September 2015). Emphasis on programmers who build the platform and staff who define user needs and the gamification.
• Beta development (December 2015).
• January 2016: Launch platform and focus on attracting users and make them stay.
• Execute business model: a so called multi-sided platform where we on one hand serve individual users and communities, and on the other hand serve beneficiaries, i.e. other organizations and decision makers, who take and use the results of the projects on our platform. Our platform creates value by facilitating the interactions between these two groups. Thus, our platform grows in value as it attracts more users, also known as the network effect.
• Consider options for scaling up and out the platform to enhance our reason for existing.
Any feedback and ideas are welcome and appreciated! The very aim of We the Community is to share information and ideas for collaboration, so let’s start here!