Congrats for your first post! I think it’s well written; I like the structure of „problem-proposed solution-possible issues“, you write short and clearly, and you stated what kind of input you want from the community.
It was useful for me that you provided the example of meat eating as a coordination problem. I would have found more examples even more useful for thinking about the potential applications where a coordination platform is among the most promising approaches (btw, I think for meat eating it is not among the most promising).
I like your idea, but I’m also worried about your 2nd issue: nobody will use it. It seems to me like people are just not motivated enough by being a part of improving the world. Meat eating seems like a case in point: there is already a veggie community you can be part of (at least in Germany in every bigger city) and the marginal impact you have doesn’t even depend that much on coordination. Still it’s a tiny movement.
I think it’s reasonable that you are trying to think about the landscape and bottlenecks of behavior change and coordination before moving to action. There is probably much more to learn. For example, I’ve read this short report about change platforms in the context of changing organizations, that seems to have some success stories and learned lessons that are also relevant for you. This might be a much more tractable pathway if there are smaller scale important coordination problems. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/build-a-change-platform-not-a-change-program
Regarding more examples, I think that any action which someone could say “I would do this but what difference is one person’s action going to make” is a candidate for a good campaign. More examples I can think of mainly relate to conservation (energy, water etc.). I also think this platform could help power boycotts of companies which could be a very powerful use (but also with a risk of becoming dangerous as pointed out by Ramiro). I actually think that this alone would be a very powerful use for such a platform.
And regarding my second issue, I think for the platform to have a chance, it would have to go viral and somehow maintain a user base after that. I agree that acquiring a user base dedicated to making actual changes in their lives would likely be the hardest part of the process.
Also, thanks for linking to that report. It seems to advocate that a grass roots platform like this could be one of the more effective ways to affect change. I definitely would like to do some more reading on the research in this area though.
Congrats for your first post! I think it’s well written; I like the structure of „problem-proposed solution-possible issues“, you write short and clearly, and you stated what kind of input you want from the community.
It was useful for me that you provided the example of meat eating as a coordination problem. I would have found more examples even more useful for thinking about the potential applications where a coordination platform is among the most promising approaches (btw, I think for meat eating it is not among the most promising).
I like your idea, but I’m also worried about your 2nd issue: nobody will use it. It seems to me like people are just not motivated enough by being a part of improving the world. Meat eating seems like a case in point: there is already a veggie community you can be part of (at least in Germany in every bigger city) and the marginal impact you have doesn’t even depend that much on coordination. Still it’s a tiny movement.
I think it’s reasonable that you are trying to think about the landscape and bottlenecks of behavior change and coordination before moving to action. There is probably much more to learn. For example, I’ve read this short report about change platforms in the context of changing organizations, that seems to have some success stories and learned lessons that are also relevant for you. This might be a much more tractable pathway if there are smaller scale important coordination problems. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/build-a-change-platform-not-a-change-program
Regarding more examples, I think that any action which someone could say “I would do this but what difference is one person’s action going to make” is a candidate for a good campaign. More examples I can think of mainly relate to conservation (energy, water etc.). I also think this platform could help power boycotts of companies which could be a very powerful use (but also with a risk of becoming dangerous as pointed out by Ramiro). I actually think that this alone would be a very powerful use for such a platform.
And regarding my second issue, I think for the platform to have a chance, it would have to go viral and somehow maintain a user base after that. I agree that acquiring a user base dedicated to making actual changes in their lives would likely be the hardest part of the process.
Also, thanks for linking to that report. It seems to advocate that a grass roots platform like this could be one of the more effective ways to affect change. I definitely would like to do some more reading on the research in this area though.