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.
@article{arxiv.1406.7735,
title = {WeDo: Exploring Participatory, End-To-End Collective Action},
author = {Haoqi Zhang and Andes Monroy-Hernandez and Aaron Shaw and Sean Munson and Liz Gerber and Benjamin Mako Hill and Peter Kinnaird and Shelly Farnham and Patrick Minder},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1406.7735},
year = {2021}
}