I don’t know if you’ve ever searched online for ways that you could actually make a difference, actually help people on a big scale. The problems we’re facing — poverty, climate change, world hunger, lack of clean water in developing nations — aren’t problems that a single person or a handful of people can solve. We need to work together. We need to be a team.

And in the internet’s current state, we’ve found that to be pretty much impossible. There are so many people, so many groups, so many organisations, and so little in the way of concerted effort to get everyone working together. Go and have a quick Google for places where you can get involved in trying to reduce poverty and help the homeless. Find one which you can easily get involved with, is working with lots of people from multiple sectors, and having a meaningful impact. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

It’s a nightmare, right? Just imagine how much we could do if we were actually able to all work together in a useful way. If everyone with the money, the will, and the means to act were available in one place, the good that could be achieved is incredible. Individuals can’t do much by themselves, but by working with each other, with charities, NGOs, private companies, and governments, they could achieve extraordinary things.

To solve world hunger, it’s estimated that we’d need $30 billion per year. Now, at first that sounds like a hell of a lot of money, but consider a few things: America spends $660 billion per year on defence. Facebook, bafflingly, spent $19 billion on WhatsApp. The UK government is apparently willing to spend £80 billion — roughly $130 billion — on making the train journey between London and Birmingham about 15 minutes shorter.

So when you think about it, $30 billion isn’t actually an unrealistic goal at all, not by a long shot. In the grand scheme of things, $1 billion really isn’t that much money — to big companies like Microsoft or BP, for instance, that’s practically pocket change. Even when we look at relatively small expenses that we all make every day, it’s not that much: collectively we spend huge amounts of money on trivial things that we don’t really need. Like, for instance, coffee.

If everyone in the United States committed to donating $3 a day for a year — about the price of a cup of coffee — it would raise enough money to solve all world hunger for eleven years. The prospect of that is utterly mind-boggling, and really goes to show how much better our money could be spent if we had only the incentive and the motivation to do so — and, crucially, the right kind of online space to discuss and plan such an initiative. With the internet in its current state, I have no idea how you’d go about organising such a campaign. You could use Reddit in a pinch, but it’s not designed for this sort of thing and is far from being ideal.

The possibility to change the world exists — it’s right there in front of us — if we work together. That, fundamentally, is what Humanity Online is all about.