Changing The World With Just One Click
What if it was possible?
Bringing citizens together online to create the world after Covid-19
It was early April. Amid the new coronavirus crisis, a group of French organizations (the French Red Cross, WWF France, Make.org, the SOS Group, le MOUVEMENT UP, and Unis-Cité) launched a massive citizen consultation around the theme “Inventing the world after Covid-19”. The aim was to mobilize citizens to plan concrete actions for the post-crisis world, after the end of lockdown, and to gather a set of proposals and ideas that could ensure that we do not return to the abnormal.
This consultation was a success: first of all in the figures: 20,000 proposals were submitted, 165,000 people participated and the consultation counted 1.7 million votes. Great ideas emerged:
- Encouraging local consumption and proximity circuits
- Moving towards alternative agriculture
- Limit the production of waste, especially packaging and plastic, promote recycling
- Relocating certain strategic economic sectors in France and Europe
- Rethinking education for people and the environment
- Putting the environment and social issues at the heart of public policies and taxation
- …and lots of other ideas.
This consultation, taking place at a time when democracy had come to a standstill in France with the interruption of municipal elections, was the consecration of an already mature movement: civic-tech. Highlighted during the Yellow Vests crisis, with an extremely strong mobilization, particularly on the government platform of the Grand Débat, civic-tech believes in the possibility of renewing the link between citizens and institutions through online engagement.
In a speech at the beginning of the year, Axel Dauchez, CEO of Make.org said that civic-tech allows “a reactivation of democracy through the involvement of citizens at all levels (consultation, citizen juries, referendums …) It is not a question of starting from scratch and redesigning all our institutions. Citizens must reappropriate the institutions and regain a sense of permanent democracy. Between elections, there must be a continuous exchange between citizens and elected officials to recreate the link”.
The platform Make.org is the culmination of his conviction: a tool that should make citizen engagement easier through an intuitive digital path: he can write short proposals, answering to an open question, and he can also vote on the proposals of other citizens! At the end of the process, an algorithm finds points of convergence between citizens, engaging and actionable ideas on which civil society can unite to find solutions to change things.
This civic-tech movement is booming, but what is the value of a click for a citizen? Can we change the world with just one click?
Indeed, when we see that the most viewed French-language videos on Youtube today have several billion views, what is the value of a million clicks on a petition? What is the value of a like on Facebook? Is the clicking citizen really committed to a cause? Will it make a difference?
The truth lies, as it often does, in the in-between. In 2009, Alexandre Roberge made a rather glowing observation about online engagement, often introduced as “slacktivism”, the activism of laziness. However, very often, signing a petition is already engaging as it allows you to learn about a cause, and studies show that signing a petition can lead to larger donations to this cause, or even to other causes! However, online engagement is not enough. As we saw during the Arab Spring or the Yellow Jackets crisis, it wasn’t petitions or mobilization on the internet that brought about concrete changes: it was the sacrifice, the fight of thousands of people in the streets.
However, digital tools remain useful tool to organize citizens’ movements and inspire!
Digital technology is useful for organizing citizens’ and activists’ movements. Social networks have allowed the demonstrators in Tahrir Square to organize, to bypass the mass media to disseminate images, testimonies, and other evidence of police abuses. In the ecosystems of ecology, the international movement of British origin Extinction Rebellion (XR) is meeting online on safe platforms (Signal, Telegram). These platforms allow a full cross-disciplinary organization of activists within the movement.
Finally, digital technology can be used to inspire citizens. The French Youtuber “Partager c’est sympa” — Sharing is cool — documents strong actions against the current system, but also gives keys to commitment, leads for action, and creates fiction to explore a future that might be desirable.
About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Business Strategy. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DBS.
