The Idea - A First Review

September 11, 2008

Blogpatenschaften.de is a project that encourages bloggers to become charitably active and that tries to involve people from different walks of life in the active online communicating community. The goal of the project is to build bridges between online and offline activists. The net with its web technologies, like blogs, wikis and communities that are focused towards dialog, has an enormous potential to forge contacts between humans. Many large communities grew in the last few years. Apart from a focus on fun and dissipation advertising products and services, or polishing an image are important.

Looking at the new “social web” that involves its users in conversations, I ask myself how social can this “social web” be? Is it not possible to make the myriad of acts form committed persons, like those in NPOs and NGOs or self help groups, more visible and to bundle them across organizations? What synergistic effects will be released if all these decentralized activities connect, if all the island like solutions that exist start supplementing each other?

Networking, publishing and researching was never as simple as today. Everyone can write online, without being a blogger, a wikipediene or a programmer. How can the possibilities of the “social web” be used to build bridges between online- and offline activists? These were the thoughts that occupied me in advance of visiting the re:pubilica’08 in Berlin and for which I got exactly the impulses I needed to go online with Blogpatenschaften.de.

There was one thing that became apparent spontaneously: There are quite a few bloggers that would be happy to show web-newbies, NGOs and charitable societies the possibilities of publishing, researching and networking online and, if they were so inclined, to support them in connecting ideas online.

How does Blogpatenschaften work?
Through our “blog sponsorship” initiative we want to bring together bloggers and non-bloggers. Blogpatenschaften is geared both towards bloggers who are very technologically enthusiastic or have a high net affinity and those that are not online yet. A blogsponsor can either pass on web know-how or make guest blogging possible or sponsor a project by writing about it. Everyone can decide for themselves how deeply involved they want to be in the project.

Experienced bloggers support those that haven’t had the possibility of engaging with the internet so far. There are many people that know they have something to say, but do not know that the internet can help them. And that it is really easy and almost free. The blog sponsors support newbies. This way both sides, bloggers as well as non-bloggers, gain new insights from new perspectives.

Mid-June 2008 we gave out a call to blogaction with the title: “Bloggers Support Social Projects And Offliners” We asked: Where are bloggers that would help those not online in taking part in this networking? Where is the net already used to draw attention to and connect concrete projects? We want to encourage already existing ideas in the first phase and to help them become visible. This blogaction is still running until the end of the year. An independent jury will then reward the most interesting blogger-offliner team with a small award of 100 Euros. One half will go towards the project or for the offliner and the other half is for the blogger. We would be happy, if more people took part and made others aware of it.

Cooperation:
The idea of Blogpatenschaften has found an interesting partner in Blogpolis.de. The idea of blogsponsorship as well as the idea behind Blogpolis build on decentralized e-democracy. Blogpolis wants support blogactions by reducing the effort that it costs the initiators, by simplifying the networking of blogs and to afford a better overview for the readers. How this works can be observed in the given example: For us this means that we do not want to change anything about the diversity and decentralization of individual bloggers, netizens and offliners, but to show those networking possibilities that best suit the needs. That can be the possibility of guest blogging for a small society, or a web-newbie. Long term projects can be accompanied by the sponsor blogging about it and thus helping the project to more publicity. Another way is to collect funds or distribute a petition. [Update02010: The project Blogpolis was given up.]

Goals:
We plan the founding of a non profit organisation. Its goal could be to further facilitate the ideas of blogsponsorships, to organise PR, info-events and workshops for web-newbies and, if enough funds exist, to reach more offliner via print media. Blogpatenschaften wants to show, that individual actions can be very effective as well, if the network is well made. The website blogpatenschaften.de could, in the long term, become a collection of best practice examples and current information on the subject “How to network social commitment- online and offline” and thus be an inspiration for other projects.

This post was (in a longer german version) already published in the Glocalist Review.

Translation: Paula Schramm