Cesviamo: a social network for solidarity

It reminds me of the concept of The Long Tail... that was first coined by Chris Anderson to describe a particular business strategy, such as for example Amazon.com, that consists in selling a large number of unique items, each in relatively small volumes. The main characteristic of these kind of businesses is to realize profit by selling small quantities of (even "hard-to-find") items to many customers, instead of selling large quantities of a small number of more popular items.

Cesviamo exploits a similar idea, but for very different purposes: it is an initiative of Cesvi, an aid agency aimed at transforming the values of “human solidarity and social justice into humanitarian aid and development initiatives for the affirmation of universal human rights”.

What is ingenious in the Cesviamo initiative, is the conceptualization of a humanitarian project not as a single big objective, but rather as the sum of many, small objectives, accessible to all.

For example: Pietro, by eating 20 ants (without bread), is going to fund the project "L'acqua è vita", aimed at providing Sudan with drinkable water; Katia, by committing herself to go to work pyjama and pink slippers (and to upload the video on youtube), is going to help funding the projects "Casa del sorriso", in the frame of the adoption of entire communities of children in India, Zimbabwe, Perù, and Brasile.

Nice initiative!

Want to be happy?

Happiness is contagious! Surround yourself with happy friends or with friends who have happy friends. A research recently published in the British Medical Journal says happiness can quickly spread in a viral way within one's social network. The study used longitudinal network analysis, analyzing data related to 4739 individuals from 1983 to 2003, and found that when a person was happy, their friends became more happy too.

The researchers studied clusters of happy and unhappy people in the network, and discovered that the relationship between people’s happiness extends up to three degrees of separation. In other words, people who are surrounded by many happy friends are more likely to become happy in the future. Moreover, those who are central in the network are more likely to become happy too. Considering that effects decay with time and geographical separation, a significant spread of happiness was found between friends or siblings who live within a mile of distance, coresident spouses, and next door neighbours, but not between co-workers.

Once again, it seems we do are social animals, and thus our happiness is not an individual, but rather a collective phenomenon.

Let's spread happiness!