Tuesday, December 16, 2008

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!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Conoscevo CESVI ma non questa iniziativa Cesviamo, un bel progetto web 2.0 impegnato per lo sviluppo!
Andrebbe segnalato come link ICT4D