That’s a thought raised by The Volunteer Economy.
What companies would you volunteer for?
One response to “What companies would you volunteer for?”
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It’s amazing to me how many people divorce where they work and where they spend their money from what they support. Our society is capitalist enough that when you work for a company or spend money with that company, you’re supporting that company to the exclusion of their competitors. And so when you spend your money at that company, you’re voting in favor of the world-view they present — whether it be the cheap and disposable world of WalMart or the profitable homogeneity of RIAA-backed recording labels.
All this Web 2.0 stuff really just makes that more apparent. Open source projects live or die based on their support, and user-data-aggregating sites are pointless until you have a certain threshold of users. As a contemporary example, I’m trying out Feed Each Other — http://feedeachother.com/ — but the whole basis of the system is pointless unless both you and your friends are actively using it. So unless people are willing to spend their most precious and limited resource — their time — on a system, it’s DoA.
More at my blog: http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2007/06/12/how-we-vote/
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