People Power, Not a Portal

At the "State of Service" event put on by MassINC & AmeriCorps Alums earlier this month, creating a new "Match.com for service" portal was the idea that seemed to generate the most enthusiasm.  In these "there's an app for that" times, thinking there's a technical solution to a challenge comes naturally.  And there is certainly some evidence that doing a better job connecting people with opportunities to participate could increase civic engagement.  Back when I was starting Social Capital Inc. (SCI), I came across a League of Women Voters study which said that roughly half of the Americans they surveyed indicated that they'd like to be more civically active, and that "lack of information" was the single biggest barrier preventing them from doing so.  We have since seen similar findings in our own local survey, pointing to the need to connect people with information.

Sure sounds like a technical solution waiting to happen, right?  Well, we at SCI stepped in to do our part, deploying our local community portal tool in 10 locations as a centerpiece of our efforts to foster civic engagement.  And we certainly aren't the only ones to do so, as the Internet abounds with sites that have different variations of tools designed to connect people to civic engagement opportunities--Volunteer Match, Connect and Serve, Neighbors for Neighbors, to name just a few in addition to our own.  Web tools like these play an import role in today's service movement, but the fact that creating new tools continues to generate enthusiasm suggests that there is something missing.  Our experience at SCI suggests that people trained as connectors are the missing ingredient, not a new web portal.

I would argue that what would really advance the service movement is not a new portal tool, but something like the "Geek Corps" envisioned by the Knight Commission report, "Informing Communities:  Sustaining Democracy in a Digital Age".  Though I'm not wild about the name, the idea of a corps dedicated to helping people use technology to connect to opportunities to participate is compelling.  Their proposal also includes providing individuals with technical skills and nonprofits with more technical capacity, but a key part of the Geek Corps concept involves playing the role of "matchmaker"--linking citizens with issues and needs they can address.

For the past three years, the SCI AmeriCorps Outreach & Technology Coordinator (OTC) team has in many respects been functioning as a "Geek Corps".  When we first started this team, we were fairly early in the process of rolling out community portals.  It was easy to get enamored with our new portal tool, and much of our recruitment, training and support of the OTC team focused on the technical aspects of maintaining our Drupal-based portals.  But after reflecting on our experience during strategic planning last year, we prioritized the training of people to use our tools to achieve our mission; clarifying for ourselves that the portal tool is just a means to end, not the end itself.

Prioritizing our people over the portals--or emphasizing the "O" for outreach as much as the "T" for technology with our OTCs--has had important practical implications for us.  We now value communication skills as much if not more than technical competency in our selection process.  Rather than focusing mostly on technical skills, more training time is devoted to understanding community needs and assets, the dynamics of social networks and developing effective outreach strategies.

The results of this shift have been notable.  For instance, our 4 OTC members serving with DotWell undertook a major revamping of the MyDorchester.org website in response to community needs, then launched a major outreach effort to promote the site.  Monthly site traffic increased by 60% to 3,300 during their 10 months of service.  More importantly, the site was being used to serve as a resource for pressing issues like connecting local Haitian families to resources following the earthquake.  The members needed the ability to place the web tool in the context of broader community building needs and to communicate effectively to achieve these results; technical skills alone aren't enough to achieve our goals.

Of course, in the world of technology, there's always room for new and better tools.  I hope the service movement does improve existing tools and evolve new ones as needed (aggregation of data from existing tools sounds better than a new parallel system).  But I caution against putting most of our energy into a new website, thinking it will be the service silver bullet.  Training more people to effectively use tools that exist to engage their fellow citizens in service is a compelling need, and something along the lines of the proposed Geek Corps has significant potential to advance the movement.  With AmeriCorps slated to grow dramatically in the coming years thanks to the Kennedy Serve America Act, it seems like the Geek Corps concept has great promise could to move from white paper to reality.