NGO2.0 and social media praxis: activist as researcher

Abstract

This article tracks the emergence of a particular brand of ICT activism that promotes the use of social media as a means of helping Chinese NGOs break out of their communication bottleneck. The author starts by introducing NGO2.0, an activist project targeting China's rural regions, using it as an entry point to examine the practice of “social media for social good” and shed light on the ecosystem of social media usage by Chinese NGOs. The author also deliberates on the explanatory value of the binary paradigm of “rural vs. urban,” looks into the methodological implications of undertaking “social media action research,” and articulates what it means to be engaged in the hybrid practice of “activist as scholar” in the specific context of Cultural Studies.

Keywords::

• social media
• tech4good
• Web 2.0
• ICT in China
• NGO2.0
• Cultural Studies
• social media action research
• Participatory Action Research
• activism 2.0

Acknowledgements

I thank Elisa Oreglia and Jack Qiu for their insightful feedback on the early draft of this paper.

Notes

^1. As of July 2014, 895 grassroots NGOs among 1492 that appeared on the NGO2.0 philanthropy map did not own Weibo accounts.

^2. A scandal – known as the Guo Meimei Incident – involving China's Red Cross broke out in 2011. Known as the atomic bomb of the Chinese nonprofit sector, the incident blew away the last shred of the public's trust in the state-monopolized philanthropic structure. Multisectoral collaboration began to take shape in renewing the philanthropy sector.

^3. The Chinese government backed up the IT sector's dabbling in social media to promote a new brand of philanthropy that would involve the participation of average netizens. In 2011 and 2012, Beijing hosted the summit of “Global Social Media and Social Good,” which involved a host of international and domestic Chinese luminaries. For details, see http://news.56.com/sp/zt2012 and http://gongyi.qq.com/a/20111203/000010.htm.

^4.Tencent.com launched a crowdfunding platform in October 2011 to enable NGOs and volunteer communities to raise public funds. Sina.com established its Micro-Charity Platform soon after.

^5. The first nonprofit technology conference in the USA was held in 2002. Beth Kanter, one of the most passionate American advocates of nonprofit technology started working in the field in 1992.

^6. See “Nongcun diqu xinxi xiaofei qianli buke xiaoxu” (The potential of information consumption in rural regions cannot be underestimated), Xinhua Net, July 23, 2013, http://news.xinhuanet.com/info/2013-07/23/c_132565097_2.htm, accessed in December 2013.

^7. The statistics were provided by the Chief Technology Officer of NGOCN in 2009.

^8. Please visit www.ngo20map.com, click on “NGO Issue Areas,” and choose the category of “policy advocacy” to find the self-identified policy-advocacy NGOs.

^9. Minqin County is known to be the next Lop Nur, which was formerly a salt lake, now largely dried-up, located in the southeastern portion of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

^10. First-tier cities refer to Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen.

^11. For details about this hackathon, see NGO2.0, “Gongyi jiketuan Guangzhou dier ci Hackathon huodong yuanman chenggong” (NGO-Tech Network Successfully Held its Second Hackathon in Guangzhou), http://www.ngo20.org/?p = 1808, August 17, 2013, accessed in December 2013.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jing Wang

Jing Wang is Professor of Chinese Media and Cultural Studies and Director of the New Media Action Lab at MIT. She is the founder and chief executive officer of NGO2.0, which is now registered as a nonprofit organization in Shenzhen. Her research interests include advertising and marketing, civic media and communication, social media action research, popular culture, and non-profit technology. http://mitgsl.mit.edu/faculty-staff-detail/115.