The Age of Peak Guilt

For liveblogged transcripts of this talk, see the MIT Center for Civic Media blog.

Participants

Zach Walker

Zach works for Donor's Choose. Most people know what Donor's Choose is, but for those who don't, it's often described as "Kickstarter for American public schools".

Nick Grossman

Nick is an internet advocate and is working on starting up connected.io. Nick thinks about how networks and connectedness are changing things.

Andrew Slack

Andrew works for the Harry Potter Alliance, which draws parallels between real world projects and fiction to inspire fans into action. Their view is that fantasy is not an escape, but an invitation.

Michael Norton

Michael works at Harvard Business School and studies the relationships between happiness and money.

Q&A

Culture

• What can we do to build awesomeness into organizations that don't have it baked in from the start?
• What about organizations working on very serious issues? Can you work playfulness into that?

You can use competition to convince organizations - issue a challenge to them to do specific Awesome things (like opening up data to developers). And all organizations should have a sense of playfulness baked in, no matter how serious their cause. There is a tension between serious and playful though. Nonprofits push back against getting donations from people who don't care; they really want people to engage with their cause and be actively choosing to contribute.

Narratives and storytelling

There is a notion that narrative helps people relate to a cause - the idea of connecting hunger and *The Hunger Games* or creating a supervillain to personify global warming. Building stories gives people a meaningful connection to a cause.