Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design

Article Idea:

Digital altruism and the riddle of anonymous online samaritans

suggested by Christopher Grant on 2008/08/11

In this blog post I use argue that digital altruism is one of the key motivating factors for contributing to an virtual communities. Altruism because it’s all about the self-interest defying need to move outside of the market space that dominates more and more of our lives, to do something that feels big and important and doesn’t just serve ourselves, our employers and the system. Digital because thanks to the combination of new technologies that facilitate easy, de-localized communication and new sites which make contributing easy, fun and rewarding (I see what I’ve contributed) I can be altruistic from anywhere, at anytime.

I go on to hold that if digital altruism is one of the main motivating factors, it should be an implicit and explicit part of every virtual communities design and architecture, just as important as other factos (reciprocity, sense of community, etc.)