Call To Action

A Call to Action

The Situation

The media play a key role in discovering, explaining and distributing information essential to informed self-government and to fostering engaged, knowledgeable citizenship. The internet, wireless networks, and widely available mobile technologies now allow ordinary citizens not only to consume media but to create, share, aggregate, remix and redistribute it – to BE media. Ordinary people, as well as institutions that were once thought of as something other than media, are now direct participants in the media, increasing their power to communicate with each other and to hold governments to account.

The Ambition

To harness the power of information technologies and human ingenuity for the common good, we propose a worldwide We Media Global Initiative to invest in bottom-up media. The initiative will connect and inspire individuals and organizations to take action - to do something material - to give voice to marginalised groups, to encourage government accountability in all countries and to help people not only access but productively apply and derive knowledge from the extraordinary volumes of information distributed throughout the connected society. It is also designed to create and incubate business and donor networks to sustain the initiative into the future.

The Model

The initiative is built around formal and informal collaboration between committed individuals and institutions at a local, national and global level. To utilise the benefits of digital media, the initiative will focus on promoting its activities through the web, but will also use face-to-face training and knowledge sharing events to complement the internet efforts. The initiative will benefit from knowledge and networks of professional and non-professional media producers, as well as technical and financial experts, companies, policy makers, non-governmental organizations and other supporters.

The Initiative will seek to tap into the shared knowledge, collective intelligence and capabilities of a wide range of ordinary citizens AND professionals, as well as industries including those of journalism, advertising, public relations, marketing, entertainment, finance, telecommunications, research, retail, healthcare, technology, philanthropy, NGOs, social activism, policy and academia.

All will benefit from exposure to one another through the Initiative.