Could a "Craigslist for Service" Actually Work?

When my aunt and uncle-in-law emailed me on November 6th, asking for some advice on what they can do to help Barack Obama "address the great challenges that he and our country face moving forward," I was embarrassingly stumped. Err, there were plans in the works, I knew, to ramp up Americorps and even start some new -corps, like one for inner city teachers. Frankly, though, my relatives aren't looking to devote their lives to Obama. They just wanted to help the country along a bit in their spare time.

Luckily, I remembered something that might just be perfect. During the campaign, Barack Obama had promised to inaugurate just such a part-time volunteerism system, an idea the campaign catchily called "a Craigslist for service."

The mention comes in their Plan for Universal Voluntary Citizen Service (pdf). In it, the Obama-Biden campaign tipped their hat to existing volunteer matching services, from USAFreedomCorps.gov -- a little-known and clunky portal launched by President George W. Bush in 2002 -- to VolunteerMatch.org, founded Silicon Valley entreprenuers that connects the willing with existing opportunities with more than 50,000 non-profits. But they went further, saying:

Obama and Biden will build on that foundation and leverage technology to increase awareness of and participation in service opportunities. There will be a comprehensive, easily searchable web presence with information about service opportunities, and a full strategy to ensure that people interested in opportunities can find them.

The enormous, pressing question that remains is this: is their vision limited to more efficiently slotting people into existing service opportunities? Let's hope not. There's an opportunity to sprinkle some of the magic dust of the Obama campaign to make a Craigslist for service far more citizen-driven, and, in turn, far more revolutionary. Such a thing is still just pie in the sky during these early days of the pre-administration. But if it works, hey, it might be a perfect fit for my aunt and uncle.

Now, techPresident contributing writer Gene Koo of Harvard's Berkman Center has called the idea "rather dull and uninteresting." But, frankly, the same could be said of the actual, enormously successful Craigslist. It's wildly speculative to wonder if a true peer-to-peer Craigslist for service -- one that connected people together, creating new social opportunities, not just plugging people into existing ones -- could work, but that's the fun part.

Without carrying the metaphor too far, let's consider how a service model inspired by Craigslist could succeed, and why it might not:

Getting Started Would Be Trivial. In the pre-Craigslist age, if you wanted to, say, get the word out about a garage sale you're having, you'd call up your local newspaper and place an ad to run in the next few weeks. No longer. With Craigslist, just create a posting and poof! the world knows about your yard sale. In some communities, that's enough to draw a big enough crowd. Applying that to service, if you've got a plan to, say, raise the cash to bring in a speaker on social justice to your local library, a service system truly on the model of Craigslist wouldn't erect any roadblocks along the way.

The downside: Such loosey-goosey organizing is great for simple tasks, like putting together a "Hey, Let's Clean Up Lincoln Park this Sunday!" action. But sometimes accomplishing great things takes real planning and consensus, which is harder to achieve in a flat-organizing model. That said, with the infighting that can drag down community activism, maybe encouraging lone rangers to go it solo isn't such a bad thing.

Citizens Who Share Interests Could Finally Find One Another. During his 2005 bid to become New York City's public advocate, techPresident founder Andrew Rasiej asked why there was no city office responsible for connecting the many New Yorkers who are ready, willing, and able to make the city a better place. Why not help bring together the concerned citizens who each, invididually, want to open up the neglected South Bronx waterfront for public use? An office like that, though, could be entirely virtual.

The downside: Helping citizens self-organize is great when they're on your side. Not so great when they have other ideas, and figure out how to lobby City Hall. While remaining fuzzy on just how interactive a model they have in mind, the campaign did pledge that it would have Web 2.0 bells and whistles, like letting citizens rate volunteer opportunities. That said, if we're just feeding volunteers into existing jobs -- doing a shift at the local Red Cross, helping kids to read after school, or a candy-striping at a local hospital (something, actually, the real Cragslist already does, in its signature messy way) -- is that really all that much progress?

Overhead is Minimal. One of the more appealing aspects of Craigslist is surely the cost: in most cases, nada. Of course, the dark hearts of newspaper men and women burn with a hatred for Craigslist for, supposedly, smothering the classifieds business in its sleep, killing the news subsidization model for local newspapers especially. But it has made customers very happy. A Craigslist for service model could significantly reduce overhead for volunteerism, which is a considerable burden to charity work.

The downside: Some charity work takes real money to set up and run. Are we setting up the expectation that suddenly that money isn't needed anymore?

Things Can Happen Quickly. Craigslist is great for quickies. When you need a new dresser, last-minute tickets to the Coldplay concert at the Meadowlands, or a ride to the beach this weekend, it's perfect. But how do we support sustained action online that takes months or years to accomplish?

The downside: Of course, many point to MyBarackObama.com as a model for sustained action that worked, and beautifully. But there we had a charismatic candidate and an exceedingly clear goal: get Barack Obama elected come November 4th, 2008. That unity will be a lot tougher to achieve when the end zone is far fuzzier and farther off.

Giving Stuff Away Makes You Feel Good: When, years ago, I found myself with an extra couch that I needed gone by the weekend, I listed it for free on Craigslist. Some recent college graduates came to pick it up. They were falling all over themselves in gratitude, which made me feel nice -- until one of them, some six years younger than me, called me "ma'am." There has been a reemergence of a hunger to contribute to the common good. Once it's rewarded, it makes you want to do it again and again.

The downside: Those boys should get a job and buy their own damn couch. The worry is that we're putting too much emphasis on volunteerism, just when voted in a president who embraces the liberal belief that sometimes government's exactly who should be tackling poverty, hunger, hopelessness.

It's Craig's World. We Just Live in It. When everyone in your city uses Craigslist to give away furniture or list killer apartments, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to look elsewhere.

The downside: In this case, what's at the top of the ticket isn't a smiling bald utopian-minded programmer from San Francisco. It's the leviathan United States government. Do we really want to entrust so much or do-gooderism to Uncle Sam?

That's enough from me. Let's hear from an expert: Craiglist founder Craig Newmark. I asked him for his take:

Many people in the US want to do more to help other people, not just the new "civic generation" but people across all ages and background. I feel we need both top-down and bottom-up means of getting people together to do so. The bottom-up version would involve online tools which would get people together to spontaneously connect, possibly via existing social networking tools. We're all busy, but now and then we have free time, and a good grassroots, local tool would be great.

Great indeed.

A huge thanks to Micah Sifry for chewing over the ideas in this piece.