What is it?
Question: What do climate activists Extinction Rebellion, financial analyst Keith Gill and BTS superfans (also known as The Army) all have in common?
Answer: They have each created seismic change and disrupted traditional systems through a decentralised model of leadership and community.
Over the past two decades, the institutions that traditionally shaped society (governments, political parties, big business, mainstream media) - have seen their trust and influence eroded. Their stranglehold ability to control and shape how people think and behave has waned, hastened by the evolution of the internet. In their place is a new model of decentralisation that distributes power and influence away from the central group.
New political movements, like Black Lives Matter, have harnessed decentralised leadership structures, online platforms and communication technologies to drive change on a global scale.
New business models have enabled small, agile disruptors to outsmart, out-innovate, and overtake multi-billion dollar market incumbents, and, in the case of Gill’s GameStop campaign, to challenge the dominance of Wall Street and bring the ultra rich down a peg or two.
“Net Zero, blah blah blah. Climate neutral blah blah blah. This is all we hear from our so-called leaders. They have now had 30 years of blah blah blah and where has that led us?
We can no longer let the people in power decide what is politically possible or not, what hope is. Hope is not blah blah blah. And hope always comes from the people.”
Greta Thurnberg, Youth4Climate, COP 2021
Why should I care?
Who holds power and how it’s wielded is changing. Technology has changed the balance and enabled previously disempowered groups to act and challenge the status quo. Old assumptions about how to build a movement, create change, and get things done are being challenged.
Whereas older movements and communities had to front-load their organising capacity, align with prevailing power-brokers, and scale within the existing structures and systems. New decentralised models allow them to reach wider audiences, scale quicker, and build movements without having much existing organisational capacity. The internet's decentralisation has also made it a place - for better and worse - where individuals can operate with an empowering degree of anonymity.
Embracing decentralised power may allow charities to circumvent cumbersome institutions or structures that previously inhibited or slowed the drive to change. It opens the potential for more radical work to be done away from the grip of government or corporate control. And, perhaps just as crucially, it may allow individuals and groups to operate with an empowering degree of anonymity and autonomy.
So, where can we look for inspiration on how to use decentralised power to spread a message, build active communities, empower marginalised voices, and drastically scale your impact?
“Older movements had to build their organizing capacity first. Modern networked movements can scale up quickly and take care of all sorts of logistical tasks without building any substantial organizational capacity before the first protest or march.”
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Spreading the message
Acknowledging that official government guidance often hadn’t reached or resonated with young people, charities London Youth and Partnership for Young London collaborated on a creative campaign to get young Londoners to create posters for their peers to raise awareness of how to follow the rules in the coronavirus pandemic.
While the big gaming companies were being criticised for low-key and superficial responses to the Black Lives Matter protests last year, a group of gamers took it upon themselves to use popular gaming platforms like Fortnite and the SIMS to show support and solidarity for social justice issues and galvanise a community of gamers who held big tech to account.
Building, organising and mobilising communities
Library Of Things is an online platform that allows local residents to borrow tools and equipment for one-off use from their neighbours. Neighbours can borrow or lend anything from lawn mowers to ukeles to gazebos. The platform makes previously expensive activities more accessible and affordable for local people, all while reducing waste and bringing members of the local community closer together.
As an antidote to the slow and analogue process of writing to local councils with little optimism of a proactive response, CitizenLab co-founders Wietse Van Ransbeeck, Aline Muylaert, and Koen Gremmelprez built a “community engagement platform” that allowed residents to share ideas about how to improve their local area with each other and then begin a dialogue with local governments to make it happen. CitizenLab is now used in over 300 communities in 18 countries, working on anything from clean energy planning to improving bike lanes.
Involve, the UK’s public participation charity, launched the Pop Up Democracy programme, which provides training on how to create temporary installations that create new spaces for local political and civic participation.
Empowering the marginalised
South London’s Rising Sun Collective started a crowdfunding campaign to buy a pub that had become a cultural hub in the local community as a space for collaborative projects across art and music. In July 2021, the Collective raised £47,000 to take over the pub and save it from luxury housing developers.
Unbound is an alternative publishing company that runs crowdfunding campaigns for readers to select and back the projects they want to read that had previously been rejected by publishers. It has a community of 300,000 people from across the world and has funded over 600 projects.
Challenging the status quo
Open Access is a growing movement to ensure that academic articles are published in journals that are free to read, stopping companies like Elsevier (who own around 3000 journals, making just under £100m in year-on-year profit in 2019) from charging extortionate fees for access and pricing people out.
Ethical hackers, also known as ‘white hat hackers’, don’t break into computer networks and security systems with malicious intent as per their ‘black hat’ counterparts. Instead, they’re hired by companies to make sure their systems and data are kept as secure as possible, alerting the relevant parties when they have found weaknesses and fixing them.
A San Francisco-based non-profit has developed an app to help Iranians bypass surveillance and censorship by their government. Nahoft, which is Farsi for 'hidden', converts a user's text into a random string of words that can be sent through any messaging app, and then decrypted by the receiver using a unique code sent to them through the Nahoft app. The app is allowing activists to continue communicating securely when the government imposes internet shutdowns to crack down on protests.
“The Robin Hoods of cyber, white hats exist to improve security; finding loopholes and notifying victims before any nefarious parties have an opportunity to exploit them.”
Emma Sinclair MBE, co-founder of Enterprise Alumni.
Decentralised finance
Decentralised finance (DeFi) is an “umbrella term encompassing the vision of a financial system that functions without any intermediaries, such as banks, insurances or clearinghouses, and is operated just by the power of smart contracts.” Basically, it seeks to operate like traditional financial systems but in a completely transparent, global and permission-less manner, all powered by the blockchain.
What does this mean? New models of peer to peer borrowing and lending that cut out the intermediary banking institution, and connect lenders and borrowers anytime, anywhere, with any amount. Interest rates are set by supply and demand, not by the bank's profit requirements. Forbes has an excellent and in-depth article if you want to explore DeFi, including how DeFi is challenging traditional institutions, insurance and trading.
So What?
“Decentralised power” might sound a somewhat abstract or academic phrase, but it’s certainly one that packs a punch. For charities, it offers the opportunity to break away from existing power dynamics and embrace new models that harness the full power of your community to get things done. From holding governments to account, to disrupting scientific research through open-source access, at its heart decentralised power gives communities the hope they are desperately craving, and the agency to act on it.
1. CONSIDER - CO-LEADERSHIP:
How can you act as a platform for your communities and give them a voice? How can you empower marginalised communities to join the fight and lead from the front? What would adopting a co-leadership approach look like? How would your governance and structure have to change?
2. DISCOVER - THE INTERSECTIONS:
Decentralised power doesn't mean having to connect with multiple micro-communities. Look for the intersections and speak to what unites. Start from a platform of inclusion now and you'll reap the rewards down the line.
3. EXPERIMENT - NEW MODELS FOR FUNDING:
The sector is no stranger to emergency appeals, community fundraising and giving circles. But what would it look like to experiment with new models for funding and fundraising? What would experiments with new DeFi insurance lending offers look like? Could this enable you to connect those in most need with those who can give, at the point of need?
4. CHALLENGE - SUPERCHARGING SCIENCE:
Platforms like Experiment and Crowd.Science are using the tried and tested models of crowdfunding to supercharge early stage research. Whilst petitions to change the existing model of peer review pay walls that only benefit the journal publishers are gaining traction. Are the old hierarchical systems of science holding back breakthrough discoveries that could change the outcomes for your beneficiaries?