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These past few days have been crazy! Here is a quick update as to how everything has begun to come together (and better than I could have imagined).

As I posted last time, I was scheduled to interview Shawn on Thursday, but unfortunately we had to reschedule. We had been trying to schedule an interview for a very long time, but due to conflicting schedules, we had been unsuccessful. So, when I first heard that we needed to reschedule I thought “whew, that’s great!” (because I had a lot of things going on), but before I could finish my thought, the daunting possibility of “oh no! what if I don’t have a story by the end of the semester” came to focus.

As Dan Savage’s mom would say here: “sh**.” (For context, listen to the This American Life podcast Heretics–I think it’s the last act).

[Deep breathe].

Saturday rolled around and as I took a break from working on transcribing my Xhosa fieldnotes, the realization that I still wanted to conduct a lot of interviews with Shawn’s supporters set in, and my mind began to race: How in the world do I go about doing this? How long will it take for people to message me back? What if no one messages me back because I’m some random stranger? What if they don’t want to be interviewed? Ahhhhhhhh!!!

Then it hit me–I need to ask the YouTube community! Why didn’t I think of this sooner? The majority of my research pertains to group formation, collective action, and what not, so shouldn’t this have been my first thought? OF COURSE, but it wasn’t, simply because I never considered myself someone to “vlog,” or actually ever have myself–like me, on YouTube.

I found most everyone who has ever created a video response to Shawn’s videos (and who have been active recently), and then set about messaging them. I explained my research and asked if anyone would be willing to create a video response if I made a vlog. After a couple of hours, I received a response from DeathOfAFatMan saying he would be more than willing. About an hour after that, AngelLife999 responded with a similar message.

From these two responses, I decided to go forth with creating a vlog in hopes that more individuals would see it and hopefully contribute as well. After about an hour (yes an hour) of recording and re-recording, I finally got one that ‘would do.’

After uploading it, I went ahead and went to bed with hopes that at least one person would respond. When I woke this morning, I had comments and video responses! Thrilled? You bet. Right now, there are 3 video responses (2 are in the process), and they are great! Definitely more than I could have hoped for! And, as for the comments, they are just as helpful!

Basically, I was interested in why individuals were compelled to support Shawn and the Uncultured Project. So far, the responses have been in line with what I had imagined–namely because it is a transparent form of giving, and because it does give people a sense of connection.

AWESOME!!!

Anyway–back to the whole interview issue.

I kept today (Sunday) completely free of anything that would pull me away from my computer, in hopes that I would hear back from Shawn. And…I DID. I received an email around noon and he said he was available “now,” so as soon as I got the message I quickly responded and immediately logged into Skype.

The interview went great! We talked about everything from his background, to his work with the Uncultured Project, and even to good sites to find cc music. Due to some of the content (privacy issues and spoilers), I am not going to post a transcript of the interview, however the sharable parts will most definitely be in my final video.

As far as other organizations similar to Shawn’s–I have looked into two: The Water Project and Kiva.

The Water Project, established in 2006, is a Christian non-profit organization that encourages individuals to make small donations in order to help bring clean water to various parts of the world. The process goes as follows: you make a donation, get matched up to a project and a partner (dependent on what type of project you prefer), and then they show you the results (via blogs, pictures, and sometimes videos). They say that they post “updates” in “near real time” but really, it appears that they use the term “updates” to refer to main/big events that are occurring. Overall, The Water Project has been very successful.

Contrasted with The Water Project, Kiva is a secular organization founded by Matt Flannery and Jessica Jackley in 2004 (you can see a timeline here). Their approach is also similar to that of The Uncultured Project, in that they also show individuals where their money goes, but it differs in three main ways. First, it shows individuals who they are lending to via a picture and a profile of the entrepreneur, which leads to the second difference in that it is based off of the concept of micro-financing. Below is an outline of how Kiva operates:

The whole process of donating to Kiva is very interesting (and money is not lost through PayPal) and also seems to be very successful. You can see a fact/statistic sheet here.

The third main difference is that Kiva gives individuals the opportunity to aggregate into “teams” (there are over 1192 PAGES of teams), and then self-organize their team. From there, they can create blogs, websites, etc., and then post the updates for their particular team on whichever platform chosen. On each group page, they have a list of people who have been matched up to their entrepreneur and you can click on the particular entrepreneur that takes you to information about them, their culture, and their status of repayment. I could go on more about this because there is LOTS more, but it would be more beneficial just to check out their website.

Both the Water Project and Kiva are excellent examples of new media being utilized as a new mode of philanthropy, but neither of them are doing exactly what Shawn is doing…not really at least. Mainly because Shawn is deeply connecting individuals and making the whole process more personal by making a direct form of interaction between the donor and the individual being helped. This is one great thing about not being a huge NGO or charity organization…he still has the opportunity to personally connect with people on YouTube, and then connect them with someone in Bangladesh.

This is about all I have for right now–but if anyone can think of something I’m missing, or should look into, please let me know!

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