Cindy Gallop and software engineer Wendell Davis. [image via Wired]

What exactly is If We Ran The World?

IfWeRanTheWorld.com is a web platform for anyone who’s ever gone, “I want to do something to change the world, but I don’t know what or how.” Now if you feel that and you go to any one of a raft of websites that are all trying to tackle this issue – socialactions.org, changents.com, changetheworld.com, etc, what happens is that you are instantly met and assailed by causes. You are met by AIDS, poverty, world health, Iran… And you are paralyzed into inactivity through too much choice.

When, on the other hand, you are asked to answer the question, “If you ran the world, what would you do?” it forces you to stop and think about what you believe in, what you value, what YOU care enough about to want to do something about, and it literally draws the answer out of you. It begins the process of owning that answer, as the first step of a platform that’s designed to make it impossible for you not to act.

How else does If We Ran The World compel people to take action?

I want to find a way to integrate doing something into everyone’s day-to-day lives online as much as doing nothing currently is.

That is effectively what large amounts of time spent on Myspace and Facebook and Youtube is – doing nothing. People spend hours of time playing Farmville, Mafia Wars, and poking each other. I imagine all that time and energy and effort spent on doing something that will have an impact on the real world – as opposed to doing nothing that has an impact in the virtual world.

That means our platform has to be as entertaining, as engaging, as fun – it has to work like a game. We designed it based on game theory and gaming principals. We call it literally “competitive collaboration.” We are leveraging the human competitive sprit to act. We are using all the emotional dynamics that make for the utterly addictive experience those site provide for hours and days on end. There’s a lot of psychology baked into this.

All online social networks currently are underpinned by one fundamental human truth: sex and dating. I’d like to make “taking action” the new social and sexual attractiveness value. I would like to make “Do you act?” the new measure of how attractive someone is. It’s not too much of a stretch, as we already admire people who get shit done.

How will this play out on your site?

On existing social networks, when you post your profile, you can post a photo of you at your most attractive, and a carefully-crafted mosaic of the books and music you like that gives a certain impression. You can lie. On If We Ran the World, you can’t lie. Apart from some basic information you enter upfront, your profile is entirely dynamically-generated by your actions. The more you act, the more it builds. You are what you do. You are the sums of your actions.

I call this “action branding.” Personal action branding for individuals, and corporate action branding for business. Company profiles work the same way – entirely generated by actions, not PR spin or greenwashing. I believe the advertising of the future isn’t about saying but doing. Action branding is communication through demonstration. It’s walking the walk.

Can you describe how it will work?

This whole platform is built around the concept of the micro-action. The micro-action is the atomic unit of If We Ran the World, in the same way the tweet is the atomic unit of Twitter. It’s an incredibly small, simple, easy to do action. We have micro-financing with Kiva, we have micro-blogging with Twitter. Take it to the next level: micro-actions. If it’s so easy to do, why wouldn’t you?

At its simplest, If We Ran the World allows you to sent up an action platform to achieve any goal that is your answer to the question. You break that goal down into micro-actions, and issue them as invitations to act to your friends, family, neighbors, employees, brands, businesses, celebrities. And every micro-action, once completed, reports back to your personal or business profile.

If We Ran the World is based on the fact that as you compete each micro-action, you feel good about yourself. You build your self-esteem. The more you do, the more you feel you can do. The feeling that you can take one small step to take control of your circumstances, do something about life, your community – that’s the dynamic that gets people out of poverty, despair, abuse.

What gave you the idea for all this?

If We Ran The World is combination of all my personal experience and learning and philosophy. It’s based very simply on basic human psychology and ordinary common sense – but if we all operated according to ordinary common sense, the billion dollar self-help industry wouldn’t exist.

It’s an idea that really came out of two places. It came out of the kind of person that I am, and it came out of the industry that I work in. When I say it came out of the kind of person that I am – I’m somebody who is naturally very action-oriented. I’m all about making things happen. I totally believe in “Be the change you want to see.” And I have a very low tolerance level for people who whine and whine about stuff and never do anything to change it. Too low a tolerance level, on occasion.

All of that got me thinking. You could argue that the single biggest pool of untapped natural resource in this world, is human good intentions that never translate into action. I found myself thinking, “If you could find a way to take all of those good intentions that all of us have on a daily basis and somehow find a way to turn them, at the moment of intention, into action, you would then unleash a source of energy and power that really could do extraordinary things in the world.”

Absolutely.

So that was one half of my thinking. The second half of my thinking was born out of 24 years working in brand-building, marketing and advertising. I happen to know that there is another equally large, equally powerful, equally untapped pool of resources – which is corporate good intentions. Companies know that in order to earn the right to do business in the world today, they have to be “Corporately Socially Responsible.”

They often have very large budgets dedicated to CSR, and employ whole teams of people whose sole purpose in life is to find effective ways to spend those budgets, but who nevertheless all-too-often waste them. Waste them doing things like taking out full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal saying, “Look how green we are,” that maybe nobody reads. And missing the opportunity to align their CSR agenda with their day-to-day business objectives and integrate the two in a way that proves you can do good and make money simultaneously.

So I decided I wanted to find a way to bring those two things together – human good intentions and corporate good intentions. And find a way to activate them collectively into shared action against shared objectives that will produce shared and mutually beneficial end results. An idea is only as good as its execution. Ideas are ten a penny. Everyone’s having ideas. It’s all about execution. Bloody make it happen.