The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has a long history of innovation in civic media. One of the more intriguing instances of this tradition is the BBC Action Network, a grassroots online civic engagement initiative. It launched in 2003 under the name iCan, and quickly succeeded as a medium of choice for local community activism groups. The Action Network provides a space for the creation and organization of local action groups, incorporating a set of tools into the site that facilitates the operation of these groups.
While the initiative is nominally under the BBC’s purview, most of the content is user-generated, and the only section that includes a major editorial contribution from the BBC is in the Guides component. This includes a comprehensive library of civic media how-to articles–ranging from pieces on the exact procedure to lodge a complaint against the police to how to protect or change a public footpath. The section also contains more general advice directed toward the civic-minded citizens that frequent the site, including useful tips on how to recruit celebrities for community efforts and designing campaign logos.
The heart of the site is the campaign section. A concerned citizen forms the seed of the initiative by outlining a topic that concerns the local community. This may be anything from a pothole that requires repair to a move to block the destruction of a park. Every campaign-starter is organized and tagged both geographically and by issue (for example, “crime prevention” or “local policy”). That way, people browsing the website without a concrete movement to get behind can find a campaign associated with their location, or with an issue that concerns them. Once the initial post goes up, campaigns quickly build up steam as others join the effort and use the website to coordinate meetings, marches, petitions or whatever additional actions are required to advance the cause. Some people contribute advice; many offer their idle hours for volunteer activities and others donate money.
The method has proven successful many times over. Last year, a resident of Ealing started a campaign protesting a road closure that would divert large volumes of noisy traffic into her residential neighborhood. Hundreds of residents joined the effort and, through the site, coordinated a leafletting campaign, a petition and a march that was attended by a thousand people. Incorporating advice found on the Action Network website, the activists also lobbied the local parliamentary representative and set up meetings with the transportation authorities. The campaign was eventually successful and an alternative solution was adopted by London Transport.
Another section of the site is dedicated to citizen journalism. Users can post articles about local or national issues and these are made organized under the same tags as the campaigns. Occasionally, Action Network journalists also publish articles on topics that they feel are particularly relevant to the users of the site. Often, these articles may summarize activist efforts associated with a pressing problem in an effort to get users behind that particular campaign (or start one if needed). A recent featured article dealt with the urgent need for funding to be put into the UK’s Autism Awareness Campaign. Citizens can also use the section to publicize civic-minded events to members of their local community that are part of the Action Network (and likely participants in such events), such as charity car washes for their neighborhood fire station or fundraising for the village library.
Given the BBC’s tendency to reinvent the various sections of their online presence on a regular basis, it’s not inconceivable that the Action Network will be altered in various ways in the near future. The basic model has proven itself extremely successful, and is likely to endure.