Building bridges: The future of sustainable cooperation between informal online activists and civil society organisations

NEW forms of information communication technology (ICT) have begun to counter the paradigms of exclusion by empowering the silent, the invisible, the marginalised, the cynical, the passive and the apathetic to engage and act. ICT has transformed advocacy by endowing transnational networks and communities with a greater capacity to research, report, publicise, organise, campaign and develop policy on pertinent issues.

It is clear that there is a gap between professionalised civil society organisations and the constituencies they purport to represent. Currently most traditional civil society organisations use social media as primarily a promotional add-on to their existing work.

However, the recent growth of civic online space and mobile media technology represent a massive opportunity for CSOs, like CIVICUS: World Alliance for Participation, to enable informal activists to enlighten and shape our work and interventions, and to enrich our understanding and capacity to act on contemporary issues.The key question is: how can traditional civil society organisations capitalise from and build on an almost organic process, happening quite independently from them, without attempting to capture or institutionalise such processes, which would endanger their creativity and flexibility? Or put inversely: how can an undefined, motivated but oftentimes transient group of individuals best use the technical know-how of CSOs?

It is important to stress that new forms of technology are merely of instrumental value and are in fact catalysts for activism. The potential of ICT to function as (a) a tool for mass mobilisation for offline action (b) a vehicle for new forms of online activism (c) the creator and driver of online civic space (d) a platform for knowledge-sharing and collective learning and (e) a source of new models of governance is contingent on the content uploaded by everyday citizens and their subsequent actions and reactions.

Nowhere has the impact of ICT been more apparent than in the Middle East North Africa region. Popular protest, propelled by social media activism, has proven to overcome barriers of reach, credibility and fear that previous, more formal forms of advocacy have not been able to achieve and have led to dictators tumbling in Egypt and Tunisia and despots in Libya, Bahrain, Syria and Yemen teetering on the brink of collapse. While both traditional CSOs and social media activists are fighting to challenge the paradigms of power, they are both incapable of effecting sustained and radical social change on their own.

At a time when the political vacuum in the Middle East is highly prone to capture by elite interests, the participation and inclusion of citizens in building a new country could not be more important. Bricks and mortar NGOs are often invited to take a seat at global decision-making arenas and have the power to influence opinion and policy. Citizens participating in informal structures, despite the authenticity of their voice, do not have access to these avenues and are usually at the periphery of these events. How do we negotiate the careful dance between preserving the integrity of CSOs, yet at the same time aiming not to co-opt or de-radicalise the agenda of these activists?

More generally, CIVICUS asks:

1. CSOs and online activists: what are their relative strengths?
2. Nurturing nascent new civic spaces: what are the challenges?
3. Harnessing new forms of activism: what does this mean for the CSO?
4. What would better support for cooperation look like?