Thursday, February 15, 2007

Tell the world "I'll do it, but only if you'll help me do it" - PledgeBank

What a brilliant idea!! Pledgebank will be massive influence for democracy. The last pledge listed on this page is particularly poignant.

About Pledgebank
You can listen to an MP3 of this instead.

Hello. I'm Tom Steinberg, the director of mySociety, the charitable group which is building PledgeBank. I've taken the unusual step of recording this introduction because PledgeBank is a slightly unusual idea. I've found that explaining it in person often works better than using the written word.

We all know what it is like to feel powerless, that our own actions can't really change the things that we want to change. PledgeBank is about beating that feeling by connecting you with other people who also want to make a change, but who don't want the personal risk of being the only person to turn up to a meeting or the only person to donate ten pounds to a cause that actually needed a thousand.

The way it works is simple. You create a pledge which has the basic format 'I'll do something, but only if other people will pledge to do the same thing'. For example, if you'd always want to organise a street party you could organise a pledge which said 'I'll hold a street party, but only if three people who live in my street will help me to run it'

The applications of PledgeBank are limitless. If you are a parent you could say that 'I will help run an after hours sports club but only if 5 other parents will commit one evening a week to doing it '. If you are in a band you could say 'I'll hold a gig but only if 40 people will come along'.

PledgeBank has been undergoing real world testing for a few weeks already, and there are already some successful completed pledges completely outside our original ideas of how people might use the site. One person gathered 20 other fans of a BBC radio series to lobby for its release on CD. Another encouraged 8 people who he'd never met to bury buckets in their own gardens to make homes for endangered stag beetles. And a member of an online community said he'd organise a 5th birthday party and now has 30 members of that community saying they'll come along.

PledgeBank isn't just limited to people who use the internet a lot. You can sign up to any pledge with a simple two word text message (in the UK only). Ideal for getting your friends in the pub involved, people in your street and so on.

PledgeBank is free, easy to use, and needs your involvement before we can launch. So if there's something you'd like to achieve in your community, in your place of employment, your university, amongst your friends, or in your street, please take a look at PledgeBank.com and create a pledge right now. Thank you.

FAQ

Lists of pledges - Open

Successful pledges, closed to new signers (250)

Failed Pledges (336)

Successful pledges, open to new signers


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