03/11/2014 00:14 Virtual Rynda – The Atlas of Help: Mutual Aid as a Form of Social Activism | Global Dimensions of Digital Activism Page 1 of 13 http://book.globaldigitalactivism.org/chapter/virtual-rynda-the-atlas-of-help-mutual-aid-as-a-form-of-social-activism/ Global Dimensions of Digital Activism Global Digital Activism MIT Center for Civic Media Edited by Ethan Zuckerman and Lorrie LeJeune Virtual Rynda – The Atlas of Help: Mutual Aid as a Form of Social Activism Previous Next Crowdsourcing in transition from emergency to everyday life Gregory Asmolov In emergency response situations, there is often a gap between what is thought to be needed and what is really needed. In a digitally connected world information overload is a real possibility, and allocation of resources becomes a challenge. In other words, too much help causes as many problems as too little help. This case study looks at Russian-fires.ru, a crowdsourced emergency response platform created in the wake of wildfires that struck western Russia in 2010, and its transformation from an ad-hoc to a post-ad-hoc network. What grew out of Russian-fires.ru was Virtual Rynda: an Atlas of Help, an online project to support and facilitate mutual aid and crowdsourced solutions to different types of problems, not only in emergencies but in everyday life. After more than a year of experimentation Rynda.org shows that effective crowdsourcing systems for mutual aid must simplify cooperation and reduce risks associated with helping unknown people. Therefore, to increase the likelihood of mutual aid, such a system must also decrease the transaction costs associated with mutual aid. Finally, this paper suggests a critical assessment of the Rynda.org case study, and in particular, how it focused on exploration of challenges around deployment of crowdsourcing platforms. It also suggests that mutual aid can be approached as a form of everyday activism that can be supported by digital platforms. Introduction: The two paradoxes In September 2010, a group of people met at Masterskaya, a Moscow café popular among young Russian liberals, ironically close to Lubyanka Square where the Russian security services (FSB) compounds are located. There was another paradox in this situation: this group of people had worked together intensively on a project that enabled thousands of people to offer or receive help, but most of those around the table had never met face-to-face before. The group sitting around that table was the team behind the “Help Map” project. It included people from different cities in Russia, as well a number of other countries. The Story of Help Map Help Map (Russian-fires.ru) was a crowdsourcing platform for facilitating emergency response to the unprecedented wildfires that took place in summer 2010 in the Western part of Russia. It was created using the “Ushahidi” crowdsourcing platform developed two years earlier in Kenya. [1] The initial idea of using Ushahidi for a response to wildfires came from a blog, attracted the attention of the online community, and led to the development of the networked team that created the Help Map and managed the project. The Help Map was certainly not the only platform that was created then, and not the first online initiative, in response to the disaster, but it had a specific role within the citizen-based emergency response. In the first days of the wildfires, the Runet (the name commonly used to designate the Russian Internet) became a major source of information about the disaster, while the traditional state-controlled media downgraded the scale of the emergency and framed the situation, saying everything was “under control” (Khokhlova 2010). Meanwhile the Russian capital, Moscow, was blanketed with smog and millions of people were directly exposed to the consequences of the wildfires. A high point in the intervention of Russian social media into setting the agenda of wildfires media coverage was when the blogger top-lap, who lived in the rural area that was affected by wildfires, posted an emotional open letter to Prime Minister Putin, describing the lack of action by local authorities and emergency services. He demanded a return to an old tradition of self-organization in local communities as the major factor in emergency response. This type of village-based self-organization was supported by old technology—an emergency bell used to call people to come and help. One of the old Russian names for the emergency bell, used by the blogger, was “Rynda” (this comes originally from the sailor’s jargon: “Ring the bells”). The blogger’s demand, “bring back the Rynda!” became a meme during the Russian wildfires and a symbol of the failure of the formal system to provide an appropriate emergency response (Davydov 2010).