Crowdfunding for linguistic variety

The “Crowdfunding for linguistic variety” module brings to the fore the dynamics of crowd initiatives, and in particular, crowdfunding, to enhance linguistic variety in society. The module consists of three units:
Unit 1.“The power of crowds: Key features of crowd initiatives”,
Unit 2. “Crowdfunding: What is it and how it works?”,
Unit 3. “Crowdfunding for linguistic variety: Examples of successful campaigns!”.

Introduction

By adopting BOLD’s call for social action, this module embraces crowdfunding for linguistic variety as an innovative and participatory method that should be integrated into learning and educational settings. Specifically, in unit 1, we explore the variety of crowd initiatives and highlight their social value and potential for multilingual purposes. In unit 2, we focus on the objectives and tools of crowdfunding, while unit 3 presents concrete examples of successful crowdfunding campaigns for linguistic variety.

This module aims to promote and expand the skills and comprehension of users on crowdfunding for multilingual and intercultural purposes. It will amplify user’s knowledge and competences in this topic by providing an overview of the crowd initiatives landscape, and the way crowdfunding can trigger social action in multilingualism.

Stefania Oikonomou, Katerina Zourou

On completion of this module participants will be able to:

  • distinguish the different types of crowd initiatives;
  • understand the social dynamics and value of crowd initiatives;
  • identify key components of a crowdfunding campaign;
  • set up their own crowdfunding campaign for linguistic variety.

The target groups of this module are aligned with those of the BOLD project. In particular, 

  • Pre-service educators at universities: 

This module will critically contribute to the capacity of student teachers to navigate the spectrum of crowd initiatives and understand their social relevance and value. It will provide specialised knowledge and upskilling relative to crowdfunding for linguistic variety.

  • Civil society organisations: 

This module will offer members of civil society a concrete view of the social dimension of crowd initiatives, especially crowdfunding, and their potential for citizen engagement in multilingualism and linguistic variety.

  • Unit 1 investigates the spectrum of crowd initiatives, from crowd translations to crowdsourcing actions, aiming to pinpoint the social value and unleashed potential in those social actions regarding linguistic variety.
  • Unit 2 examines crowdfunding by providing a concrete presentation of its key components, objectives and tools, thus supporting users to set up their own crowdfunding campaign!
  • Unit 3 presents successful crowdfunding campaigns that champion linguistic variety. This overview and analysis of concrete examples further expands user understanding of crowdfunding’s social dynamic!

8 hours

The sources used to build this module include:

  • Studies and reports issued by scholars and policymakers;
  • Explanatory videos;
  • How-to guides, and
  • Charts and graphs to enhance visualisations.

Unit 1: The power of crowds: Key features of crowd initiatives

The digital revolution has facilitated direct access to information for millions of people worldwide. However, claiming that knowledge production and knowledge sharing are equally accessible to everyone on the web doesn’t always reflect reality on the ground. In fact, activities such as knowledge sharing require access to  resources available in indigenous or endangered languages (Canestrino, Magliocca & Li, 2022). 

As the English language represents more than a quarter of all the languages used on the internet (UNESCO & Global Voices, 2023), there is an urgent need to safeguard linguistic variety. In this challenging landscape, there are not only questions as to who can truly access the content available on the web but also concerns over the infrastructural capacity of marginalised communities to access the internet and make their voice heard in the digital world (Paolillo et al., 2005). 

While acknowledging existing challenges for speakers of less-used languages, this module aims to shed light on participatory crowd initiatives that leverage the power of crowds for linguistic variety. Despite the alarming environment, language activists, scholars as well as groups of motivated individuals, have found crowd initiatives to be a significant tool for raising collective awareness and mobilising for action.

1.1 Understanding crowd initiatives: types & examples

The digitalisation of almost all spheres of social life has enhanced the potential for collective and bottom-up action by individuals and communities that can now connect “through a common technology or use-condition” (Harhoff & Lahkani, 2016). This collective mobilisation of people has led to the emergence of the term “crowd”- namely, “a large group of people who have come together” (Cambridge Dictionary, n.d.)- that is often utilised to emphasise individuals’ involvement in a campaign, a project or an action, that is considered crucial to its implementation.

Hence, experts, especially those working in business, management and financial sectors, were among the first to see the value of crowd initiatives for innovation purposes. As people share their knowledge and expertise openly and freely online, a new field of practice has emerged, giving rise to terms such as “crowd-related phenomena” (Felin, Lakhani & Tushman, 2017), and “crowd-powered innovations” (Boudreau & Lahkani, 2013). 

In this module, we consider crowd initiatives as participatory processes whose social value and relevance is growing! Existing literature review connects crowd initiatives to the concept of “crowdsourcing” introduced by Howe (2006) to describe “the engagement of individuals who voluntarily offer their knowledge to a knowledge seeker” (Zourou & Ziku, 2022). In this context, “crowd initiatives” relate to forms of “crowdsourcing” which is “an umbrella term for a variety of approaches that tap into the potential of a large and open crowd of people” (Geiger, D. et al. 2011). Stemmed from the words “crowd” and “source”, crowdsourcing is a synonym for digital actions that are based on volunteers’ contributions, usually to serve a social purpose. 

Watch this 1-minute video by Harvard University that shows how crowdsourcing first emerged in society.

Types & examples of crowd (sourcing) initiatives

To better understand the range, the objectives, and the various forms of crowdsourcing initiatives, we found  our analysis on Howe’s typology (2008) that distinguishes four (4) types of crowdsourcing: 

  1. Wisdom of the crowd
  2. Crowd creation
  3. Crowd voting, and
  4. Crowdfunding.

Let’s find out together more about them!

a) Wisdom of the crowd

Have you ever participated in an online competition or project that called for volunteers to exchange their ideas and knowledge and to find solutions to a problem? By invoking  the “wisdom of the crowd”, Howe (2008) aimed to highlight the unleashed potential existing in large pools of people who join forces to resolve an issue! These types of crowdsourcing initiatives are designed to encourage, support, and integrate user knowledge and expertise in developing innovative solutions that would be impossible to achieve with a small group of people.

Acknowledging the value of individual and local knowledge that is amplified by collective participation, initiatives of this type can take several forms and entail various levels of user engagement. Indicative examples of such actions are hackathons and citizen science projects as showcased in the Zooniverse platform! 

Click here to see how hackathons leverage the wisdom of the crowd to solve a problem!

Watch this 1-minute video to learn how citizen science is empowered through the Zooniverse platform!

b) Crowd creation

The “crowd creation” type of crowdsourcing encourages users and communities to co-create for social objectives. The tangible outputs of these initiatives include digital repositories, videos, online spaces, etc. You don’t have to prove your expertise or studies’ portfolios to take part in a user community that creates content for a particular theme or social matter. You should just express your availability and start co-creating with others!
In the field of advocacy and action for language safeguarding, there are several crowd creation actions. An indicative example is the First Voices initiative! “First Voices” was made possible through the active contribution of Indigenous community members who share their language and linguistic history on its platform. This online space was developed by the First People’s Cultural Council (FPCC) and acts not only as a living repository of Indigenous languages but also as an educational and learning portal that is open to users worldwide!

Likewise, crowd translations are another type of crowd creation for language safeguarding. An outstanding example of a crowd translation is the “Second Life Community Translation Project” which is hosted on the wiki platform. Set up in 2009, “Second Life” engaged thousands of users who actively contributed to translating web pages into less-used languages. 

Learn more about the Second Life Translation Project here.

Finally, another crowdsourced inspirational initiative is “Living Dictionaries” which was first launched in 2006 as the “Talking Dictionary” by linguists Gregory D. S. Anderson and K. David Harrison (Living Dictionaries, n.d.). “Living Dictionaries” include collaborative multimedia features and tools that facilitate the safeguarding of endangered languages by users across the globe. The “Living Dictionaries” app allows users to create new digital dictionaries and add their language entries. Thus, the app fosters the development of  dictionaries for several endangered languages, such as the “Talking Dictionaries of Micronesia”.  

Watch this 5-minute tutorial provided by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages on how to add a new Living Dictionary!

c) Crowd voting

Have you ever participated in the voting process of a TV show? Have you voted for your favourite weekly-news article in an online magazine? If yes, you have been part of a large crowd voting initiative! Based on users’ preferences for specific products, performances, and outputs, organisers gather the feedback they need to improve their services or products.

To learn more about crowd voting, check this paper by Chen, Xu & Liu (2020).

d) Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding generally refers to the act of offering a lump sum to an online campaign that calls for people to support a specific cause. Want to learn more? In this module’s units 2 and 3, we will go deeper into crowdfunding, its objectives, and its different methods! 

Get ready with us!

1.2 Why crowd initiatives for linguistic variety?

Language is a fundamental element of civilisation, rendering each linguistic community and its cultural identity unique through time. To protect endangered languages from becoming extinct, concrete, and collective efforts should be envisaged that also make provisions for  sustainable and long-lasting results and impact. In this context, digital tools and technologies cannot serve this purpose unless they are designed to encourage and allow open and collective action by users all around the world. 

In other words, the task of preserving and enhancing linguistic variety online cannot be effectively achieved by the efforts of only a few, dedicated individuals or groups. What crowd initiatives achieve is to generate and strengthen more participation and engagement of community members and individuals, thus enabling better outcomes in terms of quantity,  quality, and diversity of contributions.

To highlight the value of digitally-enhanced crowd initiatives for Indigenous languages, UNESCO, together with Global Voices’s Rising Voices, has issued the “Digital Initiatives for Indigenous Languages” (2023) toolkit intending to upskill Indigenous language-users in utilizing digital tools and media for the  preservation and promotion of their language.

Hence, in the Toolkit (2023), we read:

“Digital initiatives in Indigenous languages can thus be understood as forms of social engagement which resist language displacement and loss.”
(UNESCO & Global Voices, 2023)

Watch this video by UNESCO on the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-2032).

To learn more about the UNESCO & Global Voices Toolkit, click here.

Conclusion

In this unit, we navigated the colourful spectrum of crowd initiatives for linguistic variety, highlighting their empowering and community-driven value. What is purposefully  missing from unit 1’s list of initiatives is another form of crowd action known as “crowdfunding”. The reason? We are going to focus entirely on it in the next unit! 

Are you ready?

Unit 2: Crowdfunding: What is it and how it works?

When we set up an initiative or campaign for linguistic variety, we are faced with the question of “How will it be funded?”. Hence, the motivation to contribute to a greater cause may mobilise several people to freely dedicate their time and resources to a crowd initiative, like the ones presented in unit 1, but the reality is that some kind of funding is usually necessary to ensure smooth implementation and sustainability of the action. For example, think of the maintenance costs of an online platform over time…

However, what seems to be a no-go to organise a crowd initiative is just an important element you should consider and potentially solve through….another crowd initiative… 

Crowdfunding! 

Let’s find out more about it together!

2.1 What is crowdfunding?

Made of the words “crowd” and “funding”, crowdfunding can be generally conceived as an “alternative finance mechanism” (Demattos Guimarães & Maehle, 2022). Thanks to digitalisation, crowdfunding emerged as a means to collect funds from several diverse users, whether they are individuals or organisations. By not limiting the pool of potential supporters to a single group of people, crowdfunding allows you to seek funding from various actors that are active in the online world, and who are willing to finance your project. 

The reasoning behind crowdfunding assumes that “it is better to acquire smaller sums of money from a diverse pool of people than wait for one generous donor to finance you”.

Through this assumption , we aim to highlight the value of bottom-up, participatory, and collective support of a project in comparison to top-down and elite-financed projects. Hence, adopting crowdfunding as your main source of fundraising is a responsible and courageous decision, as success is not guaranteed unless you dedicate time and work to  organise your campaign efficiently. 

Crowdfunding campaigns usually include different kinds of reward(s) for their supporters. People who decide to contribute any amount of money to its cause must be sufficiently acknowledged to minimise the risk of an unsuccessful crowdfunding campaign. At the same time, rewarding people may increase their motivation to contribute further.

Watch this 15-minute TED Talk by Simon Walker on Why and How to Crowdfund!

As with many things, crowdfunding comes in many different forms and it may serve various goals. According to De Voldere & Zeqo (2017), there are four (4) types of crowdfunding models:

  • Donation-Based: donating small amounts to meet the larger funding goals of a  project while receiving no financial or material return in exchange.
  • Reward-Based: donating small amounts to meet the larger funding goals of a  project with the expectation of receiving a tangible (but non-financial) reward or product at a later stage in exchange.
  • Peer-to-Peer Lending: borrowing from several lenders via an online platform with each lender lending a (small) amount in return for financial compensation.
  • Equity-Based: investing in a business via an online crowdfunding platform in return for a share in the business.

Source: De Voldere & Zeqo (2017)

Naturally, seeking alternative financing from your fellow community members or other groups of people is not a new phenomenon. What is considered innovative in crowdfunding nowadays is the strong prevalence of the digital component in the organisation and hosting of the campaign, from its ideation to marketing and communication.

Although crowdfunding has been particularly utilised in the cultural sector to remediate the progressive lack of public and private funding for this industry (Rykkja et al., 2020), crowdfunding is employed by individuals, communities, and organisations of any background  and sector. 

In the field of linguistics, one particularly inspiring crowdfunding campaign was the Yoruba Names Dictionary campaign, organised to fund a project for the preservation and the continued use of Yoruba names! Hosted on the crowdfunding platform, IndieGoGo, the campaign aimed to raise 5000 dollars to set up and run the online space that will host the digital Yoruba dictionary. The campaign was successful in reaching its funding objectives, while the digital space that emerged  (see here) is populated by the users who contributed to that funding, thus enhancing its crowdsourcing approach and practice.

Check how the “Yoruba Names Dictionary” campaign looked like on the IndieGoGo platform here.

2.2 How to run a crowdfunding campaign

As highlighted in the previous sub-unit, crowdfunding is more than an alternative or digitally-enhanced way to finance your project. Crowdfunding’s true value lies in connecting  people from various socio-cultural backgrounds who commit to supporting a project. Based on the type of rewards provided to supporters and the ultimate goals of the campaign, the level of user engagement may vary. In the case of linguistic variety, we aim to foster long-term engagement in crowd initiatives and so it is crucial to maintain supporters’ engagement beyond the crowdfunding campaign. 

Think of a linguistic variety project that you would like to create and that you may need funding for. Why not combine your campaign with your crowdsourcing action and let supporters know that their contribution is welcome once your initiative is up and running?

In the next section, we will provide you with a concrete, step-by-step guide on how to set up a successful crowdfunding campaign based on the Tsakarelou & Zourou (2023) guide.