Who will be working on the platform?
1st circle of contributors
A social movement makes sense when
characters, convenience and community converge to create audience engagement. This movement will first and foremost gather people who either have experienced being overweight or contributed to change perception in food intake with research, concern and factual knowledge.
In her 2015 article “
Building Movements, not Organizations”, social-movement theorist,
Hildy Gottlieb wrote of a growing global movement that is trying to create a healthy, humane world. Quoting Paul Hawken, it is “work that is happening not under a single banner, but by millions of unaffiliated individuals and groups around the world.” She asks what a practice would look like if socially minded organizations acted like movements?
The Big O Movement aims to be a coalition of complementary-skilled individuals and entities. It will weave a circle of knowledge around a bespoke platform that grows organically, genuinely supporting teens to take ownership of their lives and stories. On the platform, they will be invited to speak about what matters to them, such as body shape and body representation, or discuss the real issues – and how society, social media and schools deal with them. Using interactive portfolios, video conversations and podcasts, they will collect past and future material, and share thoughts on what must change. In their profile, they will not be defined by their body shape but by what their centres of interest are, what each’s singular vantage point looks like. Or simply said, who they are.
Who will be using the platform?
A knowledge-based activist database
Teenagers
The platform will engage users with regular updates around real-life protagonists. Today, it is Shannon, Byron, Chelsea and Susie; tomorrow, with funding support for commissioned work, teens from all walks of life and corners of the globe – China, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, US, South Africa – will be joining.
This unique challenge from a technological point of view is making this space a living organism of thematic resources, a place where empirical knowledge, grassroots experience and academic research intersect. The first audience of the content are the teens themselves, and potentially their parents and relatives.
Researchers
Conversations among teens and experts will seed and feed from a growing resource of “owned” information. A dedicated Wikipedia around the theme provided by individuals, media outlets, academic research teams, grassroot case studies, will serve as a crossroad on the topic for anthropologists, sociologists, psychotherapists, dieticians, and historians.
Corporations and political bodies
The goal of The Big O is more than sharing experiences, debates and knowledge – it also aims to incite action in corporate and political spheres by engaging empathetic individuals. The COVID-19 years have shown us the terrible effects of ignoring the responsibilities and consequences of living with obesity.
In her article, “
Building Movements, not Organizations,” Hildy Gottlieb argues that: “Governance of movements is about values, strategy, and direct action […] people working on behalf of a movement are loyal to other individuals within the movement and to a cause larger than those individuals.”
The scope of the Big O movement is to erase the borders between disciplines, to resist jargon and its linguistic barriers, to see no harm in public and private entities coming together, with a true sense of togetherness in collaboration and the humility to learn something from each other.
Technologists
How often have we experienced a space where agency is given on equal terms to all actors while safeguarding ethics? How often have we given a vulnerable group of humans the agency to play an active role in their own experiences and be heard and listened by peers in a safe and trusted space?
Teens, parents, relatives are the first circle of audience, researchers, policymakers, health specialists the second. And in the third circle, are the unexpected newcomers. Tech agents of change looking at new experiments, people interested in societies’ implications on the individual, people landing on the platform through its many tags on subjects such as food, diet and sport, with sub-categories to be Google-friendly to broader audiences.
The next step is to find the same creativity and alternative thinking for its funding mechanisms.
This is where we are.
Yet the future is now.
