Grassroots activism—by nature and necessity—is unstructured, undocumented and organized outside of mainstream channels. This has historically been effective in combating systems of power that seek to hinder progress. The ‘metoo.’ Movement’s viral moment in 2017 exemplifies this; rather than turning to official sources for disclosing sexual violence, 19 million voices shared their stories via hashtag, creating a monumental shift in the fight to end sexual violence.

‘me too.’ Act Too creates a documented, accessible entrypoint into the movement while preserving its grassroots, decentralized nature. It achieves this by harnessing adjacencies between activism and social media, e-commerce, and blockchain.

THE SITUATION:

The ‘me too.’ Movement was founded by civil rights activist Tarana Burke in 2006 with two areas of focus: healing and action. Eleven years later, #metoo caught a viral spark to become the most successful sexual violence awareness campaign in history, setting the stage for a widespread invitation to join this fight.

THE OBJECTIVES:

Unsilencing the movement.

Throughout history, systems of power have prioritized the reputation of perpetrators. Survivors are discredited. Stories are swept under the rug. Activists are written out of history.

Accessibility for allies.

While #metoo woke up the world to the prevalence of sexual violence, actions which can be taken to help end sexual violence are unfamiliar, leaving many struggling to understand their potential role in this movement.

OUR BRIEF:

Take a movement that’s seen by many to be about eliminating a behavior and turn it into something designed to create behavior.

INTRODUCING ACT TOO

The first recommendation engine for activism to end sexual violence – and a blockchain-powered archive that preserves it.

CROWD-SOURCING GRASSROOTS DATA

Through the creative application of natural language processing and the scraping of social and e-commerce platforms, we harnessed the fragmented nature of word-of-mouth activism to assemble a vast database of actions people could take, accommodating all commitment and engagement levels. Powered by a recommendation engine, the platform models after e-commerce sites to sift through hundreds of actions to suggest ones that feel personally relevant.

DECENTRALIZING THE HISTORICAL RECORD

History is written by the oppressor. To fight the systemic erasure of this movement’s progress, we used the decentralized, peer-to-peer nature of blockchain to archive actions facilitated by our utility to a permanent digital record. Every action’s unique 64 character blockchain ID also becomes part of our digital monument—a mosaic of murals celebrating the movement’s famous forbearers.

COMPILING A DATABASE OF ACTIONS TO END SEXUAL VIOLENCE

We started by building a grassroots database of actions from organizations that included commonplace ways to help: volunteering, donating, etc. Our natural language processing engine identified and extracted the metadata from these actions. Then, it scrubbed search, social, and e-commerce platforms to find hundreds more. Some were closely related actions, but many more were unexpected - like reading a memoir or shutting down rape jokes. Finally, this vast array of actions were tagged by topic, interest, and involvement type to help fuel our recommendations.

BUILDING A PERMANENT ARCHIVE OF FOR ACTIVISM

To ensure this work can never be silenced, altered, or erased, our platform writes each completed act to a permanent, decentralized, peer-to-peer network - the Ethereum blockchain. So, present day activism encodes the past, while sending an immutable signal of this work as a beacon to the future.

THE DATA JOURNEY

Compilation

Manual compilation of typical actions across the country, informed by client and partner organizations, covering classic ways to volunteer

Extrapolation

Search, Social, and eCommerce platforms are scrubbed for related metadata/tags. Natural language processing helps identify related/tangential actions

Unification

Architecture is built around NLP-identified actions across platforms and manually compiled actions, tagged by topics, interests, and involvement

Application

eCommerce inspired experience allows for easy navigation and exploration of action dataset

Enhancement

User interactions inform future recommendations and power a multi-touchpoint CRM program

Permanence

Actions marked as completed are assigned a 64 character blockchain ID and written to the Ethereum blockchain

Visualization

Each 64-character ID is visualized as a tile, acting as a single pixel in a larger mural. Hundreds of murals are assembled, as thousands of actions are taken and recorded - bringing to life a tapestry of images celebrating the story of this fight

BUILDING A NEW NARRATIVE

Act Too launched on the third anniversary of the viral hashtag, garnering immediate global press and conversation. The campaign generated 1.6B impressions, reaching 48 American states and 71 countries in the first 48 hours. The work received praise from politicians such as Ayanna Presley, U.S. Representative for Massachusetts’s 7th congressional district, celebrities such as Alyssa Milano, Gabrielle Union, & Mira Sorvino, and even global leaders such as Melinda Gates.

THE END OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE BEGINS WITH THIS NEXT ACT

To date, the utility has recorded over 54,168 actions to the blockchain, immortalizing thousands of acts in the fight to end sexual violence.

• 12,169 Learned

• 12,812 Volunteered

• 7,730 Attended Events

• 3,899 Made Donations

Already we’ve completed the murals of 33 historic moments, immortalizing thousands of acts in the fight to end sexual violence.