Virgance: Collective Bargaining for Good

Last month, we applauded the work of Carrotmob, an organization that taps into community buying power to encourage local businesses to ‘green up’. This week, The Economist points us to a parent company, yes, ‘company’, that uses online social networking to promote Carrotmob’s events and enable groups in distant cities to mobilize their own. The business is called Virgance, apparently a term coined by Qui-Gon in Star Wars I to denote a powerful new force in nature.

Virgance “owns” the Carrotmob idea, though it claims that it does not take money from its participants or the community businesses involved. Instead it is creating a model to leverage the events into a revenue stream. The start-up, calling itself “activism 2.0″, also manages the crowdsourced environmental and social programs 1 Block Off the Grid and Lend Me Some Sugar. From the Virgance website: Virgance is a for-profit company that takes new activism ideas and uses the power of online social networks to scale each idea into a large-scale, citizen-powered global campaign to improve the world. Founded in May 2008, Virgance is releasing a series of products that focus on using online social networks to create positive social change.

Virgance

[via The Economist]