Supporting the design and development of an online advocacy community

Abstract

This thesis supports the conceptualization and design of an online community named Mimba, which aims to advance women’s health and rights. The design and development of Mimba is an initiative of M4ID – a Service Design and Communications social enterprise located in Helsinki. Mimba is envisioned as a platform for strengthening advocacy, engagement and mobilization of citizens towards improving women’s health and rights.

To establish the need, and to support the conceptualization and design of Mimba, I draw from three sources: desk and user research conducted at M4ID, a review of existing literature in the domain of online communities and networked activism, and a design benchmarking exercise consisting of study of two existing services, which leverage online communities and activism towards their goals. On the basis of this research, I propose a community model suitable to the goals of Mimba. I also use this community model to extrapolate and inform service features and design suggestions for Mimba. The practical and theoretical observations are then condensed in key wireframes for a prototype web and mobile-based app presented as user scenarios.

I propose that Mimba is best conceptualized and designed so that it strengthens cooperative efforts of its online community (Stanoevska-Slabeva, 2002) and should draw from an existing model of networked activism that addresses broad mobilization and deep participation (Land, 2009). In this thesis, these findings directly translate into the aforementioned community model and design suggestions for Mimba.