On November 29, 2007, Hank announced that he and John were preparing a secret project that would "test the power of the Nerdfighters," as it would require their collaboration. On December 3, 2007, Hank invited all Nerdfighters who were interested in participating in such secret project should sign up for a mailing list to obtain details on how to participate. On that video, Hank described the project as a “combined effort of lots of Nerdfighters to decrease World Suck in a very awesome way.” The Nerdfighters who signed up for the project received the instruction to make their own videos promoting a charity organization of their choosing, and to use a specific title, thumbnail and metadata that would tag each video as part of the whole project—the Project for Awesome or P4A.
Doing this was part of the plan to “take over YouTube” by tricking the YouTube algorithms of the time into pushing all P4A videos to the homepage so they would get more views, therefore creating more awareness for the causes chosen by Nerdfighters. Another way in which they tricked the algorithms to promote P4A videos was to agree to upload all videos on a specific date, December 17, 2007, and to watch them, share them, rate them and comment on them as much as possible during the entire day, and by inviting others to do the same.
Collaboration through the years
The goal for the P4A 2007 was to boost donations to the charities promoted by the videos created by Nerdfighters by exposing the P4A videos as much as possible. The goal of getting exposure was achieved as measured by the high number of views and comments on the P4A videos for that period of time, but the goal of boosting donations was out of their hands to measure. Nonetheless as the P4A became a yearly event, each year represented an opportunity for improving the project.
In order to be more active about encouraging donations, the Green brothers proposed to donate $USD 1,000 to the best video promoting a charity for the P4A 2008, and invited more YouTubers to do the same. In 2009, they came up with the idea of organizing a 48-hour event that would stream live on the Internet while organizing an open chat on Twitter that would allow them to organize their efforts to feature P4A videos made by Nerdfighters. They did the same thing in 2010, but they opened the possibility of taking donations for the Foundation to Decrease World Suck, and they encouraged those donations by adding fun raffle prizes. By 2011, they added a voting system in which Nerdfighters could vote for their favorite videos, and the featured charities in those videos would receive the money raised by the Foundation to Decrease World Suck.
By 2012, this system was relatively consolidated, and the P4A took place mainly in four platforms: YouTube, the official site, where videos were embedded and users could vote for their favorite ones, Indiegogo, an international crowd-funding site for collecting funds and offering fun prizes, and Google Hangouts for the 48-hour live stream. The project was also supported by other social media platforms like Twitter, Tumblr and others. During the live stream, various hosts featured each of the three hundred P4A videos submitted by Nerdfighters, while encouraging viewers to comment on videos, rate them and share them to give them enough exposure to boost donations and create awareness.
In this way, a collaborative, interactive campaign took place in which the contents of the campaign and their distribution were a joint effort of the Nerdfighters.
In December 17-19, 2012, the P4A 2012 campaign collected over $USD 480,000 and proceeded to donate that money to the ten most-voted charities. And, although this happened after my research was over, in 2013, the P4A campaign collected $USD 869,171.
Because of the way in which this project was created and improved over time, narratives about the P4A are also popular ones among Nerdfighters. Since videos made for that project get so noticed, and members join synchronously to watch and discuss them openly in networked public spaces, this event is highly celebrated by Nerdfighters each year on December 17.
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As there is an objective way of measuring participation in this project, the P4A 2012 is the second successful activity that helped me distinguishing active from non-active members for the purposes of my research. The other one is the Nerdfighter Kiva Lending Team.(More on my method here.)
The narratives explored in this series of posts are the results of the pre-study I did with the aim of finding the most prominent themes and narratives that emerged throughout the first year of the Nerdfighter Community.
Each of these posts explores the stories and themes that are the basis to understand the culture of this community, its activities and overall atmosphere. Each section explains a theme or narrative that Nerdfighters have adopted as shareable stories through which they make sense of their culture.
More narratives:
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