Nearly ten years ago I was in Estonia for the 'Community Involvement in Theme Museums' conference where I had the chance to meet and hear from people working in Estonian, Finnish and Lithuanian memory institutions. I was there to talk about 'niche' projects in crowdsourcing, so I had a few conversations about crowdsourcing in the Baltic region.
I was told that while Lithuania doesn't have a volunteering culture, Estonia has a tradition of 'talgu', or communal work, as evidenced by talks on 'Digitalgud' on the conference programme. A 2022 publication, 'From Community Involvement to Research Interests: Crowdsourcing Projects of the National Archives of Estonia' by Liisi Taimre, Aigi Rahi-Tamm, Sven Lepa and Tõnis Türna gives a sense of this history, including that in the late 19th / early 20th centuries, 'about 122,000 pages of Estonian folklore were collected by about 1,400 people from all over the country'. The paper references lots of Estonian crowdsourcing projects alongside participant survey data, so it's well worth a look.
The Finnish version is 'talkoot', which might be familiar as it's referenced in the name of an early, influential crowdsourcing project, 'DigitalKoot'. 'Barn raising' seems to be the most popular American term for it, and while volunteering is widespread in British and Australian culture, I can't think of a general term that describes the collective aspect of volunteering in communities.
Since those conversations I've wondered how a region's traditional volunteering culture intersects with crowdsourcing and citizen science, but never had time to research it. (But I did start collecting examples.) Is it easier to start and run projects in societies that already have offline models for cooperation and collective work? How do existing metaphors shape projects and contributions?
A recent post about the 'Nordic' term 'dugnadsånd', 'the collective willingness of people to come together in the context of community projects – emphasising cooperation and selflessness' prompted me to finally post about it. (The post also mentioned the Danish term 'arbejdsfællesskab' for a 'work community' and the Norwegian 'dugnad', glossed as 'voluntary work done together with other people', which might be fruitful for thinking about how language and metaphors for traditional collective work and volunteering shapes digital platforms. If you know of work in this area, I'd love to hear about it!)
But perhaps more importantly when so many regions face so many different challenges, it's a good reminder that working collectively for positive causes can support happier individuals and a more resilient society.