The Uncultured Project

Mindaugas Voldemaras

Meet Mindaugas Voldemaras. Mindaugas is one of the many people who submitted a video as part of the 2011 Davos Debates. Of all the efforts by applicants to get votes, Mindaugas was one of the more successful.

Mindaugas, a blogger from Lithuania, campaigned around the slogan: “Vote for Lithuania in Davos!”. He was appealing to his most salient constituency: Lithuanians.

Appealing for support from your constituency is really the best way to mobilize support on an issue. It’s a group that can be diverse but has a shared identity, kinship, and a sense of collective benefit.

From a "campaign poster" made for Mindaugas

Appealing to a salient constituency also makes it easier to find others who can help mobilize others. Mindaugas was able to find support from prominent Lithuanian tweeters, bloggers, and even Lithuanian sports fans.

The only hurdle in Mindaugas’s mobilization efforts was that everyone in Lithuania, being in the same time zone, went to sleep at more or less the same time and could only vote for him during waking hours.

When Mindaugas saw my efforts to get votes, he assumed I too was appealing to my constituency. He assumed my constituency was Canada. And, like him, he assumed I’d be limited to when Canadians were awake.

This assumption is why, thanks to you, we were able to take the #1 spot.

Click the jump to learn why.

Continue reading ‘The Anatomy of a Transnational Davos Campaign’

My friend Karen made this great video explaining how you can vote for me in the Davos Debates. There is less than 10 hours to go and I’m currently 70 votes behind the leader:

And my friend Reese made this great graphic showing how you can vote:

Just in-case the graphic is a bit confusing:

1. Go to YouTube.com/Davos
2. Make sure you are logged into YouTube. Created an account if you don’t already have one.
3. Scroll down and look for my video. It looks like this. You may need to sort by popularity if it’s not already visible.
4. Click the thumbs up.
5. You’re done

As a few of you who have been following my journey for a while may know, this my fourth attempt in four years to have a presence at Davos. In the past I’ve been lucky to have the most vocal and most democratic support – though in the past the selection process hasn’t always been vote-based and/or voting specifically within the YouTube community.

Voting ends 6:01 pm EST today. I’m currently a few dozen votes behind the most voted candidate who is running on a “a vote for me is a vote for my homeland of Lithuania”-style campaign. It’s hard to compete with that so I’ll definitely be praying for a miracle and hope you consider casting a vote my way.

Jamison Young, originally uploaded by dominick.chen.

When I started accepting donations, John Green said it best – “this isn’t charity, this is an experiment in community”. Even though I’m not an official charity, accepting donations from the public has been a great way of making a connection between those who this project has been able to help and those who have provided the funds to make that help possible.

In my previous blog post of “Meet a Donor” I introduced you guys to Hank Green (although I’m sure almost everyone reading this blog is already familiar with Hank Green and the vlogbrothers). Hank decided to match my “Xbox 360 challenge” by donating the funds equal to that of buying a new Xbox 360. I used those funds (after a rather remote and shaky journey) to help sponsor a child name Rithanu in the Chittagong-Hill-Tracts.

In this blog post of “Meet a Donor”, I’d like to introduce you guys to someone who has blown me away with his level of generosity and compassion: Jamison Young.

Jamison Young is an Australian born singer who lives in Prague. Even before he donated any money, his contributions to this project have been invaluable. Jamison licenses all his music under the Creative Commons. Not just that, but the specific license Jamison choose lets people use his music (in both for-profit and not-for-profit capacities) without having to pay Jamison a cent for the rights. It’s Jamison Young’s song “How Far” that has been the theme song for this project ever since the second video went online.

And it’s also actually been Jamison Young’s generosity with his work that inspired me to release all my videos, blog posts, and photos under the Creative Commons. I already thought Jamison was a generous guy – but his latest contribution blew me away. One of Jamison’s song actually got featured in the soundtrack of the new X-Files movie. For a guy that normally gives his work away for free, this was one of those opportunities where he actually earned some well-deserved money on his work. And you know what he did? He gave it all away.

Jamison Young at the new X-Files Movie, originally uploaded by jamtea.

So, when voting ends for my latest video, I’ll be going back to Bangladesh to execute whatever you guys have voted for. Depending on which options I end up doing, Jamison’s donation will be enough to cover either a large chunk – or the entirety – of one of the options. How far can this dreamin’ go?

Thanks to everyone who voted. As you might know, I created a video and submitted it to Sxephil (a YouTuber with over 50,000 subscribers). He was running a spotlight contest. I ended up in second and thus the spotlight went to LuddenMedia. Ahh well – by being nominated, my YouTube subscriptions have increased from its original 12 (I love you guys) to over 200.

I definitely am not looking to become a YouTube celebrity (or any kind of celebrity). The goal is to inspire – not to self-aggrandize. So, I’m pretty happy with second spot in this contest – more viewers, with none of the glare of the spotlight.