MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

Studying Media and Making Media

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From Cambridge to Shenzhen: An update of NGO2.0

Core members of NGO2.0
Core members of NGO2.0
NGO2.0 technology salon
NGO2.0 technology salon

Starting this past August, NGO2.0 evolved from a project originated in MIT’s New Media Action Lab into a Shenzhen-based Chinese nonprofit organization, the TuOu Center for Nonprofit Tech Development. The path from Cambridge to Shenzhen—China’s most progressive coastal city—was filled with obstacles and challenges. Made up of eleven dedicated volunteers, NGO2.0 started off in 2009 as a social-media literacy-training project designed to help grassroots NGOs in the underdeveloped regions of China to leverage new media to collaborate with each other, recruit volunteers, and explore innovative ways of serving their communities. To date, we have taught 340 NGOs across NGO issue areas how to use social media to make their presence visible to each other and to the rest of China beyond the small towns and villages where they are based.

Simultaneously, NGO2.0 has been building a change platform connecting partners committed to transforming China’s philanthropy and public interest sector. Together, the partners are working to create an enabling environment for change makers from different sectors to emerge, find each other, and form communities both online and offline.

Two of our most successful change platforms are the NGO-Techie Group and the NGO2.0/Oracle China’s Nonprofit Technology Group. Each network has drawn participants from foundations, NGOs, IT companies, universities, nonprofit technology startups, software developers and interaction designers’ communities.

We believe in leveraging local resources to solve local problems. But the networks focus less on solutions per se than a socially constructed approach to change, which means building cross-sector dialogues and giving every participant the opportunity to share problems and propose strategic alternatives. In a culture such as the Chinese where “collaboration” is easier said than done, community building will be a prioritized task for us, which includes establishing a network with provincial support-type NGOs that can reach deep into the hinterlands of the country.

Meanwhile, through a connection via the MIT Center for Civic Media, we got in touch with an Egyptian NGO Helwa Ya Balady that expressed interest in using the crowd-sourced map developed by our chief engineer Yu Wang, a CMS graduate student. This chance encounter allowed NGO2.0 to open up the source codes of our map (www.ngo20map.com) sooner than we expected. We are making plans to visit Vietnam to find opportunities for similar collaboration.

About Jing Wang

Professor Jing Wang, S. C. Fang Professor of Chinese Language and Culture, recently passed away at the age of 71. She was the founder and director of MIT New Media Action Lab and served as the Chair of the International Advisory Board for Creative Commons China. Wang was a recipient of the Overseas Distinguished Professor Award, given by China's Ministry of Education. She was also the founder and secretary-general of NGO2.0, a grassroots nonprofit organization based in Beijing and Shenzhen, specializing in ICT (Information Communication Technology) powered activism. Ford Foundation awarded her a twelve-year grant (2009-2021) to develop NGO2.0.

Wang’s first book The Story of Stone (published in English and Japanese) won her the 1992 Joseph Levenson Prize for the “Best Book on Pre-Modern China,” awarded by the Association of Asian Studies. Her third single-authored book Brand New China: Advertising, Media, and Commercial Culture came out in Arabic, Japanese, and Chinese translations. Her fourth single-authored book The Other Digital China: Nonconfrontational Activism on the Social Web was published by Harvard University Press in December 2019. One of Wang’s edited volumes (with Winnie Wong) “Reconsidering the 2006 MIT Visualizing Cultures Controversy” won the Council of Editors of Learned Journal's “Best Special Issue Award” in 2015. Professor Wang most recently worked with a colleague in China to edit a volume on entertainment media and the future of content.

Wang received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies of Harvard University, the National Humanities Center, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation.

Wang’s research interests included entertainment media in China and the US, advertising and marketing, civic media and communication, social media action research, and nonprofit technology, with an area focus on the People’s Republic of China.