BIEN will organize a series of Internet events on the Seventh Annual International Basic Income Week, September 15-21, 2014. Each event will be an “Ask Me Anything” (also know as AMA or sometimes as “As Us Anything”). In these events, an expert in a given topic promises to be available for a given amount of time to type answers to questions submitted from anyone around the world. The AMAs will appear on Reddit, which calls itself, “The Front Page of the Internet.” Reddit is one of the world’s most popular websites, last year receiving 731 million unique visitors and 56 billion page views.
For the 7 days of Basic Income Week, BIEN, together with the Basic Income community on Reddit, plan to promote an expansive series of AMAs including participants from around the world, in various languages, and on various different topics related to basic income.
Reddit is a website where people can post discussion or link to texts. Users can vote and comment on all content. It is divided into about 500,000 different communities (called “subreddits”) of varying sizes and topics. Each subreddit is a continuing discussion, going 24 hours a day, with people posting and responding. The Basic Income subreddit has recently experienced enormous growth, rising from 50 users last summer to over 15,000 today, and now ranking 1,626th out of over 5,400 active subreddits.
AMAs are hosted on a subreddit called IAMA, one of the most popular of Reddit’s subreddits with over 5.9 million subscribers. The popularity of the AMA lies in its anything goes nature. It’s like having an interview with thousands of people; any question can be asked and candor is greatly valued. A successful AMA can be read by hundreds of thousands of people and draw thousands of comments.
BIEN will schedule at least one AMA per day, perhaps several a day, throughout Basic Income Week, starting September 15 and concluding September 21. Some of these will take place in the IAMA subreddit and BasicIncome subreddit, but most will take place in some of the many other subreddits available, based on location like (perhaps Ireland, Europe, Korea, etc.), or focus of interviewee (perhaps Economics, politics, Psychology, etc.) or by language (perhaps French, German, Japanese, etc.). More Information will be released soon.
The Basic Income Subreddit is online at: http://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome/
Information about the grown of the BI Subreddit is online at: http://redditmetrics.com/r/BasicIncome
The IAMA subreddit is online at: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA