Cindy turns West on to people power

Cindy Gallop is working with Waitakere City residents who fear their community projects and values may be trampled by the Super City. Photo / Dean Purcell

Cindy Gallop speaks posh in a hurry, a slew of unusual words from a script: "The micro-action is the 'atomic unit' of IfWeRanTheWorld in the same way that the tweet is the atomic unit of Twitter. It's the action equivalent of '140 characters or fewer'."

Many people won't have a clue what that means. But some in Waitakere City understand perfectly and are making microactions as you read this.

Gallop's message comes in long unstoppable streams: "The single biggest luxury in this life is being able to do what you want, when you want, how you want and not give a damn what anybody else thinks. Many people would be a lot happier if they were doing things and even, you know, dressing in a way and living life and behaving and having relationships that were true to what they really wanted to do as opposed to what they feel society tells them they should do."

It's about identifying "your personal brand" and synchronising that with the ability to help others.

"When you feel part of something bigger than yourself, that's the secret of human happiness".

Her venture is ifwerantheworld.com, a website known, in the webspeak Gallop is fluent in, as a "crowdsourced platform" designed to harness good intentions into action.

"I wanted to find a way of making doing good sexy as hell," says the former chairman of New York ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH). She's here with her entourage - Jason Liebrecht, and Oonie Chase - at her own expense because people in Waitakere City have started mobilising on her site to protect community projects and values they fear may be trampled by the new SuperCity.

IfWeRanTheWorld is just five months old, but already threatening to be the next big thing on the net.

"It's very much a new world order," says Gallop. "We designed the platform to be self-populating, self-generating, self-propagating." The work in progress draws upon the wisdom of the crowd - "crowdsources" user insight and experience - to feed into how the site is built. "It's a social experiment and we haven't the faintest idea where it will go."

Like the social network phenomena of Twitter and Facebook, IfWeRanTheWorld is the opposite of the Super City.

"The old top-down model of making things happen through hierarchies and organisations and institutions is broken," says Gallop. "There is a new bottom-up model emerging which is about collaborative people power and collective action."

The site itself is simple. First-time visitors are encouraged to complete the sentence, "If I ran the world I would ..." The entries form a database of "action platforms" which the originator and those who join in (family, friends, community groups) break down into discrete tasks - the so called microaction - an action small and easy enough that there is no reason not to do it.

Example: "Notice the peonies in your neighbour's garden. Stop. Look." Gallop calls it emotional software - transforming good intentions into action. "Human beings are a race of prevaricators and procrastinators.

As a result, if we complete an action, however tiny, we feel enormously good about ourselves. The more you do the more you feel you can do."

As users complete tasks, assign them to friends, praise each other for jobs well done, they build up an "action profile" - a measure of not what they say, but what they do. So far, there have been a range of results. As well as worthy community projects around the globe, some have used the site to change things about themselves, others to launch their own businesses.

The missing dimension that's yet to appear on the site is "corporate good intentions", but Gallop says they're soon to arrive.

She's already working with Levi's and expects more to join. She says this is the future of advertising. Bring together human and corporate good intentions and you "unleash a source of energy and power that really could do extraordinary things in the world".

It's also the way the site makes money - while individuals use it for free, businesses have to pay.

The concept is for businesses to join community projects through the site by doing something themselves, rather than just assigning a sponsorship budget to a worthy cause. "It's communication through demonstrating - making money because you do good."

Cindy Gallop is 50. "I tell people my age as often as possible. I want people to see there are different ways of being a 50-year-old woman."

Half English, half Chinese, she grew up in Brunei, Borneo, read English literature at Somerville College, Oxford, and began working in theatre marketing before starting her advertising career.

That spans some 16 years. She joined BBBH in London in 1989. When she left in 2005, she was regarded as part of the BBH DNA.

Today she lives largely online - on Twitter, Facebook, her websites and answering email, not to mention Googling herself from time to monitor her brand.

When she speaks, it's always with urgency, sometimes with a staccato stumble: "Oh yeah, I, I, um you know to, I mean ..." Normal transmission quickly resumes: "I find when I explain to them exactly what I'm doing and how I'm doing it, the dialogue changes, particularly because as I make very clear, I'm pro-porn," she says at one point.

What? Gallop can be very direct: "I would like to help redefine what society thinks an older women should look like, talk like, act like, be like, and f*** like, quite frankly."

In 2009 she shocked the TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) conference with her four-minute presentation launching makelovenotporn.com.

The site gets about 2000 visitors a day with traffic from 180 countries.

Her TED talk highlights the problem of a generation learning about sex through watching hardcore porn and believing what is depicted is real.

Gallop's TED talk on YouTube has been viewed 85,000 times and has attracted more than 900 comments ranging from heartfelt thanks, to sharing of personal experience, to "young men hiding behind the veil of anonymity that a user name affords, hurling obscene abuse at me".

Much to their surprise Gallop responds to them directly. "Any young guys [having sex with] her could only be doing so out of pity," said one.

Gallop, who does date younger men, responded: "Fortunately a number of guys in their 20s like to do charity work."

She signs off with the names they call her - "shrivelled old hag", "whore", "granny".

She genuinely wants to "open up their minds" about the subject - often asking them to message her directly or speak to her via Skype.

The results have been surprising, with the perpetrator of one of most offensive comments apologising.

"When you get them on their own the dialogue completely changes."

One of the most abusive turned out to be a 28-year-old Eastern European computer programmer who was a virgin.

Gallop ended up giving him dating advice. He recently emailed her to say he has met somebody and is in love.

"I'm a huge believer in breaking down misconceptions and tackling them head on. I never take any of those things personally."

She says the reason for the site is the lack of a counterpoint to porn - "a lack of an open healthy dialogue around sex that enables people to bring a real world mindset to porn that allows them to see it for what it is - fantasy and entertainment."

She's currently looking for investors to develop the site further. "The way I want to take makelovenotporn forward sets out to redefine porn and to play it at its own game. I'm engaging in guerrilla warfare on that front."