Global citizenship project report

How our world has become smaller?

Today we are more interconnected compared to a century ago, especially so due to improved connectivity, transport systems, etc. Indeed, the growth in the number of international flights has played a major role. The rapid growth of the telecom sector has facilitated closer relations among global citizens.

"Isn't true that "improved transport systems" along with "improved Internet connection" have made the world much smaller than in the past?"

It's also amazing to see how travellers use the Internet to gain some information before travelling to another country. Nowadays, it's quite easy for people to check weather forecasts for the country that they are willing to visit. In fact, travellers are not only interested to know the weather forecast, but they are looking to get some first-hand advice before travelling to another country.

"Travelling physically to any part of the world within a few hours and connecting to anywhere in the globe virtually used to be a dream, now it's reality, but the question is how we can use this opportunity to become a GLOBAL CITIZEN?"

Who is a global citizen?

There is an emerging world community to which we all belong! The growing interconnectedness among people, countries, and economies means that there is a global dimension to who we are. The most positive way of responding to this is by pursuing a path of global citizenship (Israel, 2012)

The collective, conceptual, world-view, systemic, structural, and institutional levels, can change our individual beliefs, values, efforts and actions and ensure they have a synergistic effect and can make a real difference. We can and are affecting change. Our daily communications and actions are summating, making a difference, and moving the planet community toward a tipping point of potentially massive, positive, transformative change (Bourne, 2009)

We can nurture conditions for positive transformation, individually and together, and continue to mould our world into the shape of love, peace, compassion, inclusiveness, sharing, cooperation, equity, and justice — a place wherein our essential needs are met, and our rights are defended.

What global issues do we want to address?

During our interview with a renowned professor, based in London and having travelled to several countries on deputations with the UN, United Nation, we concluded that “having a country-wise handbook mentioning the local traditions, cultures, customs, festivals, languages, dos and don’ts, holidays, etc.," would help global citizens learn, accept, and adapt to the new environments and succeed. By writing this blog, we are taking a small step toward this long journey and helping our fellow global citizens succeed in their endeavours.

While we intend to cover several global subjects, initially we will focus on the three global citizenship concepts (Ogden, 2010) and depict them below:

Our plan to address the above issues

As per our investigations, there isn’t a blog/platform which specifically aims to build a platform to enable people from different cultures to share their experiences. In fact, these cultural differences are quite a sensitive topic to open a discussion in a wider range, but we propose a platform which aims to bring up the differences with the aim of highlighting the common things. This will allow individuals with different cultures to share their own culture and read about other’s cultures. We also think talking about this directly may not be always appropriate, but people can write their own views online. The more specific objectives are as follows:

• Creating a platform/blog for international students to share personal experiences of learning the British customs, accepted behaviours, civic sense and accepting and adapting to the new environment, from their peers
•  At the same time, create a platform for new entrants to share the positive differences between their own cultures and actively spread the same within the University campus

Short-term objectives of the project:

• Achieve some understanding of the necessity of having such a platform for international travellers/students - conduct an Online Survey to get more insights
• Get more insights on the topics that the travellers are mostly/students are mostly interested to know before travelling abroad/within the first few months of their visit
• Design a well-structured blog based on the information acquired from the above stage
• Propose further steps (business plan) to make this project more practical based on our initial progress

Project progress

The online survey conducted by us using the Questionnaire (follow this link to see the survey) indicated as follows:

• Many respondents knew some of the necessary information. However, almost all responded positively to the need of having complete information at one source/blog.

• Get more insights on the topics that the travellers are mostly/students are mostly interested to know before travelling abroad/within the first few months of their visit

We will cover the social responsibilities, global competence, and global civic engagement as well as the sub-topics of each concept shown in the figure along with the top four takeaways our survey research of the potential candidates highlighted:

1. Making international friends

2. Understanding diverse food habits/cuisines

3. Learning international cultures

4. Understanding international businesses.

Challenges

With every goal achieved, comes new challenges (Gemini, 2013). With several options and with varied subjects to cover, some easy and some difficult, we brainstormed on our probable approaches and decided to go for making this blog and focusing ourselves on our individual strengths. We have travelled globally and personally experienced several issues and learned a few from our abovementioned interview, we overcame these difficulties and set on with the task.  

As we go, we are aware that some critical topics having far-reaching effects may crop up, such as religious beliefs, contradictions, and cultural differences. We believe these can be handled as and when we come to the bridge using our mentors and available sources.  We intend to offer solutions to our blog visitors but also utilise their own experiences by way of comments and suggestions for the benefit of fellow visitors. The blog is not ours, but of the global community and for the global community for the welfare of the global citizens. The blog will be moderated to avoid unwarranted and illegal activities before the comments are released for public viewing.    

The financial support/ revenue creation for maintaining the blog is covered in our preliminary business plan. Going forward, we will need to run strategic tools such as PESTLE, SWOT, VRION analysis for making our blog more effective and successful.

Conclusion 

In this day of the IT boom, the making of our blog was simple and almost free. However, going forward, growing into highly competitive global markets, we will need financial support to pay the support staff for maintaining the blog, content creators, and influencers to reach a wider audience and ensure that the blog helps the needy travellers. We propose to have subscription-free access and offer free content to the users. In the near future, we propose to introduce advertisements for hotels and commercial service providers to our visitors, alongside blog keep and help generated the requisite financing/revenue to run our business. A tentative business model is attached herewith. 

There are several blogs and social media sites offering general tips and information. However, our endeavour is to help and promote global citizenship in particular and propagate the positive side of equality, diversity, and inclusion and bring cohesion among the global community. We are aware that this task is not easy as it sounds, however, it's not very hard either. We are making a beginning and are confident of success. As truly mentioned by our interview partner:

“We should be champions of the idea of having to make corrections to the way that we're living, and politicians and so on will pick up if there's a general mood of people wanting to do things, and they will help to facilitate it."