The research conducted explored both the promise and perils of social economy organisations delivering online services to citizens. An in-depth research case study was conducted; focussing on the development of Freegle (see case study background) - a social economy organisation providing an online waste reduction and prevention service - over a five year period. The research findings highlighted that the promise of such social economy organisations, within a wider ecosystem of eGovernment, to: combine the logics of commerce, social enterprise and the grassroots (i.e. supporting hybrid organisational forms); build social capital; and, deliver services at a national scale. However, research findings also highlighted that such organisations also face considerable challenges in the form of pressures to become more business-like, which in turn erode their distinctive and hybrid characteristics. Furthermore, the process of becoming more business-like is hugely time consuming and can detract from the delivery of online services to citizens. Data collection: During the project data were collected from two sources: (1) publically available online data relating to the development of Freegle; and (2) interviews with Freegle activists. Only data collected through interview was suitable for archiving with UKDS, as the online data was subject to copyright and other reuse restrictions. Permission to archive interview transcripts was sought after the participants had the opportunity to review the transcript.The research conducted highlighted both the promise and perils of social economy organisations delivering online services to citizens. The in-depth research case study focussed on the development of Freegle - a social economy organisation providing an online waste reduction and prevention service - over a five year period. This research highlighted that the promise of such social economy organisations, within a wider ecosystem of eGovernment, centres on their ability to: combine the logics of commerce, social enterprise and the grassroots (i.e. supporting hybrid organisational forms); build social capital; and, deliver services at a national scale. Such organisations also face considerable challenges in the form of pressures to become more business-like, which in turn erode their distinctive and hybrid characteristics. Furthermore, the process of becoming more business-like is hugely time consuming and can detract from the delivery of online services to citizens.

The research employed a case study research design (Yin, 2014) and the research was conducted between April 2014 and February 2015. We followed an online ethnographic approach to data gathering (Boellstorff et al., 2012) as much of Freegle activity consists of online interactions between activists. The research was exploratory in nature, with identification of relevant theory frameworks and data collection and analysis taking place in parallel and progressing through multiple iterations. Data were collected from two sources: (1) publically available online data relating to the development of Freegle; and (2) interviews with Freegle activists. Only data collected through interview was suitable for archiving with UKDS, as the online data was subject to copyright and other reuse restrictions. Interview participants were offered the options of participating in a face-to-face (8), video conference (2), telephone (2) or email interview (1) – number of interviews using each mode in brackets. This approach was adopted to ensure that potential interview participants were not deterred by a requirement for a face-to-face meeting, which would be rather unusual within the online community of Freegle activists. Each interview was semi-structured and adopted a narrative based approach (Wengraf, 2001), with the opening question asking the activist to tell the story of their involvement in Freegle (see Semi-structured interview outline.doc for further details). Follow up questions explored key aspects of the narrative and sought to develop insight into how Freegle had changed over time.