Helping others: project or research?

Helping shows itself as most difficult—as in the exemplary query whether to help by providing the fish or the fishing‐rod. Action research and similar approaches were developed to answer the question what helps the helper. Each provides structure—project‐like, partly starting from science, partly from emancipatory ideology—structure to stimulate personal resources, structure to test, structure to give voice to helpees. This article identifies ways to improve on this structure by the construction of collectives that help increase competences (enable), at the same time providing a method to test whether this succeeds. Such self‐correcting collectives constitute knowledge systems for users to participate in. Emancipation appears directly linked to the number of such systems ([knowledges]) in which people are able to participate simultaneously, each helping to maintain a stable view point.