Organizing without Organizations (or Hush! Caution! Echoland! Here Comes Everybody)

Consider the following:

• In 1992, the Boston Globe runs news stories about a Catholic priest who abused children for decades before being pulled from rotation among parishes. Boston parishioners are upset, but their anger lacks any organizational punch. The most they can do is mutter into their missals and write a letter or two. The Church leaders treat the scandal as an internal affair, and the incident dies down. In 2002, the Globe runs similar news stories about yet another priest, John Geoghan, who abused children for several decades. This time the parishioners create an organization, Voice of the Faithful, whose ranks swell to 25,000 people within a few months. Voice of the Faithful's clout is such that after decades of successfully squelching criticism and revolt, the local Catholic bishop is forced to resign.
  
• In the 2004 presidential election, Howard Dean’s supporters organize online, produce surprisingly large crowds of supporters at events, and raise more funds than the rival campaigns. Despite this show of strength, Dean does poorly in the primaries and the nomination goes to John Kerry.
  
• In 1992, a young Finnish programmer posts a message on a message board, announcing that he’s going to free operating system as a hobby. Fifteen years later, the free operating system, Linux, is running on nearly 40% of the world’s servers.
  
• One morning in Cairo, an Egyptian blogger is arrested for libel. Using Twitter, a micro-blogging service (micro-blogging is blogging with very short blog posts), he informs his friends, who rally lawyers, and by 11 pm that night he is free.
  

What all these stories have in common is that social tools such as email enabled people to communicate and collaborate in ways that would have been unimaginable a decade or two ago. Email, wikis, blogs, and social network sites such as Facebook and MySpace make it easy for people to connect to one another and share information. The cost of communicating is negligible. The speed of communication is almost instant. The ramifications are many.

As Clay Shirky, an IT consultant and teacher at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, writes in his new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, social tools like email have changed social behavior forever. Not all online social endeavors will succeed—the Dean campaign failed because it had a committed core but lacked a broad, committed base—but many will succeed, a few wildly so. As the Boston diocese discovered, when large numbers of people suddenly have the ability to organize easily, they become a powerful, just about unstoppable force for change. New broad-based movements can start at any time. And no traditional organization or government can contain them.

We're all aware of at least some of the impact of these tools: all the teenagers on Facebook, solicitations from PACs for emailing Congress, and so on. But few of us have surveyed the broad effects of these tools in a systematic way to gain an understanding of how people, social contracts, and software are all interacting. Shirky gives us this survey, and it's lucid and thought-provoking.

He points out:

"We now have communications tools that are flexible enough to match our social capabilities, and we are witnessing the rise of new ways of coordinating action that take advantage of that change. . . . These tools have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication, and scope of unsupervised effort."

Email, blogs, and wikis dramatically lower the cost of coordinating group efforts. They enable groups to organize quickly and easily and to take on daunting projects that traditional organizations, with their hierarchical structures and cost-consciousness, would never consider. When organization becomes easy, more people will organize. When more people can organize, new forces for change will sweep society, affecting government, business, culture, and personal lives.

In just under 300 pages, Shirky explores the characteristics, implications, and results of the new types of social interactions and organizations that have emerged in the past decade. Here’s a quick survey of some of his insights:

• The power law distribution (think of the curve you’ve seen in discussion of the long tail phenomenon) describes all sorts of social behavior, from contributors to Wikipedia to the popularity of blogs to programming work done on open source software projects.
  
• Participation in most social systems follows a power law distribution. A few contributors do most of the work. Most contributors do almost nothing. The work of the industrious few provides so much value to the less industrious majority, though, that they feel motivated to contribute, improving the breadth and quality of the entire project.
  
• If the majority of blog entries, MySpace pages, and other online content strikes you as trivial and inane; don’t worry. It doesn’t really matter, because you’re not the intended audience. These communications are public, but their intended for a select audience of friends and family. Shirk likens blog posts such as “What’s happening, dude?” to a conversation overheard in a shopping mall. Comparing the artistic quality of a blog post or MySpace page to a story in the New Yorker misses the point. And you will be overlooking the manifest transformative power of these new tools, were you simply to dismiss them because of their low editorial standards.
  
• As communication moves online, it becomes permanent through digital archives. Until now, most of what was preserved was official. Now everyday remarks are by default permanently "on the record."
  
• Social tools like the Web site Meetup.com enable small, splintered groups to meet and form. People who have explicitly left organizations (such as churches) can now easily organize themselves.
  
• Group projects follow this pattern: offer, tool, bargain. Someone initiates the group by making an offer, the group uses a tool to undertake group activity, and the behavior and expectations of the group are governed by an explicit bargain. Selecting the wrong offer, tool, or bargain can doom a project. That said, the particulars of group projects are so varied and complex, it would be folly to proscribe specific offers, tools, or bargains categorically.
  
• The best ideas in an organization usually come from people who bridge social groups within the organization. They’re able to assess a situation with a fresh perspective, and they feel less compulsion for conforming with peers and for preserving the status quo of a department.
  
• "No whining!" is a rule common to many social groups (and if that upsets you, please keep it to yourself).
  

Shirky does an excellent job analyzing the results—intended and otherwise—of new forms of social organization, such as meetups and groups like Voices of the Faithful. Whether you’re interested in applying some of these group dynamics to your business, or you simply want to read an engaging account of how these tools are changing the world you live in, you’ll find this book well worth your time.

POSTSCRIPT

As a Joycean, I feel compelled to mention that the phrase "Here Comes Everybody" is a kind of motif from Finnigans Wake, where the phrase serves as the basis for all sorts of other phrases with the initials HCE. For a list of HCE phrases, which you can imagine applying to social networks in all sorts of ways, click here. As you might guess, the title of this blog post, "Hush! Caution! Echoland!" is an HCE phrase from FW.