The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
HERE COMES
EVERYBODY
(Clay Shirky/Allen Lane/February 2008/336 Pages/$25.95)
HERE COMES
EVERYBODY
The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
MAIN IDEA
Groups of people are incredibly hard to organize. That‟s why until now, only large
corporations could generally afford to buy the tools and build the infrastructure which
were required to sync the joint efforts of lots of people. That‟s about to change. For
effectively the first time in history, a whole bevy of new social tools are coming to
prominence which make it easy for groups to collaborate and take collective action.
What this means for commerce is the environment in which the game of business is
played has changed. You need to find ways to make these new social tools work for you
rather than against you. Doing so will be an ongoing challenge, but if you ignore these
tools, you run the risk of missing out on some interesting commercial opportunities.
“We are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to
cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of
our traditional institutions and organizations.Though many of these social tools were
first adopted by computer scientists and workers in high-tech industries, they have
spread beyond academic and corporate settings. Their effects are going to be
widespread and momentous.”
– Clay Shirky
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About of Author
CLAY SHIRKY is a writer, teacher and consultant. He is an adjunct professor in New
York University‟s graduate program in interactive telecommunications. Mr. Shirky
specializes in studying the social and economic impacts of Internet technologies. He
currently consults with Nokia, the BBC and the Library of Congress as well as other
clients. He is a columnist in Business 2.0 and has had various articles published in the
New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Harvard Business Review. Prior to his
appointment at NYU, Mr. Shirky was a partner at The Accelerator Group, an
international investment firm. He has also served as Chief Technology Officer of Site
Specific, aWebmedia and design firm. He is a graduate of Yale College.
The Web site for this book is at www.shirky.com
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At one time, only very well resourced corporations could afford to hire and maintain a
workforce. There was an imperative, therefore, that these people did productive work so
as to repay the direct costs involved. That meant marginal value activities were never
attempted. The new generation of social tools are changing that dynamic because they
dramatically lower and often even eliminate entirely the costs of coordinating group
action.
Social tools work because they allow loosely structured groups to come together and
achieve common aims, without any requirement for formal management and even
outside the profit motive. With groups, people do things because they want to do them,
not because they‟re afraid of getting fired if they don‟t.
There‟s often a natural progression to the use of social tools:
Group undertakings generally start out as a sharing activity between hardcore fans of
something specific. Sharing is often operated in a take-it-or-leave-it environment.
Cooperation is the next level. This occurs when some group of people alter their
behavior in order to accommodate the actions of other parts of the group. The final rung
on the ladder is when the group decides to collaborate together to produce something.
Collective decisions are made in this final stage and it‟s hard to get everything together
since the decisions of the group need to be binding on the individuals involved.
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“For the last hundred years the big organizational question has been whether any given
task was best taken on by the state, directing the effort in a planned way, or by
businesses competing in a market. This debate was based on the universal and
unspoken supposition that people couldn‟t simply self-assemble; the choice between
markets and managed effort assumed that there was no third alternative. Now there is.
Our electronic networks are enabling novel forms of collective action, enabling the
creation of collaborative groups that are large. The scope of work that can be done by
noninstitutional groups is a profound challenge to the status quo.”
– Clay Shirky
In many ways publishing is a bellwether for all the changes which are taking shape in
society. In days gone past, getting something published was a major effort. The only
way this could be done was through the use of a printing press which demanded huge
setup costs and extensive pre-publication work before anything could be published.
Today, by contrast, everyone can be a publisher. All kinds of ways and means exist for
people to get their thoughts and ideas into the public domain. There are a huge variety
of self-publishing tools within ready reach:
■ Anyone can start and maintain a blog or weblog – a Web site based diary of their
thoughts, ideas and opinions.
■ Anyone can upload to the Web their photos and share their images with others.
■ Anyone can put together an audio or video message in a podcast and similarly share
it instantly with everyone in the world who has an Internet connection.
Globally free publishing has resulted in the mass amateurization of the entire publishing
industry. Where previously journalism was a profession and journalistic privilege was a
valued commodity, today anyone and everyone can honestly claim to be a journalist in
one way or another. The same applies also to the professionals who used to reproduce,
distribute and categorize what was printed.
Today, all of these tasks are handled by computers. Whenever someone publishes
something, even on the most obscure Weblog imaginable, the tools exist for others to
instantly find and then access that material. Today anyone with a digital camera, a
keyboard and access to the Internet can be a publisher. The mechanics of publishing
anything is effortless – which in turn means it‟s much easier to make the decision
whether something should be published or not. Globally free publishing also means
people value professionally published materials differently.
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“The Internet means that you don‟t have to convince anyone else that something is a
good idea before trying it.”
– Scott Bradner, former trustee of the Internet Society
“An individual with a camera or keyboard is now a nonprofit of one, and self-publishing
is now the normal case. This spread has been all the more remarkable because this
technological story is not like the automobile, where an invention went from high cost to
low cost, so that it went from being a luxury to being a commonplacepossession. Rather,
this technological story is like literacy, wherein a particular capability moves from a
group of professionals to become embedded within society itself, ubiquitously, available
to a majority of citizens.”
– Clay Shirky
“In a world where publishing is effortless, the decision to publish something isn‟t terribly
momentous. Just as movable type raised the value of being able to read and write even
as it destroyed the scribal tradition, globally free publishing is making public speech and
action more valuable, even as its absolute abundance diminishes the specialness of
professional publishing.”
– Clay Shirky
Everywhere you look on the Internet, you‟ll find lots of “user-generated content”. The
social networking companies like MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal and Xanag base
their entire business models around aggregating and then making available all of this
material.
The media has traditionally been split into two distinct camps:
At one time, there was a very clear distinction between these two patterns of
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communication but those boundaries are now blurring and dissolving. Tools like e-mail
and Web sites bring together a mix of material which is intended for general
dissemination and more private material that will be appreciated by a much smaller
audience. It‟s hard to say whether a blog is intended for a small group of people who
share a passion or whether it is designed to reach a global audience.
The widely lauded two-way interactivity of the Internet gets diluted when someone
attracts a sizable following. A blogger who is writing just for his small group of friends
will find it easy to address specific questions which are put to him whereas a well known
blogger with more than a million viewers each month really cannot do that. Interactivity
and two-way conversation becomes impractical with an audience of that size.
The constraints attached to making content for the traditional media meant a fair bit of
vetting material of only marginal value occurred. When publishing and broadcasting cost
money, you can be sure there will be an intensive effort to weed out poor materials
beforehand. That dynamic gets reversed in the current business era. Since publishing is
free for all practical purposes, people can put all kinds of material out there. Instead of
the vetting going on pre-production, consumers today spend more time filtering what‟s
out there to decide for themselves what they want to see and what they don‟t.
The very obvious fact everyone who uses a computer can produce and consume
information and cooperate with others to generate other bits of information completely
changes the dynamics of communication. The new social tools are not just
improvements on what existed previously but are the foundation for a revolution to occur.
Things that were previously impossible suddenly come into reach. The restructuring of
the media industry which is now occurring around the world is a forerunner for some
even more profound changes because all businesses manage information to some
extent. Amateur rather than professional production of content is the wave of the future.
The poster child of collaborative production in the online world is Wikipedia, an
encyclopedia which can be edited by anyone who reads i t . Launched in 2001,
Wikipedia crossed the two-million-articlemark in September 2007 and is currently rated
as the eleventh most popular Web site in the United States.
Instead of remaining just an online encyclopedia, Wikipedia has become a robust tool
for gathering and distributing information quickly. For example, when terrorist bombs
went off in the London transit system on July 7, 2005, a Wikipedia page was set up
within minutes. The first posting was five sentences long. Within four hours, the entry
had been edited more than a thousand times as more news came in. The end result is a
very detailed news article which is arguably superior to anything which has been
published to date by a commercial publisher.
What‟s impressive is Wikipedia accomplishes all this with no paid managers, no
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employees and no formal work processes. Instead, people take it upon themselves to
generate raw articles, edit those articles, polish them, correct misspellings and do
everything else which is required. The complete lack of any type of organization
whatsoever is bewildering and illogical but the proof collaborative production of this
nature can and does work is found in Wikipedia itself.
Note, however, not everyone who reads a Wikipedia article is motivated enough to
become a collaborative producer in equal measure. It is estimated that fewer than 2
percent of Wikipedia users are contributors, and yet that level of participation is
sufficient for something of value for millions of users to be created.
From a business perspective, collaborative production is a paradox. If nobody is in
charge, how can something meaningful and ultimately of value get accomplished? What
happens is for something like Wikipedia, there are no real “average” or representative
users. The majority of people simply view the articles and only a small handful get
actively engaged in generating Wikipedia articles and materials. This active minority
love having the opportunity to contribute and this is sufficient reward for them in and of
itself. Collaborative production works because it accommodates both types of thinking.
The easier it becomes to disseminate information, the easier it becomes for people to
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organize and take collective action to get things done. Social tools like Web sites, blogs
and e-mail means that people can come together and get things done in wayswhich
were previously impractical and therefore extremely unlikely.
Take, for example, e-mail – the ideal tool for group communication. E-mail has many
advantages:
• It costs virtually nothing.
• It can go next door or across the ocean with equal ease.
• It is delivered almost instantly anywhere in the world.
• It doesn‟t matter if the recipient is busy doing something else.
• It can be delivered to any number of people at the same time.
• You don‟t have to ask anyone‟s permission to use e-mail.
E-mail is the absolutely ideal group conversation tool because it applies to both
one-to-many and many-to many situations with equal dexterity. It enables information to
spread, conversations to take place and opinions to be formed within a group setting.
Organizations of all shapes and sizes can then be formed to follow through on what is
being discussed.
Notably social tools, like e-mail, don‟t create collective action in and of themselves.
Instead, these tools remove the obstacles which have traditionally got in the way. The
removal of these obstacles, in turn, reshapes the world into an entirely different place. It
has become feasible for people to band together to get things done rather than merely
sitting back and waiting for the existing social institutions to act.
“This is why many of the significant changes are based not on the fanciest, newest bits
of technology but on simple, easy-to-use tools like e-mail, mobile phones, and websites,
because those are the tools most people have access to and, critically, are comfortable
using in their daily lives. Revolution doesn‟t happen when society adopts new
technologies – it happens when society adopts new behaviors.”
– Clay Shirky
“We are being pushed rapidly down a route largely determined by the technological
environment. We have a small degree of control over the spread of these tools, but that
control does not extend to our being able to reverse, stop, or even radically alter the
direction we‟re moving in. Our principal challenge is not to decide where we want to go
but to stay upright as we go there. The invention of tools that facilitate group formation is
less like ordinary technological change and more like an event, something that has
already happened. The question is how these tools will spread or reshape society.”
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– Clay Shirky
Generally speaking, it used to take a long time for consumers to get organized. Doing
anything by collective action was difficult because it was hard to get the word out to
everyone who potentially could be involved. It used to take months, even years before a
sizable group could form around any social issue. This is no longer the case. With the
newgeneration of social tools now becoming available, pressure groups can be formed
almost instantaneously.
A good example of this occurred in December 2006. Several American Airlines flights
got diverted to Austin, Texas because of heavy storms in Dallas. The diverted planes
had to wait several hours on the ground before passengers could get access to food
and water. As a result of this experience, a real estate agent who had been a passenger
on one of those flights formed a group and drafted a proposed Passengers‟ Bill of Rights.
This document mandated airlines had to provide for passenger‟s essential needs
anytime there was an air or ground delay for 3 hours or longer. Within weeks, this group
had collected thousands of signatures for a petition in support of the new Passengers‟
Bill of Rights. After lobbying Congress, the Bill of Rights was ultimately proposed in the
House and the Senate.
As this and other examples illustrate so vividly, social tools are much more immediate
than anything which has ever gone before. Today‟s consumers have noticeably more
power to get the word out to others. They can use all of the social tools to get things
done. Whereas corporations in the past could get away with describing various things
as “isolated incidents”, today‟s consumers don‟t buy that argument. If they see
something they don‟t like, consumers get on the case. Companies need to acknowledge
this shift of power and act accordingly or certain problems lie ahead.
“The power to coordinate otherwise dispersed groups will continue to improve; new
social tools are still being invented and however minor they may seem, any tool that
improves shared awareness or group coordination can be pressed into service for
political means, because the freedom to act in a group is inherently political. We adopt
those tools that amplify our capabilities, and we modify our tools to improve that
amplification.”
– Clay Shirky
“Thanks to the Web, the cost of publishing locally has collapsed.”
– Clay Shirky
“When we change the way we communicate,we change society. The tools that a society
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uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. 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. Forming groups has gotten a lot easier. To put it in economic terms, the
costs incurred by creating a new group or joining an existing one have fallen in recent
years, and not just by a little bit. They have collapsed.”
– Clay Shirky
The new social tools work just as well for negative forces as they do for positive social
forces. The new social tools are inherently neutral. They can be used with equal
efficiency to do helpful things in society-at-large or to do those things which are
inherently unhelpful. For example:
■ When a girl’s magazine started offering an online bulletin board, it was envisaged
this would be useful for teenage girls to go online and talk about clothes, school,
romance, health and beauty. What was found, however, was the most active users of
this meeting place was a group of girls who wanted to swap tips on how to be
anorexic. Due to the fact it proved impossible to stop this happening, the magazine
shut downits bulletin board.
■ In the 1990s, entrepreneur Scott Heiferman was looking for a new business idea. He
launched a Web-based business called Meetup which allowed people to identify
others with similar interests and get together online. The original business plan for
Meetup suggested this would be a reinvigoration of classic American interest groups
– sort of like a Rotary club on steroids or people who liked one brand of cars or
another, that kind of thing. Instead of that, however, the most active meetups with the
most members in 1991 ended up being groups with these topics:
• Witches (6,757 members, 442 meetups)
• Slashdot (11,809 members, 401 meetups)
• LiveJournal (10,691 members, 311 meetups)
• Bloggers (4,222 members, 136 meetups)
• Pagans (4,222 members, 90 meetups)
• Fark (4,621 members, 81 meetups)
• Ex-Jehovah‟s Witnesses (1,609 members, 67 meetups)
• Bookcrossing (4,414 members, 56 meetups)
• Xena (1,641 members, 51 meetups)
• Tori Amos (2,261 members, 47 meetups)
Both these examples illustrate the fact the new social tools allow special interest groups
who previously had a hard time connecting with each other to get together and do things.
The tools themselves make no judgements or distinction between users. They can be
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used with equal effectiveness to do things which build social capital or the things which
destroy it. It‟s now much easier for groups to form without social approval or
sponsorship of any kind.
This enhanced freedom of assembly for groups provided by social tools generates three
different kinds of social capital loss:
1. People whose jobs previously relied on solving hard problems may find themselves
out of work when so much self-help information is available.
2. It becomes impossible for media to be banned from trying to influence the outcome of
elections because the definition of who“the media” is today is broad and changing all
the time.
3. The new freedoms generated by social tools enable terrorist networks and criminal
gangs to not only exist but also to become more resilient as a result of better
communications.
Instead of banning groups from forming in an ad hoc way, society is going to need new
and better tools to actively oppose those groups which are unhelpful. This is a challenge
of the future.
At first glance, it would be easy to assume the new social tools make it easy for
everyone to be connected to everyone else in the world. That‟s not how things work out.
If you were to try and be connected to billions of other people, those connections would
quickly become so dense they would be of no practical use whatsoever. Instead, the
newsocial tools help small groups work together better.
Put another way, the new tools increase “social capital”. Social capital is an essential
component in a functioning society. Social capital is at work when your neighbor is
prepared to walk your dog while you‟re sick or the shopkeeper trusts you to pay him the
next time you come into the shop. In healthy and robust communities, there is a growing
pool of social capital and conversely in ailing societies there is much less social capital.
Social capital is a store of behaviors and norms in society. It exists in two different
forms:
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An increase in bridging capital would mean there are more people you‟d be prepared to
lend money to if they asked for it. An increase in bonding capital would increase the
amount of money you‟d be prepared to lend to the people whowere already on your
approved list. In small groups, bonding tends to happen within small clusters whereas
bridging typically occurs between different clusters.
The new social tools increase the amount of leverage connected people have and
maintain. They can increase both bonding and bridging capital. The more bridging
capital you have, the greater the opportunities are for you to come up with new ideas.
Bridging capital is also valuable in areas like supply chain management.
“Group action gives human society its particular character, and anything that changes
the way groups get things done will affect society as a whole. This change will not be
limited to any particular set of institutions or functions. For any given organization, the
important questions are „When will the change happen?‟ and „What will change?‟ The
only two answers we can rule out are never, and nothing. The ways in which any given
institution will find its situation transformed will vary, but the various local changes are
manifestations of a single deep source: newly capable groups are assembling, and they
are working without the managerial imperative and outside the previous strictures that
bounded their effectiveness. These changes will transform the world everywhere groups
of people come together to accomplish something, which is to say everywhere.”
– Clay Shirky
The fact things can get published nowadays for free undeniably generates a lot of junk.
Instead of having high production costs naturally cull out the junk, loads more material
gets published electronically now. The barriers to communication and participation have
been lowered dramatically and quality control happens after the fact rather than before.
This means the price of failure is also extremely low, often zero.
Conventional organizations work hard to reduce the occurrence of failures because this
is a waste of scarce resources for the firm. Therefore, ideas are carefully vetted before
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any investment is made, and only those projects which hold the greatest likelihood of
success are given the green light. The problem with this approach is no one knows for
certain in advance which projects will succeed and which will fail. It‟s also difficult to
determine whether the project designers have any clearer view of the future. Under
these conditions, it‟s almost inevitable that firms will end up green-lighting failures and
passing on projects which are actually huge success stories. Safety often trumps
innovation for these businesses.
The social tools reverse that dynamic entirely. New ideas can be put out there for free
and people can decide for themselves whether to get involved or not. The genuinely
worthwhile projects will attract people and resources while the also-ran ideas will just
naturally fall by the wayside. The new social tools don‟t reduce the likelihood of failure.
They do, however, reduce the cost of failure to nothing. They allow a large number of
new ideas to be tried and whatever works to come shining through.
In the publish-then-filter business model, nobody is trying to make a judgement call.
Experimentation can be done ad infinitum. No one dictates that one project should move
forward and that another should not. Instead, market forces dictate the course of
development. What‟s popular gets worked on and what‟s not gets ignored.
The shining example of publish-then-filter is quite possibly Open Source Software, one
of the great success stories of the digital era. The term “open source” refers to the fact
the source code of software gets distributed to all users rather than just the software
itself. That means anybody and everybody can change the software if they are of a mind
to do so. The history of Open Source Software is interesting:
■ Prior to 1980, software generally came free with a computer and was distributed with
its source code.
■ During the 1980s, it was realized software sales could become a business in its own
right. Companies started selling software packages, usually without the source code
so only the original developer could make alterations.
■ In 1983, the Free Software Foundation was formed to produce high-quality free
software for the Unix operating system. This foundation seemed to be fighting a losing
battle since most software companies went the opposite route and sold proprietary
software alone without the source code. By the late 1980s, most market
commentators were suggesting free software wouldbe limited to just a small niche in
the larger market.
■ In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a young Finnish computer programmer, posted a simple
note to a discussion group on operating systems: “I‟m doing a free operating system
(just a hobby, won‟t be big and professional) . . .I‟d like to know what features most
people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement
them:-)”
■ Within 24 hours of announcing his intention, Torvalds had volunteer programmers
contacting him from Austria, Iceland, the United States, Finland and the U.K.
■ Within months, a simple version of the operating system software which would later
be called Linux was up and running. Torvalds solicited input for new ideas from far
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and wide and used a brutal meritocracy where the best ideas were integrated into
Linux, regardless of who had suggested them. Over time, this widely distributed group
of programmers contributing their efforts for free have come up with a genuinely
world-class operating system.
■ Today the Linux operating system is used by something like 40 percent of the world‟s
servers.
While it is true Linux has been a great success story, there are actually more than a
hundred thousand open source projects underway at present. The vast majority of them
have been failures. It is estimated around three-quarters of the open source software
projects never get to the degree of completeness and utility required to attract even a
single user. It‟s accurate, in fact, to say the open source ecosystem is outfailing
corresponding commercial efforts. Whether or not Linux is a fluke remains to be seen
but the commercial software industry does see open source as a profound potential
threat to its business model.
Allowing cheap failures is a great way to develop new things because:
■ Multiple ideas can be tried out – and you can build on what works and drop what
obviously does not.
■ Biases can be set aside – you can ignore staying with the tried-and-true and instead
branch out into all kinds of new directions.
■ If you get enough people trying new ideas, happy accidents have a greater chance of
being discovered.
■ There is no bias toward accepting something which is substandard just so you can
“get your money’s worth”.
■ You can use the talents of people who make only a one-time contribution rather than
hiring people to churn out good ideas day-after-day. This means you can utilize the
brilliant-but-erratic types rather always having to find steady-performers.
“Community has not historically been a good guarantor of longevity. This is the secret of
the open source ecosystem and, by extension, of all the large-scale and long-lived
forms of sharing, collaborative work and collective action now being tried. Because
anyone can try anything, the projects that fail, fail quickly, but the people working on
these projects can migrate just as quickly to the things that are visibly working. Unlike
the business landscape, where companies have an incentive to hide both successes
(for reasons of competitive advantage) and failures (to forestall any perception of
weakness), open source projects advertise their successes and get failure for free. This
arrangement allows the successes to become host to a community of sustained
interest.”
– Clay Shirky
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Every time social tools are used successfully, you will find there is a fusion of a plausible
promise, at least one effective tool and an acceptable bargain with users. To take each
of these elements in turn:
The promise is the “why” anyone should join or contribute to a group. You have to
create a promise which is compelling enough to get people to either participate or
become an actual user. Everyone is busy and if you want to make a claim on someone‟s
time, you have to offer something which is of more value than what they presently do.
And not only does the promise need to appeal to you personally but you also need to be
confident it will appeal to lots of other people as well. Being the sole user of a social tool
really isn‟t much help at all.
The larger the number of users you need to make something viable, the harder it is to
get the promise right. You have to achieve buy-in from more people which is always
hard. To address this dynamic, there are a few things to try:
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■ Make joining the group easy – which positions the promise correspondingly more
within reach.
■ Offer things which will create personal value for individual users.
■ Subdivide the community into small clusters and offer a means whereby small
groups can grow larger.
■ Offer fame – everyone will be able to admire what you contribute.
■ Use personal charisma to make the early joiners feel engaged in what’s going down.
■ Keep it real using something like the Linux approach. Instead of saying “We’re
going to create a world-class operating system in our spare time”, you put out a much
more down-to-earth invitation: “Get involved in this and you’ll be doing something
interesting and noteworthy.”
The promise specifies “why” anyone should join the group and the tool helps with the
“how”. The tools need to be powerful enough to overcome the difficulties of coordinating
the actions of a large group of people. Tools are inherently context sensitive – there is
no universal tool which is going to be great in every situation imaginable. Simply put
great social tools are designed for the job at hand and to help people achieve what they
actually want to do.
When designing or selecting the best tool, there are two basic questions you should
ask:
■ If you’re looking for a small group of contributors, you’ll probably be looking for
conversational tools where everyone can come to agree on a single point of view.
■ If you’re oriented more towards a very large group, you want tools where people can
pool their knowledge to come up with a small list of potential answers. Not everyone
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will agree with every option but in total these options will encapsulate what the
majority of people are suggesting.
■ The duration of the group interaction will also strongly influence your choice of tools.
Once you understand these basic factors, you can then decide which tools are most
appropriate for the situation at hand. New social tools are being developed all the time,
but newer doesn‟t automatically mean better. The most basic social tools are e-mail,
online discussion groups, blogs and wikis. These tools are at least a decade old and yet
are still in widespread general use.
The bargain comes last. In practice, the bargain sets the rules of the road. The bargain
matters only if there is a plausible promise and a working set of tools. The bargain
specifies what you can expect to achieve if you are interested in the promise and adopt
the tools required.
The bargain is the most complex part of the mix because it cannot be specified in
advance. The users have a big hand in creating the bargain. The bargain clarifies what
you expect of others and what they can expect to get in return. Bargains can be
balanced or entirely one-sided, formally stated or more implicit, simple or complex.
When Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia, he couched the bargain as a personal favor:
“Humor me. Go to our Web site and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten
minutes”. The bargain drives what kind of group assembles so remember when you
change the bargain, you‟ll always change the makeup of the group to one degree or
another.
At first glance, it would seem like putting together a plausible promise, tools that fit the
task at hand and an acceptable bargain would be easy but in practice it‟s difficult to get
the balance right. Most group efforts fail because of the complexity in getting all the
interactions precisely aligned.
To add to this complexity, groups always evolve over time. Take, for example, Wikipedia.
The initial promise wascouched in terms of a personal favor. Today, Wikipedia‟s mission
is: “Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all
human knowledge”.The sheer breadth of that new and improved promise encourages
people to be more thorough and more careful about what they contribute because this
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project is all encompassing. By changing the promise, Wikipedia enjoys a quite different
and distinctive dynamic.
In similar fashion, social tools may appear simple on the surface but there are often
deeply embedded complexities. Many large groups are sustained by the extraordinary
efforts of a small group of genuine enthusiasts. If Wikipedia did not have a core group of
enthusiasts who edit out the suspect material submitted by pranksters, the quality of the
online encyclopedia as a whole would be seriously degraded. Different subgroups within
the larger group as a whole may use quite different tools, including customized software
It‟s also true that an inappropriate or unappealing bargain can kill a group, even when
the promise and tool sets are effective. When Microsoft‟s engineers saw the success of
Wikipedia, they offered Encarta users the same capabilities. The only stipulation was
anyone who contributed had to grant Microsoft the right to use that information for
commercial purposes in the future. Most people balked at the idea of giving Microsoft
something for free it would then turn around and sell back to them. The Encarta
approach died a natural death as a result.
Note also the combination of the promise, tools and bargain is constantly changing and
evolving. Digg is a user-edited news site where users can suggest and rate which
stories should appear on the front page. In early 2007, various articles started appearing
on Digg which contained the secret digital key present on all DVDs to stop people
copying the contents. At first, Digg censored and removed any posts which contained
the key but this set off a flurry of complaints. Kevin Rose, Digg‟s founder, eventually
relented and stopped censoring these articles. In announcing a new policy of allowing
anything to be posted, Rose stated: “After seeing hundreds of stories and reading
thousands of comments, you‟ve made it clear. You‟s rather see Digg go down fighting
than bow down to a bigger company.We hear you, and effective immediately we won‟t
delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the
consequences might be. If welose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.”
“The Digg revolt is one example of where our social tools are going. Starting with the
invention of e-mail, which first functioned to support a conversation in a group, our
social tools have been increasingly giving groups the power to coalesce and act in
political arenas. We are seeing these tools progress from coordination into governance,
as groups gain enough power and support to be able to demand that they be deferred to.
The Digg revolt was one of the broadest examples of this intersection between groups
and governance; it will not be the last.”
– Clay Shirky
Where social tools ultimately end up taking society is still open to debate. It is clear the
ability to communicate better and work with groups of people will bring about changes in
the way things get done in society. Social tools are inherently political by nature simply
because they increase the ability of people to say what they like and to act accordingly.
An increase in the freedom of speech has always generated political change in the past
and it‟s highly likely this will continue to remain true in the future.
Whilst wecan‟t accurately forecast what commercial paths these social tools will take
society down in the future, it‟s already clear the world at large is being pushed down a
route which is largely driven by the technological environment rather than conscious
decisions on the part of business or political leaders. The important question isn‟t really
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whether or not we should allow these tools to spread. The genie is already out of the
bottle. Rather, everyone should be focused now on how social tools will reshape society
and the business environment as a whole.
“When I was growing up, one of the hot debates among my nerd friends was whether
we were living in the Atomic Age or the Space Age. The only interesting question was
whether limitless energy or the wonders of space flight would transform our world more.
We were right to wonder which of the two technologies mattered more, but we didn‟t
know we‟d picked the wrong two. The most important technologies of the time weren‟t
atomic energy and space flight; they were the transistor and the birth control pill. The
very size of the transistor meant that everything in society that touched information
would be turned upside down, which turned out to be a bigger deal than nuclear energy.
By making control of fertility a unilateral and, crucially, a female choice that didn‟t have
to be negotiated case by case, the pill has transformed society in ways far more
important than anything ever accomplished by NASA. The transistor and the birth
control pill are quite unlike each other, but they do have one thing in common: they are
both human-scale inventions that were pulled into society one person at a time, and
they mattered more than giant inventions pushed along by massive and sustained effort.
They changed society precisely because no one was in control of how the technology
was used, or by whom. That is happening again today. A million times a day someone
tries some new social tool. Much of the world can now use these tools, and within a
decade, most of the world will be able to. Our social tools are dramatically improving our
ability to share, cooperate, and act together. As everyone adopts these tools, it is
leading to an epochal change.”
– Clay Shirky
* * *
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