Clay Shirky’s closing CFP plenary

Thesis of Here comes everybody: group action just got easier.

Barrier to ad hoc groups: transaction costs. The internet lowers these costs.

Example1: HSBC offered college students penalty-free checking in the spring. Over the summer, they changed their policy. They had two advantages: information and coordination — students were spread out. There was the usual media outcry; but nothing actually happened. But they hadn’t reckoned with Facebook. Thousands of people joined the group. They wrote up detailed instructions about how to change your bank account — HSBC lost their infomration advantage. Then they started online protests. They started planning an in-person protest for the fall … by then HSBC had caved.

William James: “thinking is for doing”. This change is going on in media: “publishing is for acting”. Media isn’t just a source of information; it’s also a site for action. What Facebook shows is that every URL is (potentially) a link to community.

Example 2: 2006 Minsk ice cream flash mob; photos show secret police dragging kids out. It was illegal to join in a group in the main square. They managed to force the state to act in public, under the cameras. Media as a site of action — action as a site of media. “Nothing says dictatorship like arresting people for eating ice cream”. Takes advantage both of accelaration of publishing *and* shift from advance planning to spontaneous action.

Example 3: Twitter. If people know you’re being held, you’re not held as long. Egypt example. Interesting dynamic of social software. Tools like MS Word and Photoshop have roughly the same effects anywhere around the world. By contrast, social software has very different effects on context. The same technology used in the US for lolcats is used by Bahraini activists to mark up Google maps. In actions where group action is restricted, anything which enables group action is often repurposed for this. Ethan Zuckerman: “tools that are designed specifically for activists are usually the first things governments shut down”; but gov’ts can’t shut down twitter, flickr, … because they’re so broadly used.

Lessons for activists — wiki discusion of “rules and tools”

1) some animals are more equal than others.

Slashdot: first place to get large scale reputation and karma right. Typically get hundreds to thousands of comments. Suffers from the tragedy of the (rhetorical) commons. Once there’s a large audience, there’s a temptation to get that audience’s attention — even for those whose *only* goal is to get attention.

Slashdot’s Gestalt: members defend readers from writers. People who care more than average about Slashdot as a whole (post, meta-moderate, etc.) become “members”. They then give those members power to do more moderation.

Patterns:
1) move comments to a spearate page
2) treat readers and writers differently
3) let users rate posts
4) defensive defaults — e.g., hide 0 and -1 by default

2) short/long and small/large

long reputation both
short neither moderation
small large

for small/short groups, reputation and moderation can be harmful: you get an inert system. for small/long, the key is individual participants: who’s trying to advance the group, and who’s getting in the way.

3) not all enviornments are the same

one of the biggest mistakes is to assume that all environments are the same, and deploy something heavyweight like Slashdot where it doen’t make sense

as of late last year, nobody had replicated Slashdot

4) not all users do the same thing

wikipedia page: 5000+ edits, 2200+ users
most active user: 350 edits.
most participants have made only one edit

the temptations are to design assuming all the users are the same; or do 80/20 rule and ignore the needs of the 20%. the onesies and twosies on the page add up to a huge amount of work

wikpedia lowers the cost of a single pass: if you see a comma missing, it’s no overhead to fix it. similar thing happened with coalition for passenger bill of rights. subdividin participation into tiny chunks and syndicating things incredibly broadly is now an option.

Starting things

sharing: youtube, nature, del.icio.us: i’m doing this for me, and my actions are creating aggregate value

cooperation (wikipedia, linux): people altering their behavior to synchronize with others who are also changing their behavior

collective action: the outcome has value to the group; the group stands or falls as a whole. the hardest to get going

something i noticed after finishing the book: the world is filled with sharing examples. there are a bunch of well-understood collaborative examples: open source, wikis. for collective action, almost all the examples we have now are about stopping things — Filipinos turning out against the government; HSBC protests.

what’s the difference between cooperation and collective action? not sure, but here’s a thought:

the collaborative production successes we have all center around intellectual property. the thing that makes this possible is the licensing structure — GPL, Creative Commons, GFDL. we don’t have an equivalent for group action in the real world.

front porch forum in vermont: make it easy for towns to have online bulletin boards. for example, what to do about sidewalks. gap: there’s no equivalent license, no way for law to defer to the group. for example, a group can’t sign up for a bank account; it can only be one person. if however the group walks out and incorporates, no problem. the law recognizes corporations as social structures.

what i’m wondering is whether it’s possible to use corporate structure to let a group come together.

tantalizing examples: “the virtual company project”, trying to let groups come together, take on their own governance rules, invest in sweat equity, and get recognized by the state.

UK: the community interest company; for-profit companies with social goals. right now, if i took over ben and jerry’s and introduced ground-up-kitten ice cream … i could do that. community interest companies can write things into their bylaws in a (relatively) inalienable way.

somewhere between a bet and a hope: this is going to happen.

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Fred Lane: front porch forum. The political aspects are interesting: officials get access to all their consituents. This service has jacked up the levels of involvement and activism to new heights.

Clay: I use it as the benchmark example, because it’s the right software and hte right environment. The social transformation we’re going through matters more than the technological one; these tools don’t get interesting socially until they’re technologically boring. what’s the most interesting social technology of 2008? email! people forwarding the links around.

Greg Vetter: I’d add Mozilla as an example — moving to a for-profit entity. Resonates with my research. (not clear if they wrote anything into their bylaws?)

Dave Reed: from my experience on boards, including a community-focused startup, the thing that’s missing is the overhead. it’s now taken me over a year to form a non-profit. how to reduce this?