Swarms

Manhattan's birds are brilliant. From my 42nd-floor conference room in Midtown, I often see flocks fly by in perfect formation, suddenly veering right, then left, to dodge the buildings below. It's as if they're being choreographed by some grand master hawk squawking orders from atop the Empire State Building.

Truth is, of course, birds aren't very smart. [Central Park's birds still can't seem to distinguish a cookie wrapper from a bagel chip.] But flocks of them? Different story. Group-think helps them to negotiate skyscrapers and migrate to Miami in a heartbeat.

Humans, too, gain some advantages in groups: we're just starting to figure out how much smarter we can be when linked online. [Five years ago, we began using social media to find and aggregate the people we knew into simple social networks. Then we started organizing our networks to do things, like raise money for a cause.] Now? We're experiencing another big evolutionary shift in the way we use the Net to collaborate. Think swarms—multiple social networks that aggregate rapidly to influence the offline behavior of others. They're much bigger and more powerful than our single social networks ever were. And like SWAT teams, they're all about swooping in to do something quickly, then disbanding.

Four types of super-swarms made headlines last week, offering up some tough lessons in mass collaboration for organizers and bystanders, alike:

* Twestival—the 250-city, one-day global gathering of Twitter users offline—ended up catalyzing hundreds of thousands of people in 186 cities worldwide to raise money for charity:water.org, a New York-based nonprofit that builds freshwater wells in Africa. It was the largest, if not the first, swarm-for-good ever assembled. Yet today, nearly a full week after the Feb. 12 event, Twestival organizers still don't know how much money they raised toward their goal of $1 million. Amanda Rose, Twestival's London-based chief organizer, sent out a tweet early yesterday that attempted to lower expectations: "Reaching $1 million that quick was always going to be tough," she tweeted, "but the awareness that came out was worth it. Will not blame those who didn't reach it." [This followed an earlier tweet that indicated that only 25% of the cities participating had reported how much money they raised. Later still, she tweeted: "We are close to £200k ($284,703.210) so nothing small. Announce soon."] Throughout the day, Rose urged people to continue donating in a last-ditch effort to bring the tally closer to the goal. Take-away: Swarms can easily overwhelm the individuals who organize them; their behavior is very difficult, if not impossible, to document in detail or control by any one individual or nonprofit once catalyzed.

* More than 4,000 people swarmed into London's Liverpool Street Station Feb. 9 to both mock and mimic an ad by a local phone company. Some characterized this Facebook-driven swarm—which totaled 14,000 participants online and off—as, simply, the latest in a series of Internet-inspired pranks in recent years [The first recorded flash mob occurred in Manhattan in 2003.] But this one was different. It might be the first swarm mobilized to mock or mimic something commercial. Previous "flash mobs", new media experts say, have been focused simply on having fun. This swarm resulted from viral marketing writ huge. Take-away: Companies can help to launch a swarm as part of a viral marketing campaign but can't guarantee it will stay "on message."

* The Women's Media Center mobilized a swarm in New York and Washington on Feb. 10 to protest remarks made by TV personality Bill O'Reilly following President Obama's first press conference. O'Reilly derided veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas, calling the 88-year-old journalist "the wicked witch of the East" and poking fun at her age. Within hours, more than 10,000 people sent angry emails to O'Reilly and his producers, forcing the conservative provocateur to apologize to Thomas on air the next day—precisely what the swarm ordered. Take-away: Swarm-advocacy can be used to both challenge and promote free speech and social norms in new and highly powerful ways, raising new questions about the power of a networked crowd to shape the expression—and the behavior—of an individual.

* al Qaeda forces Feb. 11 staged simultaneous suicide attacks on three Afghan government ministries by mobilizing newly formed online strike-swarms. Terrorist "flash mobs" are now being used in smaller-scale terrorist violence, similar to the kind first seen in Mumbai last November, swarm theorist John Arquilla says in a piece he wrote Feb. 17 for The International Herald Tribune. Arquilla says al Qaeda and its affiliates have been using swarm tactics for several years and that they are being coordinated, increasingly, through the use of social media. Take-away: Flash causes, or swarms—when politicized—can be dangerous and difficult to minimize or pre-empt.

Howard Rheingold, the author of the 2003 bestseller, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, says digital swarms are just getting started. Given the evolving "brush fire" mentality of the Web, expect to see many more of them taking collective action offline—for better or worse—in coming months. Warns Rheingold: “As these [flash groups] become politicized, there is a potential for good and for danger.”

For more on the early work of swarms, see Cisco engineer J.D. Stanley’s recent paper, Digital Swarms, here. Also check out Swarm Theory, an article by Peter Miller in the July 2007 National Geographic. And for the upside of swarms, check out Charles Leadbeater's 2008 book, We Think, about mass collaboration and innovation.

(Illustration, The Birds, by Harley McCabe for istock.com)

Share-fest

Some social media factoids from Inauguration Day yesterday:

* More than 1 million status updates were posted on Facebook, averaging some 4,000 per hour for the day.

* An average of 8,500 status updates were posted on Facebook per minute druing Barack Obama's speech.

* Obama's Facebook Fan Page had more than 4 million fans and more than 500,000 wall posts.

* By noon yesterday, CNN had surpassed its all-time total daily streaming record of 5.3 million live streams: between 6a and 3:30p EST yesterday, it had served 21.3 million live video streams globally, nearly four times its previous record

* Twitter reported a surge of five times the normal tweets per second, and experienced some outages due to the rapid rise in traffic.

* ABC News Digital had a record 8.3 million views on ABCNEWS.com and across partner sites including Yahoo! and Verizon VCast.

Also, if you haven't already, check out the new whitehouse.gov site. Click here to see ReadWriteWeb's comparison of this new site with the Web sites of Obama's White House predecessors—the Presidents, of course, who had a Web site at all.

Here's the Photosynth, 3-D image that CNN collected in its The Moment project. It pieces together photos sent to CNN's site the instant Obama put his hand to the Bible and includes images from hundreds of different vantage points around the Capitol steps.

To learn about YouTube's move to make Inauguration Day videos downloadable for free, click here to read Jimmy Orr's post on the Christian Science Monitor's Vote blog.

(Illustration, Number Brain, by Prawny for istock.com)

Change Games

In his 2004 book, "The Wisdom of Crowds," New Yorker columnist James Suroweicki offered the world a simple but profound idea: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few—no matter how brilliant—and are, therefore, much better at problem-solving, innovation, and even predicting the future.

In the four years since Suroweicki's book, the phrases, "the hive mind" and "crowd-sourcing" have entered the lexicon: those inventing the next, "2.0" version of the Web are testing ways that companies, educators, and social change advocates can tap into their thousands of new and expanding social networks—on demand—for better ideas, more money, and greater influence.

Facebook's popular Causes application is already demonstrating what a cause-wired group of colleagues in multiple social networks can do if they share a common goal, like Pave My Street, Elect John Doe, Save the Whales. (Since it debuted a year ago, Causes has some 12 million users supporting more than 80,000 nonprofit causes worldwide.)

Barack Obama's campaign is tapping its "hive mind" of supporters to drum up new bucks and ideas. (OhBoyObama, reports ReadWriteWeb, is an "outsourced think tank." The site asks people to submit policy ideas for a vote by the "crowd" that logs in.)

And at this week's 5th annual Games for Change conference in Manhattan, about 350 video game designers, educators, and change advocates are meeting to create, debate, and demo new types of "cause" games. Suzanne Seggerman, Ben Stokes, and Barry Joseph founded the emerging "games-for-change" movement to enliven public debate and tap players' vast array of social networks for solutions.

Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City , launched yesterday, explores New Orleans' stubborn housing crisis. Created almost entirely by students at Brooklyn's Canarsie High School with Global Kids, a New York City urban youth nonprofit, the game aims to "draw attention to residents' continuing fight for housing in 2008." Players follow the fictional character, Vivica Water, and relive her battle during the 2005 storm to save neighbors from rising floodwaters. (See sketch, below, from an early set design; note the watermark.)


ICED: I Can End Deportation, by the human rights nonprofit Breakthrough, lets players "walk in the shoes" of five teens facing deportation, including Marc of Haiti, who is seeking political asylum; Suki of Japan, who is living in New York on a student visa, and Anna, from Poland, who "thinks she's a (U.S.) citizen." The goal: to show players "how immigration laws deny due process and violate human rights."

But after the role-playing ends, do games like ICED and Tempest really have the power to solve anything?

Designers say that's probably why the most popular (and promising) games stress collaborative problem-solving for the real world. World Without Oil, for example, a year-old game from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, has so far logged 60,000 visitors and 1,800 players from 12 countries who prefer to speak up and share their own views about how an oil shock might impact their real-life jobs, housing, mobility, and relationships—a "play it before you really live it" experience, Seggerman says. Peacemaker, a game about the Middle East conflict, lets players take on the role of either the Israeli or the Palestinian leader (or both, ideally), so as to better understand the kinds of decisions either one of them might be forced to make. UNICEF's Ayiti: The Cost of Life, out this month, transforms poverty into a type of strategy game that asks players to "manage a family of five over four years and keep them healthy and alive, educated and out of debt," says co-creator Barry Joseph of Global Kids. It's tough: winning isn't easy without innovative, collaborative problem-solving.

And what do players think? Are they having fun yet? In a recent survey of ICED players, a majority said they liked the adventure of evading immigration police and then having to maneuver themselves out of a detention pen. But a like-sized majority of players said they also "felt a little manipulated" because the game seemed "a little one-sided" and overtly political, says Shelley Pasnik, director of the Center for Children and Technology, which evaluated the game. "Games like ICED represent a good start," Pasnik says, but game content will need to evolve to represent more varied viewpoints and trigger more offline activism.

Viva the evolution. Says MIT professor Henry Jenkins, an expert in youth media and an enthusiastic supporter of crowd-sourcing social change: "We have to think of ways to use games not just to escape reality but to re-engage with reality."

What do you think?

For more on this week's Games for Change festival , see the video below: