Speed as Strategy

Social media scholar Clay Shirky likes to tell the story of Russia's Voina street-art activists and the June night in 2010, when some of its members painted a drawbridge leading to the Bolshoy Dom, the former headquarters of the KGB and Soviet secret police in St. Petersburg, where Russian President Vladimir Putin would be arriving the next morning. To passersby, what they had painted wasn't immediately clear —until the drawbridge was raised slowly the next morning, revealing a giant phallus rising skyward in full glory at precisely the time Putin pulled up in his motorcade.

Fast forward almost six years, to this past Thursday, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation released an article detailing 65 things the public did not know about NSA surveillance at this same time last year. EFF had been working on the analysis for weeks, based on a year of reporting on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations of mass NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens. The EFF's article was released to mark the first anniversary of the Snowden leaks—as well as EFF's 25th anniversary.

Both Voina's overnight street provocations and EFF's months of reporting are examples of cause activism—but occurring at two vastly different speeds. "Voina's drawbridge stunt occurred in the Internet's native time signature of right now," Shirky said, in remarks at this week's meeting of the annual Personal Democracy Forum in New York. "EFF's occurred in the institutional time signature of a quarter of a century."

Causes need activism at both speeds to thrive and survive, Shirky says. "As online cause communities grow and mature, it's tempting to think we should move the time signatures we operate at from the short-term to the long term, away from quick actions to longer ones. But I think that's wrong. I think what we should do is expand the window of the time signatures in which we can operate because things work better when (the two speeds) can be made to work in tandem."

Just don't underestimate the strategic power of short-term actions, Shirky cautioned. Slacktivism works, he said.

"We've been hearing for some time now that slacktivism is ridiculous, stupid and, 'How can you think that would work, right?'" Shirky said. "But if (slacktivism) never worked, Brendan Eich would still have a job," Shirky added, referring to the former CEO of Mozilla who was pressured into resigning earlier this year following an online protest of his support earlier this year for taking away the right of same sex couples to marry in California. The online campaign to oust Eich, Shirky said, "was a pure slacktivist movement. It was an entirely virtual uprising and it was about public humiliation, and yet it worked."

Slacktivism also works, Shirky said—even when short-term defeat is absolutely assured. "Putin is still very much in control of Russia," Shirky said. "But Voina's action and a thousand other public manifestations of one sort or another robbed incumbents there of their ability to insist that the seeming consensus of the Russian public is real. That (short-term) activity, even if it doesn't lead to revolution, is incrementally achieved."

The takeaway here? If you're a cause organization, don't ask which speed is best, but rather consider how the organization can operate better at both speeds.  "If you're an institution, ask yourself what would happen if something on your issue forced you to react overnight, what could you do? Could you only issue a press release or could you also paint a bridge if you had to?" Shirky asked PDFers. "Or, if you're part of a ragtag group fighting for net neutrality and you know you're up against a September 10th deadline, ask yourself what you might do differently if you knew you'd be having that same fight over and over and over again over the next five years."

"And if you're going to pull a stunt, ask yourselves what residue of human connection and trust will it leave," Shirky added. "When people turned out in Tahrir Square, the social media that turned out to matter the most was that which fed the physical occupation of the Square. It wasn't Facebook or Twitter. Those were good for broadcasting things internationally and nationally. The social media that mattered most was SMS. The biggest social media predictor of physical presence in Tahrir Square was whether your name was in the address book of the phone of someone already in the Square."

"Stunts don't leave that residue of trust. They don't introduce people to each other.  If you're building an institution, ask yourself of all long-term thinking: 'What if we had to surprise the world tomorrow? What would we do?' Because you might have to, "Shirky said.

"I think we cannot forget the lessons of complex movements like the Arab Spring and like Occupy Wall Street, which is that the various time signatures work better together," Shirky said. "Shorter-term is good for surprises but it is lousy for continuity and capacity-building. Long-term is great for continuity but lousy for surprises.  ...We need to start thinking of time itself as a strategic weapon."

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photography: Bowie15]

Swarms, Redux

In the past few weeks, a number of friends and colleagues have been sending me notes on the uprisings in the Middle East, knowing that I'm writing a book called Swarms, on social media and their ability to rapidly expand the coordination and power of self-organized groups.

As new protests spread across the Middle East [ the result, in part, of coordinated action via social media], here are some quick observations:

* The Internet, mobile phones and online social networks are tools for rapid coordination that can help people to synchronize their beliefs and coordinate their actions -- faster, easier and on a much larger scale than ever before;

* Establishment institutions aren't afraid of big ideas so much as synchronized action -- and social media tools in the hands of the voiceless, disaffected or disenfranchised (those with an ax to grind or a cause to promote) can effectively re-calibrate the balance of power;

* Social media can be an accelerant, enabling social movements to crop up in weeks and days rather than taking years to mobilize, as before;

* Social media can make weak social ties stronger, making it easier for people with similar ideas and sentiments to find each other and create communities of coordinated action;

* The Internet can help to distribute leadership and decentralize it; movements no longer need a single charismatic leader calling all the shots;

* Net-coordinated dissent is going regional. Social networks are now influencing other social networks;

* There is an arms race of technology between the governed and those governing. Egyptian authorities were clueless; China's are not. NYU colleague Kristen Taylor, on a social media panel last week in New York during Social Media Week, coined the term, "The Mubarak Effect." Said Taylor: "It's this tone deaf thing that's happening that can happen, really, in any sector. You have someone in there who's not listening (via social media), who's unable to listen and it ends up really bad."]

* A nation that disconnects its Internet and mobile phones opts out of the world economy -- insuring that no nation challenged by synchronized action via social media can afford to disconnect citizens completely for very long;

* The combination of online and offline activism is powerful, as is an independent press. Al-Jazeera's balanced coverage and livestreams of the protests added to the momentum and credibility of the youth movements in Cairo and Tunisia and elsewhere, spawned via social media;

* The ability of social media to bear unfiltered witness to events -- and distribute videos of them as are happening -- makes it harder for information "to go away" but easier for people in failed uprisings to be identified by regimes later -- and "disappeared."

For more on digital swarms, see Mary Joyce's blog post on the tech that powers activists on the Meta-Activism Project blog, and Clay Shirky's piece on social media and political dissent in Foreign Policy Magazine. See also Hillary Clinton's recent speech on Internet freedom, and this NPR interview, below, with Alec Ross -- the State Department's social media advisor. The State Department, Ross says, is now monitoring the tweets of influential people around the world, and chiefly those in the Middle East. "It's fascinating...the degree to which information can be made available in real-time from sources who wouldn't have been historically elevated," he says.

Here's Ross, below:

What do you think? Let us hear from you.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Photo: Street protest in Yemen: Reuters)

Fixing Social Media

A lot of cause-wired groups aren't using social media effectively enough yet to bring about large-scale social change, NYU Professor and author Clay Shirky told people attending Day 2 of this week's Personal Democracy Forum in Manhattan. "Digital activism has, in a large part, trapped itself in a tragedy of the commons," he said today.

Rather than help a majority of cause activists to become more active and effective, he said, social media -- more often than not -- are being used to simply make activists more vocal. "Much activism online so far has been more about making noise than sending persuasively strong signals" to those in power that change is necessary, Shirky said. Failure by cause-wired groups to improve this "signal-to-noise ratio," Shirky said, will risk turning digital activism into little more than "crowdsourced PR" for any number of do-good causes. "The thing I would like most to see now is more of an effort by social activists" to help cause-wired groups send stronger signals for change to those in power, he said.

The popular author of Here Comes Everybody (and a new book, Cognitive Surplus -- both about the rise of self-organized groups online) -- shared three ways that cause-wired groups might become more effective online:

1. Raise the cost of communication. Design your cause around group commitments to do more than simply fire off emails. "When the cost of communication falls, the (strength of the) signal falls," Shirky said. Case in point: A group of women in India last year formed a group on Facebook called The Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women to fight beatings by religious conservatives seeking to squelch their freedom of expression. The group attracted hundreds of supporters, who organized a campaign to send pink underwear to leaders of the conservative group and to government officials to fight the harassment. The women won; the government stepped in to stop it. "Governments (authorities) tend to respond to groups rather than individuals," Shirky said.

2. Assume factions. The Obama Administration's change.gov site, during its first days, stumbled when it asked people to list what one issue they wanted the government to tackle most immediately. The crowdsourced favorite? Marijuana law reform -- above all other issues facing the nation at the time, including war and the failing economy. "Was this a result of people who hadn't been given a voice before finally getting their say or was it a successful effort by some people to game the system so that their issue could came out on top?" Shirky queried. "That's one of the central tensions facing online activism today." The government, in this case, needed to enable multiple discussions around multiple issues on the change.gov site, Shirky said -- rather than invite supporters to make just one list. "By making one list, the Obama administration made a mistake," Shirky said. "It didn't give each faction room to have its say online."

3. Regard elected representatives (or corporate managers) as partners, not targets, in your push for change. On Capitol Hill, Shirky said, lawmakers consider messages from activist groups that are delivered via thousands of emails to have "zero signal" and so they largely are ignored. But if a social action group could say, instead, to a lawmaker that it was "sending only 1,000 emails from people who really care about a particular issue, who live in your district and who vote in each election," the noise turns to signal -- "and a rare kind of signal that is largely missing in digital political activism these days," Shirky said.

Among other conference highlights from today:

* Alison Fine and Beth Kanter, coauthors of the new book, The Networked Nonprofit, said most nonprofits still act like fortresses, detached and self-protected from the world around them. This needs to change, Fine said. Nonprofits needs to start engaging their supporters and others interested in the issues they're advocating, or these organizations will risk losing support and won't survive.

* Howard Rheingold, author of the 2003 book, SmartMobs, said it's time to start teaching people how to better vet and shoulder the explosion of information that's coming at them over the Web. He also urged conferees to be more mindful -- intentional and deliberate -- in what they do to fight for change online. "By mindful, I mean there needs to be more directed attention given to things," Rheingold said. "We need to get out and meet each other and engage in the physical world. ... We need to give more active attention to the big issues .. to making sure, for example, that the information we are getting online is not getting narrorwer and narrower" because of rising use of Web filters by Web companies seeking to provide personalized information to their users.

* Susan Crawford, on the law faculty at the University of Michigan and formerly an FCC advisor to President Obama, urged conferees to fight for keeping high-speed access to the Internet accessible to all. “We are in the course of a titanic battle for the future of the Internet in the United States," she said. "The technology community is radically underrepresented in this battle" and needs to speak out so that digital citizen activism can have a strong future. Crawford urged the few hundred technologists in the audience not to take "high-speed, open Internet access for granted" and to speak up against further consolidation of broadband control by corporate interests.

The conference ends tomorrow.

The New Watercooler

In Ken Auletta's bestseller, Googled, about the massive social and economic changes triggered by the Web, Auletta quotes NYU new media professor Clay Shirky as saying we're living through such rapid, destabilizing change, that "the old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place."

The change is so wrenching, Shirky says, that when people demand to know how we're going to "replace" newspapers -- and all the other you-name-its getting knocked into irrelevancy or reshaped by the Web's tsunami-forces -- "people really are demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution, that the ancient social bargains are not in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it..."

I recalled Shirky's words while attending Justmeans.com's Social Media and Stakeholder Engagement conference last Friday in London; many of the panelists [some from iconic corporate brands, including Unilever, Royal Dutch Shell, Dell, and SAP, among others] provided a rare glimpse at the degree to which social media are creating palpable levels of discomfort inside the modern corporation. Gathering at the 250-year-old, former Whitbread Brewery on the eastern rim of Georgian London, now a conference center, conferees spoke candidly about their scramble to find ways to use social media to win and retain employees, customers, and other stakeholders.

Especially insightful were remarks by Tim Johns, VP of Corporate Communications at Unilever, who said that employee/management communication inside most large companies today "is at an all-time low," and that new people coming into the workplace "are tuning us out completely." Johns said this new generation of workers are among the most sophisticated users of media in modern history. "They have multiple interfaces with media and information and listen to what they choose, when they choose and how they choose -- and yet the funny thing is, at many organizations, we [in management] forget this." This is dangerous, Johns said:

"Young people have the ability to filter you out. They can put you on mute.
They can be looking at you, you can be looking at them, but they are simply not listening and will change the channel whenever something is being said or done that stops interesting them.
They do not lose these skills when they come to work."

It's scary, John says, because "the biggest driver of a company's reputation is its performance; performance is your people and so therefore, your employee engagement is your reputation." If your employees are putting you on mute, Johns said, your corporation's reputation is at stake. Johns said the only place where trust is rising in today's workplace are on social networks, among so-called "P.L.Us" -- People Like Us, one's peers.

Therefore, Johns said, companies need to start engaging with employees by creating social networks in the workplace that aren't about controlling the communication but are, instead, about facilitating it. Unilever, for one, has set up a MySite "zone" across the organization's UK operations, what Johns describes as an "internal Facebook" where employees with similar interests or skills can "find each other" and collaborate around new projects and solutions. [Do social media in this context fulfill the "knowledge management" goals that corporations have been chasing ever since the Web's emergence in the enterprise some 15 years ago?]

But there are barriers, Johns said. To be successful, senior managers must "rescue internal communications from the dead hand of HR," he said. "My hope is that when the revolution comes, HR people will be the first against the wall. The dead hand of HR in most organizations has killed employee engagement. [HR people] tend to be hierarchical, one-way communicators who want to tell you what's good for you and force you to accept it."

Among other conference highlights:

* Robert Nuttall, former head of internal communications for Marks & Spencer, the British retailer, said many companies are using social media to be in one-way communication with employees and customers, alike -- what he called "telling mode" versus engagement. "On many fronts, there is still a long way to go," he said. Nuttall said firms that fail embrace social media do so at their peril. "At some point in future," he said, "there will be a point at which companies will be called to account much more harshly than they are now" by their employees, consumers, and activists, and social media are the best way to engage corporate stakeholders as collaborators.

* Bjorn Edlund, former Executive VP of Royal Dutch Shell, agreed that many companies are struggling in their effort to harness social media. But he urged social media advocates inside corporations "to be stubborn. If you believe in change, you have to fight for it. Ask them to talk to their kids, to realize how the modern world works. Then ask them to come back and reconsider."

*Dan McQuillan, Head of Digital, Enterprise UK and co-founder of Social Innovation Camp, said social media are important because they help companies understand what matters most to their customers and employees. Companies need to "make themselves hackable," he said; people will construct change on their own, he said, if they see their own companies dropping the ball. The key, then, for organizations? Use social media to "find, and then be in the [stakeholder] conversations wherever innovation is occurring," McQuillan said.

* Ed Gillespie co-founder of Futerra, urged his corporate peers to use social media to help "create sizzle" among employees about the company's "do-good" work. "It's about selling the sizzle, about focusing on what gets people internally really excited," Gillespie said. "It's about using social media to generate social proof that this thing you're working on has meaning." He said it's like the story about the hot dog salesman in the States, who tells a customer that he is not selling the sausage, but the sizzle -- the aroma, the smell, the excitement. Gillespie added: "If you're not selling the sizzle of sustainability, then it's like the hot dog salesman says; you're just selling a dead pig."

How much does your company use social media in the workplace? Let us hear from you.

-- By Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Oscar Scotellaro for istock.com)

Now Media

Amid Iran's continuing protests, much is being said about the “state of now”—what happens to the speed of change when it’s possible to share real-time information and cellphone videos with anyone around the world about major events as they occur. "Now media"—cellphones, the Web, Facebook and Twitter—are redefining what it means to be civically engaged.

“That a new information technology—[so-called “now media” such as Twitter, cellphones, mobile vlogs]—could be improvised for this purpose so swiftly is a sign of the times,” blogger Andrew Sullivan gushed in his recent post, The Revolution Will be Twittered, about the public demonstrations in Iran challenging the outcome of Iran's June 12 presidential election. “ …You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before.” Political blogger Maegan Carberry, meanwhile, told last week’s 140 Character Conference in Manhattan, the nation’s first all-things-Twitter thoughtfest, that “social media are pushing us into an era of post-partisanship,” where political parties become far less important because group-to-group communication helps people to self-identify common goals. Says NYU new media professor Clay Shirky, "We are living through the largest increase in expressive capability in human history.” The surge of Twitterized news reporting out of Iran, he says, has made the Iranian uprising historically unprecedented. “This is it. The big one,” he told TED interviewers. "This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media.” [And Twitter, of all social media, is having impact at the moment because authorities have not yet found a way to shut it down completely.]

Iran, of course, isn’t the first world hotspot where social media have been used to focus global attention in a heartbeat. Cell phone videos and text-messaging by on-the-ground activists were instrumental in exposing the government corruption that was blocking foreign aid to victims of Burma's Cyclone Nargis. Social media also helped to leak word out to the world about the 2007 pro-democracy uprising by Burmese monks; the hardline censorship by Chinese authorities during last summer’s Beijing Olympics, and the extent of China's deadly 2008 earthquake —details of which, says Shirky, would have otherwise taken years to go public.

But whoa, Nellie. While Iran is showing us, again, that social media can—in rocket speed—expose the undercurrents of dissent and the underbelly of corruption in sometimes shocking detail, these tools have not yet been able to originate mass dissent, nor drive widespread reforms, at least not yet. For every successful Net-aided protest, such as the Facebook campaign last year against FARC in Colombia, there are at least a dozen more uprisings that end when authorities shut down the Net or—as with the as-yet unmutable Twitter in Iran—track down agitators and "disappear” them, creating a chilling climate of self-censorship that all but cedes power to those abusing it.

More significant, perhaps, is the power of Twitter and other forms of social media to accelerate the rate at which events play out, regardless of outcome, and how that speed can be destabilizing, in and of itself. Jason Calacanis, the social media entrepreneur and CEO of mahalo.com, calls the Internet "the greatest accelerator since the advent of the written word." Speaking on a panel on social media and politics that I convened and moderated at this year's Milken Global Conference in LA, Calacanis said: "Truth gets wrestled away from the rumors more rapidly now; if you’re on the wrong side of society, you get outed in hyperspeed." Further, he said, "When you're on the wrong side of an issue, it’s very hard to be involved in an online discourse because if you are, the quicker you'll get to the inevitability of being wrong.”

Indeed, the challenge now for Web-powered activists is figuring out how to use these new tools to do more. As Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey told the 140 Character Conference's standing-room-only crowd last week: “We have this brand new tool [Twitter] to help us in this experiment in democracy, but where are we taking this? What are we doing with this technology and how are we sustaining these concepts of immediacy, approachability and transparency to open up the process of every social community from families to the largest governments in the world?”

Great question, Jack. For more debate on the power and future of social media, follow next week’s Personal Democracy Forum in Manhattan, which likely will include a late-addition workshop on Iran. And for more on how social media may be already shaping the course of political history, see Clay Shirky’s recent TED talk, below:



(This post by Marcia Stepanek)
(YouTube cellphone video of Iran protesters June 20, 2009, above, courtesy BBC)

Party's Over

The air in Davos this past week was so thick with gloom over the convulsing economy and Wall Street greed [$20 billion in bonuses paid out despite hefty bank bailouts and historic layoffs], that many CEOs leaving the World Economic Forum for home today "bore the harrowed looks of survivors of the Donner Party," according to Newsweek columnist Daniel Gross.

Quick, boys. It's time to dust off those old corporate social responsibility [CSR] initiatives and retool them into Web-driven programs that deliver—or your company may find its precious brands, recruitment efforts, and corporate culture worth zilch to Generation G (for Good). That's the name trendwatching.com gives—in a just-released report—to a growing segment of cause-wired, global consumers aged 40 or younger who consider "generosity" an important social and business mindset. "As consumers are disgusted with greed and its current dire consequences for the economy...has there ever been more urgency for corporations to ditch the greed and embrace generosity?" the February 2009 report asks in its introduction. "...Sharing is the new giving...In this business climate, can you really afford not to spend some time figuring out how to get a little closer to your customers?"

Compiled for business leaders in more than 120 countries from a global network of 8,000 trendspotters, the report lists various ways firms might use social media and other initiatives to create social responsibility programs that matter:

*Co-donate. Collaborate with customers about how often to donate—and to which causes. Use online and mobile technologies "to make the most of impulse-driven and networked fundraising."
*Be eco-generous. Don't just offset your company's impact on the environment; find ways to improve it .
*Engage in "free love"—in this case, give away some goods, like free coffees or free travel guides to consumers.
*Use brand butlers to help customers make the most of the company's products. IKEA, for example, loans out branded bikes with trailers to its customers in Denmark to help them transport their purchases home.
*Engage in "perkonomics." Offer perks like reserved parking to, say, owners of a specific automotive brand, or let preferred customers jump queues at busy events.
*Offer "tryvertising." Let customers try products before they purchase them to make their purchasing decisions based on their product experiences rather than corporate brand messages.

There's no question: with public trust in CEOs and corporations at rock-bottom and the change mantra out of Washington [and Davos] still freshly potent, cause-wired social entrepreneurs have never had a better opportunity to boost traction for their Web-powered ideas as they head into the start of their own summit season—first at the vaunted TED2009 conference in Long Beach on Wednesday and then at the Skoll Foundation's World Forum in Oxford in March.

In the months ahead, expect aggressive efforts by leaders of the social enterprise movement to track and compile the ROI of social media in for-profit and nonprofit enterprises. Says new media expert Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations: "Design an environment where people can feel good at what they're doing...and they'll flock to your venture."

For more on designing initiatives for generosity that also work for the bottom line, see Shirky's talk at the recent Pop!Tech conference in Maine, below:

(Illustration by Miroslaw Pieprzyk)

Blockage

Change, Obama-style—the social media/open White House stuff—hit a bit of a brick wall this week, but it was mostly silly stuff. [See Jeff Zeleny's piece in The New York Times about Obama's hard-won fight to keep his Blackberry and see Tom Watson's grumbling over the sluggish postings and flat content he found on the Whitehouse.gov site that debuted Tuesday.]

The irony wasn't lost on anyone: Obama's tech team pretty much wrote the book on how to use social media to drum up and engage supporters, build a movement, and raise a lot of money online to challenge the Establishment. That this same team—now itself the Establishment—would diss the computers, networks, and software it inherited at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was mostly to be expected. [Obama spokesman Bill Burton told Washington Post reporter Anne Kornblut Thursday that going from the working conditions of the campaign to the working conditions of the White House has been "kind of like going from Xbox to Atari."] How cool is that, right? [We got it.]

Ultimately, of course, it's not about the equipment. The much harder bit will be figuring out how to manage [and effectively lead] the crowds that Obama's social media brought to the party—namely, millions of cause-wired constituents impatient for 24/7 information-sharing and input on everything from the economy to the names of the inevitable First Dogs. How best to keep feeding these newly cause-wired constituents ever-newer things to share-hear-diss-do? How best for anyone to lead in an era of ever-higher demands for participation spawned by wider use of social media? Nonprofits are being pressed to do no less than reinvent their role as charity middlemen, thanks to social networks that can [and are] creating new causes, with or without established nonprofits to support or guide them. What follows is an edited transcript of a conversation I had recently with new media expert and Here Comes Everybody author Clay Shirky on the need for new forms of leadership to manage in this new climate. [Watch this space: a podcast version will air here next month as part of Cause Global's new Cause Radio series.]

Do social media require us to invent new ways to manage organizations?

They absolutely do. I don’t think traditional management is something that can control this. Organizations everywhere are essentially wrestling with how do we hybridize with these newly capable, self-organized groups that use social media to come together around a cause—or, in Obama's case, around a candidate. It's really that kind of Vatican II sensibility—Vatican II being the 1960s doctrine from the Catholic Church that said the people are the church, a fairly radical move; and yet, compared to what's happening in the organizational world and in politics—the idea that the government is the people—the Vatican was actually 40 years ahead of its time.

There's a temptation among most managers to view social media tools and crowdsourcing as simply a sort of novel set of instruments, kind of like, "Oh, here are some new tools for us to get our job done." But this isn't just about laying our hands on some new tools. These crowds are people. It’s really an organizational shift. People managing these newly interactive organizations need to start explaining why it is that what they're doing and asking is important. They need to start articulating how, say, your input is helping the organization and its cause. It really does involve a degree of openness on the part of existing organizations that we haven't seen before. In fact, if you're a manager of a traditional organization looking for control, you will have trouble in this Web 2.0 environment. There's an analogy here. It's the relationship between the structure an organization can provide and what eventually grows up among the people who come there. It's a little bit like the relationship between a trellis and a vine. You can shape it, but the organic growth and the ultimate structure is really going to be produced by the people who come there.

Is there someone or some new organization doing this well?

Boing Boing, one of the well-trafficked Web blogs, has a brilliant community manager named Theresa Nielsen Hayden, whose principal MO is to sit back and watch. She is in charge of one of the Internet’s real hot spots, an incredible amount of conversational energy forming around the various things that Boing Boing posts on its Web log; and yet, she doesn't go in and try and set the tone. She simply tries to set outer boundaries for the conversation, like, this is name-calling and it's off the rails, or, this is a person riding their hobbyhorse. And so she's not trying to guide the community so much as keep it from going into a rat hole where the conversation will collapse. It’s the opposite of the traditional managerial style. When she got to Boing Boing, she did almost nothing for three months except watch. And everybody was like, "What are you doing? Aren't you supposed to be going in and managing the comments?" She was like, "Hang on a minute. Let's just see what happens."

Occasionally, she would step in when she had to. And what she was waiting for is to identify who in the community would come forward and start essentially taking on the community as a whole, shepherding it, the natural leaders emerging from in the community base. And then once she identified them, she hired them to keep doing it. That kind of managerial style is not the 30,000-foot visionary and it's not the micro-manager. It's in this middle zone where there's a high degree of facilitation, but there's also just a high degree of observation—What is going to happen next?—because in these kind of new open environments, there's a good chance that what happens next organically will be more interesting, more effective, and more important than something you could decide in a morning meeting.

So it's a kind of natural selection: if left alone, the group will choose its own leaders?

Yes. There's a lot of rhetoric around about self-organized and bottom-up and so forth. And it is very possible to overstate the case, to take the illusion that if you just dump a million people together, somehow Wikipedia emerges as a side effect. But I think, critically, for these large-scale, long-term management efforts [of newly interactive organizations and institutions], there is a profound need for [a new type of] leadership. It's not that, you know, somehow social media and crowdsourcing lead to mob rule. Rather, those most interested and able in a crowd tend to identify themselves and emerge to step up to the plate.

When you look at, say, Wikipedia—2 million articles in the English language contributed by over 3 million users—you see that there's a core group of people who care much more than the average person in that crowd about the success of the project as a whole. The kinds of leadership that make those core groups work is very different than, "Well, I'm the CEO, and you're the CFO, and you're the COO, and we have this org chart." It's much subtler and more flexible than that. But just because the structure doesn't look like what we're used to doesn't mean there's no structure. This isn't a choice between structure and no structure. It's more of a choice between a more rigid and a more flexible structure.

We've all seen those orchestra conductors who walk off stage and, of course, the orchestra keeps playing brilliantly. Is the type of leadership required here more comparable to that of an orchestra conductor, or is there a need for a new kind of leadership that we've not yet invented?

There is an Israeli conductor, Itay Talgam, who gives a talk on leadership styles using orchestra conductors as the example. And the critical thing that a conductor does is synchronize the orchestra because the complexity of self-synchronization is hard at that scale. Critically, string quartets have no conductor. The first violin is essentially providing the synchronization. But the need for the kind of management that the conductor provides really only comes with scale.

So if you've got a small-scale group, you can actually get away with much lighter management styles than if you have a large-scale group. It's when you grow that you need a heavier style. The other question about the new type of leadership is how to get a group of people to all agree that a shared vision is something they'll pursue even if they don't agree with every particular. Some of this is ancient stuff—you can go back to Plato and Aristotle and the argument about how to form an ideal republic. Today, what we're dealing with is essentially a new mix, precisely because of the new technology capabilities. Every political norm is really a bargain with the current environment. When the environment changes, the political norms can change, as well.

One of the political norms has been that it takes a large institution to accomplish large-scale, long-term tasks. But that's no longer true anymore. You can write a complicated piece of software or create an encyclopedia without needing the kind of institutional and managerial frame you needed before. What I think is coming is a new type of leadership style that will expand into other kinds of collective action—in particular, real-world collective action. And so, for a traditional institution, this is really a moment where, if the organizational structure doesn't change, then the institution is essentially going to find itself working at cross-purposes with many of its members. This is a challenge that people in the Obama administration are facing; that people in nonprofits are facing; that people in many institutions are facing: how to change the organizational structure enough to accommodate Web-enabled, ground-up, collective action—self-organized groups of members or supporters or constituents that, because they're using new technology tools, are demanding interaction at far higher levels than before. This is something that really is unprecedented. Those organizations which fail to exert new leadership will risk losing support.

(Illustration by Miroslaw Pieprzyk)

Flash Causes

Earlier this week, something happened involving Twitter that has convinced me and a lot of other social media watchers that on-the-fly “flash” advocacy—rapidly, self-assembled groups formed to instantly solve a problem—has already arrived, big-time.

On Tuesday, a Chicago design executive, David Armano, posted an emotional tweet on his Twitter feed to request help for Daniela, an acquaintance facing urgent family and economic problems. We’ve all heard about social media appeals but this one turned into a genuine flash cause, as Armano’s online social network of more than 8,000 followers galvanized into action. Within a few hours on Tuesday, Armano’s appeal had raised more than $5,000. By Wednesday, thousands of sympathetic tweets had poured into his Twitter feed along with donations topping $11,000. By noon today, the cash raised had exceeded $15,000—and growing. “OK friends,” Daniela tweeted this morning, "thank-you for an unforgettable day and a half [sic]. I’m cooked. Really am so proud at how you came through.” [One of the people who donated to Daniela called the flash group, in a tweet, “the social media compassion mafia” and congratulated it for its generous and rapid response.]

The significance here is that Daniela’s digital rescue isn’t an isolated phenomenon. For months now, people in social networks have begun to self-organize into flash causes using Twitter—as well as other forms of social media. [Much has already been written about EpicChange.org’s recent Tweetsgiving campaign, which raised $10,000 in the 48 hours before Thanksgiving to build a classroom in Tanzania.] Earlier this fall, techPresident blogger Nancy Scola and colleague Alison Fine organized the Twitter Vote Report, which began as an effort on election day to create a real-time citizen-watch campaign to guard against voter intimidation—but also ended up providing a popular way for mostly first-time voters to share their personal experiences voting in a presidential election.

So what does all of this mean for social action? Can people like Dave Armano or EpicChange organizers Stacey Monk and Avi Kaplan be as successful a second time—if, say, they tried mobilizing their networks again, but this time on behalf of someone or something else? What makes people more prone to staging a successful flash cause than others? Are flash causes a temporary phenomenon fueled by the novelty of the technology, itself, or yet another powerful example of how one’s social capital online can be more powerful, in some ways, than personal wealth in fighting social ills?

There’s no science yet on the subject, of course, but there seems to be many things that flash campaigns have in common so far—a social network of highly motivated people who want to do something autonomously of any established group; the belief that no other group can help as quickly or as effectively; the shared desire to help create something new and unique, and the inspiration of an influential, highly engaged catalyst [or pair of them] with an already-large online social network poised to make a difference.

Still skeptical? HubSpot’s recent State of the Twittersphere Report estimates there are some 5 million people in the Twitter community and that it's growing by some 10,000 new accounts per day. Key to more growth will be the types of conversations the community will have; many social media watchers [myself included] believe Twitter use will become more cause-focused as it integrates a search function—and as more sophisticated mobile phone technology becomes ubiquitous this year. Watch for more efforts using Twitter as a “citizen watch” or flash-cause organizer locally and abroad.

For more on David Armano’s campaign for Daniela, go to Armano’s blog, here, and his Twitter page, here. For more on the rise of self-organized, online cause groups, see this video clip (below) of Clay Shirky addressing the recent Pop!Tech 2008 conference. Social media, Shirky says, are encouraging people to “design [new groups] for generosity” and are—in the process—“reversing everything we’re used to” about traditional philanthropy.



(Illustration, above, by Miroslaw Pieprzyk for istock.com)

It's Getting Crowded in Here

Thanks to the rise of social media, more people are having their say about things. The audience has begun talking to the stage: consumers, more and more, are talking to the producers; activists/donors are talking to the nonprofits; citizens are talking to the media. The information flow has reversed. The result? A cacaphony of input and ideas, from the ground up. Across society, says Charles Leadbeater, social media are fueling the "rise of the amateur professional." Here's an animated whiteboard that Leadbeater made to explain what he means. He shared it last week in Amsterdam, at the third annual PICNIC idea-fest:



Leadbeater is the author of the book, We Think, about the impact of social media-driven mass innovation.

Clay Shirky, the author of Here Comes Everybody, also spoke at PICNIC this year. I caught up with him before the conference and I got his take on the rise of mass collaboration and mass innovation. Shirky wonders whether society's traditional institutions are ready to handle this surge of mass input. New types of leadership, he says, are needed to manage it all:

"There's a general awareness now that the Net isn't simply a decoration on contemporary society. It's a challenge to it. A society that has an Internet is a different kind of society than one that doesn't, much like a society with a printing press was very different than the one without it. Unlike all of the media revolutions in human history, though—the printing press, the telegraph, moving images and sound, and finally the ability to harness broadcast—the Internet creates groups. It moves us into a world of two-way groups.

Group action in society just got easier. This is a big deal. Freedom of speech, assembly and religion are all now the same freedom. We are living now through the largest increase of human expressive capability in history."

The significance for nonprofits and other advocacy groups? "A big part of the traditional organization is going to be comprised now of people you have to convince rather than command," Shirky told Cause Global. "Where the organization is headed will be set partly by management and partly by the members, and it's something employers will have to learn to live with."

For more big thoughts—the top 10 trends stemming from social media shared at PICNIC this year—click here.

(Illustration by istock.com)

Peep Show

For cause-wired advocates this week, there’s been no missing the irony of China’s Olympic slogan, One World, One Dream. The aggressive push by China’s 30,000 cybercops to continuously monitor and control the information that citizen advocacy groups are able to send in and out of China is only boosting the perception of this year’s Olympics as a qualifying heat for one of the biggest contests of the coming decade—the battle between an expanding, cause-wired citizenry and governments around the globe who would block the free flow of information. (For a comprehensive overview of the battle, click here.)

Indeed, like the athletes competing for Gold in Beijing’s Water Cube, China's censors have wasted no time showing off their speed and muscle: their moves to censor Twitter, crack down on video-sharing sites (both YouTube and a Chinese version of it called 56.com), and make it hard (if not utterly impossible) to load some Web sites such as Human Rights Watch and Reporters sans Frontieres from inside the Foreign Press Center remain firmly (and predictably) intact as of today.

But what's happening this week in China, despite the widespread use of beefed-up, anti-censorship software by those would not be bowed, is more than simply an internationally-broadcast dust-up over who gets the last word (or the first online).

Internet censorship is on the rise in many countries, partly a reaction by nervous governments to the rapid and growing use of social media by citizen activists around the world. John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, says there has been a surge in the scale, scope, and sophistication of Internet filtering. In the past five years, he says, "we have gone from a couple of states doing state-mandated Net filtering to 25."

But there's another big reason for social-change advocates to pay attention to Net censorship. The issue isn't just about the type and number of Web sites accessible to Netizens at home and abroad. It's also about what a free flow of digital information enables people to do. Social media, unfettered, change the way people in society organize themselves to get things done. Such things as mobile phones, Twitter, video-sharing services, and social networking sites make it really easy for people to self-organize into groups from the ground up rather than to be organized by others from the top down.

New media expert Clay Shirky, the author of Here Comes Everybody, a new book on the impact of social media on society, says this Net-driven social revolution (with a small "r") won't be occurring at the expense of existing institutions (like governments or nonprofits, for example). But it could, he says, provide compelling alternatives that may, over time, weaken them considerably.

And that's mostly what's making officialdom from Beijing to Washington really nervous lately: this Web-enabled shape-shifting is already starting to happen. "Newly capable groups are assembling," Shirky puts it, "and they are working without the managerial imperative and outside the previous institutions and structures that bounded their effectiveness in the past." (Quick—remember that panel you missed at the last Net conference you attended about the waning influence of government? Odds are, they weren't talking about George Bush.)

For now, the information war has no definitive winners or losers: governments, as seen in China this week, are winning some rounds; citizen activists are wracking up other wins elsewhere, as in Burma during last fall's Myanmar revolt and again in May, after Cyclone Nargis. But Net activists fear that sooner or later, governments could get the upper hand—and they've been using China's Olympian censorship efforts to get everyone into the pool. (Amnesty International’s new Uncensor Web site named July 30 a Day of Protest against Net censorship in China. The Uncensor campaign is a joint fundraising effort with an Australian Facebook Cause group and organizers hope the partnership will last well beyond the Olympics.)

Not sure you're ready to jump in yet? Go ahead. Re-read your mission statement. Take it global. Welcome to the war.

(Illustration: Copyright2008 by Cathy Gendron for theispot.com)

Mobile Volunteers

NYU new media professor and Here Comes Everybody author Clay Shirky likes to tell the story about a recent day when two of his friends were sitting with their four-year-old daughter, watching a DVD. "In the middle of the movie, apropos nothing," Shirky says, the girl jumps up off the couch and runs behind the screen. Her dad thought she was going to see if Dora (the explorer, from the kid’s cartoon show) was hiding there. But no, the girl was rooting around in the cables. "What are you doing?" her father asked. Sticking her head out from behind the screen, the girl says, “Looking for the mouse.”

For Shirky, it's a tale of the times. “Four-year-olds know a screen that ships without a mouse ships broken,” he says. “Four-year-olds know that media that is targeted at you—but that doesn’t include you—may not be worth sitting still for.”

No question: all social media innovators today are “looking for the mouse”—working to find new ways to let those who use, hear, read, and watch media to participate more fully. The most innovative enlist the use of mobile phones for a cause: the nonprofit National Democratic Institute uses text messaging to spot vote fraud in elections around the globe; Witness.org asks its supporters to photograph human rights abuses with their cellphones; the Zumbido project in Mexico created a mobile social network for people living with HIV/AIDS.

But nobody has cracked the challenge of "on demand" volunteering—until now. Social media entrepreneur and activist Ben Rigby, author of Mobilizing Generation 2.0, thinks he's "found the mouse" for it with Volunteer NOW, his on-the-spot, GPS-aided mobile application that directs people who suddenly find themselves with some free time on their hands to a list of short-term volunteering opportunities near to their present location—be it an airport, an office building, a local Starbucks, or a city park. Rigby's goal: to transform volunteering into an "impulse activity" that, for the cause-wired not otherwise looking to tune out or cat-nap, could be done on the fly. (Got 20 minutes? Review a contract for a nonprofit. Translate a document for a non-English speaker. Or, text for the nearest beach or park clean-up drive and spend your lunch hour in the sun.)

"Projects like SETI@Home showed that massive computational problems can be solved when a distributed group of people donate their computers' spare CPUs to crunch data," Rigby says. "(Volunteer NOW! ) explores the possibility that this same theory can be applied to spare human 'CPUs.' We believe it will reveal a massive, untapped capacity to do good."

Rigby is not the only social media innovator intrigued by the idea of spare-time, mobile volunteering. Leaders of Do Something, a New York-based nonprofit, started using mobile phones in March to recruit volunteers. The Beta version of its Do Something NOW! mobile program, funded in part by the Sprint Foundation, invites young people to sign up for volunteering through a form on its Web site; Do Something then sends them one or two text alerts each month with volunteer opportunities that fit their locations and preferences. So far, more than 1,000 people have signed up for the text alerts: Do Something hopes to have 10,000 signed up by year's end. Opt-out rates, says Chief Marketing Officer Aria Finger, are running less than 5%.

Look for more examples of mobile volunteering in the months ahead. Katrin Verclas, founder of MobileActive.org, will be showcasing some at her global summit on cause-mobile technology in Johannesburg, South Africa, October 13-15. Google's recent entry into the mobile phone market will add fuel to the mobile advocacy movement in coming months.

For more on how cellphones and other social media are dramatically changing society's notions of free time, check out the Blip.tv video of Clay Shirky's wildly popular talk at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco this past spring. It's about 10 minutes long but well worth the cognitive surplus—Shirky's term for free time—that you carve out to watch it.

(Illustration by Richard Borge c/o theispot.com)