Very Raw Notes from Clay Shirky's Morning Plenary at the 2009 Nonprofit Technology Conference

Message -> I'll save you the cost of "Here Comes Everybody". Group Action Just Got Easier

Some stories

1) HSBC introduced fees on interest free checking accounts

"Stop the Great HSBC Graduate Rip-Off!"

Thousands of members in the first few minutes

Students document how to get accounts into other banks

Once someone solves the problem once, they solve it for everyone

Online protests, and then real world protests

HSBC caves the day before protest

"We would never have done this if we knew people would be unhappy"

Actually, "We would never have done this if we knew people could be upset and coordinated."

We are used to seeing a world in which large scale protests are backed by an organization

Organizations no longer have a monopoly on organizing

Two analysis

1) Every URL is a linked community - If a group of people are looking at something, they have a shared interest in acting on it.

2) Media is increasingly not just a source of information, but a site of coordination.

Providing the informationa and providing the coordination can now happen in the same medium

Change in longterm instruction and value

2) Wikipedia page

Doctor who on Wikipedia

-edited ~9,000 times, 3,311 contributors

- Power distribution curve

Two broad types of contribution

1 person -> 1000 edits
2,200 people -> 1 edit

"A small group of people who care much more than average"

"Inside each large collaborative effort, there is a small group of people doing a lot of the work."

"A thoruoughly unlikely person that you would find a person who could contribute 1,000 times"

Finding this person would be a high cost operation

3) Age of 16, my parents send me to NYC to see a cousin

Pizza by the slice stricuk me as brilliant

You make the pizza in advance of knowing who needs it

When you have just a few people around, you have do everything intentionally

Wikipedia is the pizza by the slice writ large

It doesn't matter who unprobably an individual contributor is

Working in a scale that is larger than we couldn't ever imagined allowed for things to happen

We are living in the biggest expansion of expressive capability in the history of humananity

Four revolutions

1) Printing press (gruops)

2) telegraph / phone (conversations)

3) Moving images (Groups)

4) Harnessing radio frequency (groups)

Converations or Groups

The internet is the first medium that brings many to many into a broadcast model. You can also talk back and talk sideways

The medium is subsuming all pervious mediums in it

Everytime anyone buys a computer or phone, "you want us to throw in a printing press as well"

These are big changes

Institutions are the way they are because they have to deal with managing people

4) First working steam boat (first design vs. sescond design)

Steam doesn't just speed up older models, it changes the form of the engine

A lot of organizations are going through a similar change

We'll just take our existing organization, and add some internet

Ubiquitous, global, cheap

New set of principles, they cannot be gotten to all in one leap

We are in a long process of iterating over and over to figure out what works

Rethinking core princples ocf organization

6) Chris Andener

Study group on Facebook

Dean of academic affairs wants to talk to him

Half of colege is cheating

Using new medium to

Taking an existing practice

Facebook is a lot like Facebook

No metaphor would work

Ademier was demoted but not expelled

To the students, "welcome, you're here, you've joined a group of scholars"

To the university, "we teach them and ship them out"

Inconvenience meant that we couldn't merge the messages

No way to analogize our way out of this kind of problem

Figure out the bias of the institution against this medium

Online is freeloader tolerent

Each individual is a person and a global publisher

The use of these tools and the meaning of these tools is much less influenced by the designers of the tool

7) Flash mobs

Anything that's mildly upsetting to bourgouisee is worth setting everything aside

Ice cream wasn't ilegal

Groups were ilegal in Belurusia

Use the media to coordinate real world action

Brought their cameras to the flash mob as well

Nothing says dictatorship like arresting people for eating ice cream

Arrest anyone who seams to be happy

It only took three years to transform an event that was meant to mock the participants to become a tool for political action

In environments where group action is ilegal, any tool that facilitates group action is a tool of political expression

"Things don't get socially interesting until the tools become technologically boring"

Obama -> We're going to accept the way in which these tools reshape our

organization

Obama -> The way they conducted that campaign was more radically diferrent

that anything that came before

As soon as you discovered Obama, you could share it with someone without

the permission of the campaign

Use the same pattern of global medium to generate interest in the campaign

Black eyed peas video vs. Sing for change video

Nobody blamed Obama for sign for change

If anything bad happens when my organization is in the mix, that's why ACLU sued MeetUp. They didn't know what would happen.

It's the sideways communication that's so scary -> supporters collaborating without permission of your organization

When something bad happens with your name, people don't blame you

"The loss of control you fear is already in the past"

You have to be in the in the new environment, or you'll be in the worst of btoh worlds

No one knew what would happen next

Linux -> "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a bobby) ... I'd like to know aht features most people would want."

Wikpedia -> "Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes."

Linux had a global but tiny organization

what ties these entities, "The commitment to fail informatively"


CONCLUSION


"organizations spend a lot of time trying to lower the chance that something will fail"

We have spent more time determing whether something will fail than just trying it out.

The new medium lowers the cost of failure

The only way to take advantage of that is to fail like crazy

If you're working in an organzation that's in the old world

Recommendation: find the person with the big idea for the organization, and lock him out of the building util he comes back with several medium ideas and hundreds of small ideas

1) Scale by -> Start with a system that is small and good, and imnprovement vs. Start witha system that's big and bad, and fix it

Don't allow a thousand flowers bloom

Aim for 7 ideas, 4 that work and 3 that fail

Fitch would never have gotten to the steam boat if he didn't fail

- informative failure
- many small ideas
- iteration

q. what's the value proposition for nonprofits in a world where people can self organization

a. you matter if you matter - what's changed is the relative value. One thing that organizations have is convening power. It's the idea that every

URL is a latent community. The big shift here is that organizations don't just deliver things to members, they help members meet and discover.


q. what's the secret sauce for convening

a. there is no secret sauce. in a social environment, certain platforms / campaign take off and others don't. One problem is orgs try to build a

new community. You should go where the people are. Poll your members. Search for your organization's name. Exclude the results from your own

website. You sudenly see the community around. Don't hire consultants. Hire the 23 year olds who have good ideas. Talk to your employees.

The 23 year old employees have a commitment to the organization and have a native understanding of the new medium. Talk to them.

q. is the change not about social media, but the culture around management

a. handling information turns out to be much more fundamental than any other factor. Animals had nerve inputs before they had muscles and bones

q. Is the new medium necessarily changing the society for the better

a. If you could get your hands on a book in 1400, it was precious. If you could get your hands on a book in 1600, it probably wasn't worth your

time. But some of that content was brilliant. The difference between the lowering value of information and the rise quality of some of it is the

situation we're in now. Optimists never have to say if a change is good. Since the changes are mostly inevitable, some of it will be pretty good.

q. what's coming next?

a. I'm not a futurist. I'm a presentist. I just write down what's happening. The role of emotion is going to be a huge part of the story in

the next few years. If you look at the response to swine flu, we're not that good at thinking fast, but we're good at feeling fast. This will lead

to increased engagement at the best. At the worst, this will lead to panic and exploitation. The emotional substrate of all media events is going to rise.