Organising without Organisations

I have finally got round to reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody and it was a revelation. I am afraid I thought Clay had just jumped on the Web 2.0 bandwagon, when in fact he is the most interesting writer on it that I have yet come across. Isn't it great to be wrong!? What I thought I would try to do is to give my slanted view on the book and start a conversation on what Clay's analysis means for the public sector. For me, the starting point for the book is how ridiculously easy it has now become to form groups. If I feel that the only people who really understand me are people who are fans both of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky, then I could probably quite easily reach out to this small sub-section of the world's six-and-half billion population and form a strongly bonded group of individuals (and as Clay interestingly argues due to Small World effects I would probably find out that quite a few of them live not too far from me). So who does ridiculously easy group-forming help?

The simple answer is "outsiders". Why? Because these are the people who in the old world faced the highest costs for group formation. One group Clay talks about is Stay at Home Moms - these are busy people stranded in the suburbs by modern life and without work (or other formal community organisations like the church) to give them easy (i.e. low cost) group formation possibilities. So it should be no surprise that groups like this lapped up tools such as Meet Up, that provide a "find people like you and meet up with them" service. But obviously lots of other groups benefit - Clay mentions witches (!), Star Trek fans etc. But more generally dissidents also benefit strongly. So happy-with-their-local-church Catholics don't particularly need the new tools to form groups (that's done for them by the well established group they belong to) but dissident Catholics who want the laity and not the priests to run the church do because oddly enough they are not going to get much help in organising themselves from the Catholic Church. In fact, the web also helps bring together people who would form groups but face social disapproval. So, yes, this means terrorists and would-be terrorists, but it also means pro-anoxeria teenage girls. Such groups have a belief that is at the core of their identity and faces strong community opposition. In the past, they might have grouped in one's or two's, but now they can form large and potentially quite geographically dispersed groups. Overall, this is a dramatic change in the nature of our society - in future the map of who is connected to whom and how is going to look rather different than in the past. A lot of established organisations are going to be weaker and less monolithic than before and they are going to face new unexpected rivals. Anyway, I do not think that Clay really knows where this is going and I certainly don't!

An easier issue to look at is the way this change impacts on the most common form of organisation today - work organisations (Ok, perhaps they are the second most common form of organisation after families). One of the things I do not like about some of the Web 2.0 hype is that you get the impression that because wikipedia was created by a self-organising collective for free very soon everything will be created by a self-organising collective for free. Funnily enough, I do not think this is going to happen, and I think Clay is very good on this. He notes that traditional organisations are based on co-ordination and that this diverts resources from directly productive activity and constitutes a cost (in a disfunctionally large organisation the costs of co-ordination exceed the benefits of additional resources, so more produces less). So some activities that would be worth doing (they produce more value than the cost of doing them) are not done because the cost of doing them PLUS the cost of the overhead is less than the value they would produce. It would be nice to have access to all the photos taken of the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, but pre-Flickr the cost of making all the photos easily available was vastly higher than value of doing this (particularly of course if you include the cost of co-ordinating the monetarisation of any value created). With Flickr, however, you do not need to find everyone who might want to take photos at the event, incentivise them to take photos, collect all their photos and then find a way to capture the value embodied in them. Rather you just empower anyone who did take photos to share them because they want recognition or just because they want to share. So for "free" you get a fabulous photo archive of the Mermaid Parade, which is amazing, but also slightly so what?

Where can this ability to organise without organisations have an impact? Let's start outside the world of financial reward. Given these new tools, what are we likely to do together without a financial reward? Well, because forming groups (and sharing, collaborating and acting together) are now easier actually quite a lot. But we do need a motive and this will shape what sort of tasks most easily get down in this new world. So it is easy to bring people together to do fun tasks, to do interestingly challenging or otherwise stimulating tasks, to do tasks in a context where the individual will get recognition from a community he/she values or to do tasks that contribute to a goal people believe strongly about. In all these cases it also helps if the task is modular. Seen in this context (and of course with hindsight!) wikipedia is not so surprising nor are the spontaneous web-based collective actions that have occurred in response to disasters such as Hurricane Katrina or the intense Flickr groups that collaborate on how to produce high dynamic range photos or the flash mobs that had a political impact in the Philippinnes or Belarussia. Mass amateurisation of previously professional-dominated activities in the creative arts is not surprising in a world where the cost of production have fallen dramatically. All it costs to produce a photo is your time and there are plenty of people prepared to make that investment (including many for whom that decision is probably not a rational one, but in an unorganised organisation this does matter, since no one else has to worry about whether the decision to invest their time was a good one).

But while the modular world of encyclopedias has seen the impact of wikipedia, there has been no such threat to the novelists and while journalists are annoyed and threatened by their amateur rivals, professional accountants still look pretty secure. It also striking that most of this collective activity is not for profit. Of course, this new wave of activity has market impacts of all sorts of kinds but it is hard to find good examples of unorganised organisations that directly relate to money generation. The two exceptions that occur to me are ebay and Betfair, which both tap the ability to let people create value through direct interaction, but even these examples suggest to me that we are not about to see unorganised organisations displace their traditional counterparts as the main players in the marketplace for products and services. So I fear that this is only Part One. I do find this book fascinating and I would be interested in other people's reactions to it and to the ideas above. I will try to round off my thoughts in another post soon.