After reading Jeff Howe's book on crowdsourcing, I was driven to look hard for a new project to get started. Combining Tribes, Here Comes Everybody, and Crowdsourcing, my creative urges were working full time thinking of potential applications for all of these concepts. After debating various possibilities, I finally stumbled upon one that I felt would be something enjoyable as well as empowering. The idea was to create an entire setting for a non-electronic role-playing game complete with history, geography, people, places, and things. There was even a domain ready for me to use create this using the community aka the crowd aka the swarm: bySwarm.com.

After Sally Jackson mentioned Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody", I thought it would be a book that hit upon my interests. It did that and more. There have been a lot of books about leadership, and there have been a lot of books about the changes that the Internet has brought to society. Shirky's book really took the analysis and the thinking to the next level by examining how people have organized without having an organization. Through the use of multiple examples, he illustrates how society has been changing. It is especially effective how he finds examples of people who organized without paradigm changing technology and how they organized after a new technology came into use.