Last week, I had the opportunity to hear Clay Shirky speak at DrupalCon in Chicago. I have been a little of a fan since reading his book Here Comes Everybody. The keynote was really engaging, and I found that my colleagues from the University of Illinois felt the same way. They became even more interested when I told them that Shirky's ideas formed part of the inspiration for how Sally Jackson went about the IT@Illinois effort.

So what's the big deal about Clay Shirky? There are two key ideas about Shirky's writings about how social media and online tools have changed the way that we can work together as crowds.

Promise, Tool, Bargain

The first idea is that you do not need to create an organization to get things done. Think Wikipedia, Linux, Drupal - no organization decided to write any given page on Wikipedia, no organization told Linus to start creating Linux, and no organization tells Dries what features to be added to Drupal. Each of these also has thousands of people that participate without being part of any official organization.

Why do people get involved?

Shirky's model says there are three components that enable people to organize without creating an organization:

• Promise - There needs to be an idea or a reason for someone to decide they want to get involved. The promise is from the contributors, not the receivers. It could be they want to share their insights or because they want to make a product they use better.
• Tool - There needs to be some sort of technology or mechanism that makes the organizing and contributing easy. Wikis, Twitter, Facebook, and even simpler tools like email can all make working together easy. If physical proximity is close, you could even argue that meeting space is a tool.
• Bargain - People wil behave well when the incentives to do so are greater than the incentives to exhibit less favorable behavior. In other words, there has to be a benefit to participation in a positive manner, or people will not engage constructively if at all.

The Power Law Curve

The other consistent aspect of organizing without organizations is that averages are misleading. If you look at the contributors for Wikipedia pages, open source projects, or anything else that lives on the contributions of the community, you will see a distribution of contributions by users that follows the power law curve. The idea here is that 90% of the people who contribute will only do so once or twice, 9% of the people will contribute a decent amount more, and 1% of the people will make significant contributions. If you look at the changes to an active Wikipedia page or the contributors of source code to an open source project, you will see this curve. The average number of contributions per user will be significant, but the vast majority of contributors are only making a couple contributions.

The IT@Illinois Connection

So what's the connection? If you look back at IT@Illinois, we did not create a new organization to decide how we would re-envision or re-organize IT for the future of the campus. Instead CIO Sally Jackson asked the community what we should do. If you look at what followed, you will see a power law curve - 90% of those that engaged perhaps attended a workshop or wrote a comment on a whitepaper, 9% took the effort to write their own whitepapers or joined a working group, and 1% wrote a bigger concept paper or stepped up to lead or facilitate.

Why did all of us that engaged get involved? Because we felt that we could contribute something to the future of IT on campus (the Promise), we had the tools available to organize like the wiki, email, Twitter, meetings, etc. (the Tools), and we had the chance to make our own work experience better (the Bargain). The beauty of doing all of this without creating some massive new organization is that people could contribute with as little or as much as they were willing and able - attend a brownbag, contribute a whitepaper, join a working group, lead a team, and on and on.

Was this just an accident? No. If you read my review of Here Comes Everybody, you know that I read that book based on Sally's recommendation. Having worked with Sally more and becoming more engaged with IT@Illinois, I know that her copy of the book shows the signs of frequent use that she believes in the ideas behind it.

Did she ever put forward a vision for how we should re-organize IT on campus? She asked all of us to share our ideas, to get involved. She knows that some of the best if not all the best ideas for IT at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will come from each of us and from what each of us can contribute. The one person who has one good idea can contribute just as much as the CIO. What the CIO can do is give us all the space in which we can be an organization without re-organizing.

The ideas behind IT@Illinois and organizing without organizations is still active. You can still get involved in multiple areas, and you can even start new ones. You just need to find the promising idea that will motivate people to join you, identify the tools you have available, and find a value that contributors will receive for being part of your effort. 

Relevant Videos and Links

In case you are not convinced yet or just want to hear from Shirky himself, I've embedded a few videos. I would also like to include a link to an article on the idea of the "leaderful community". The idea of the leaderful community is that leadership is shared, not held by the person at the top of the organization, and the idea closely follows the concept of organizing without organizations.

Most Relevant Short Piece (10 minutes)

TED Talk: Institutions vs. Collaboration