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.

My favorite example of this style was in a comparison of two different airline experiences seven years apart. In 1999, a Northwest Airlines flight from Miami to Detroit left about noon and arrived at about 3pm. The problem was that it took another seven hours before the plane was at the gate and the passengers were able to deplane. They ran out of food and drinks, and the toilets were full and overlflowing. Before the passengers got off the plane, lawyers on board organized names and addresses for a lawsuit, other passengers wrote letters, and some managed to track down the CEO's home phone number and tried to reach him. While there was some fallout for Northwest including a settlement, there was no real impact on the company. In other words, the big corporation had the power and was not really forced to change in any meaningful way.

In 2006, almost the exact same experience happened to an American Airlines flight. However, the aftermath of that flight was very different. After posting a couple comments to a local newspaper story, one passenger managed to collect contact information from a number of other passengers from the same flight. With that momentum, Kate Hanni used existing tools to start an online petition for the newly formed Coalition for an Airline Passengers' Bill of Rights. Over two thousand people signed the petition, and media attention grew. All of the attention generated more signers to the petition along with more letters and phone calls to Congress. While nothing has been passed yet, there has been legislation in House and Senate committees for the last two years - a much more powerful result.

One of the main takeaways that I got from Shirky's book was the set of three components for a successful effort to organize without having an organization, in order of importance: promise, tool, and bargain.

Promise

People do not frequently have a lot of spare time sitting around. Therefore in order to get people involved, you have to offer them something of significant enough value that they will give up another activity in order to participate. The tricky part is that the promise is by the participants rather than to the participants. It means that in order for the group to be successful, you almost have to have a core ready to go that can serve as the seed to get the population going. You can also make it extremely easy to join so that the obstacles to the first participatory act are as low as possible.

Tool

The tool is the technology that brings the group together. Where Twitter might be the right tool for one group, it might be awful for another. Or where a Facebook group might be right for one, the simple social networking aspects of connecting to friends might be the tool for another. In choosing a tool, the number of participants and the duration of their interaction inform what tool or tools would be good. Also, using the newest tools is risky because a person unfamiliar with a tool is less likely to make use of it.

Bargain

Since the lack of a promise and the right tools will doom any effort, the bargain is the last thing to address. The bargain is what reasonable expections you can have of others and what expectations they can have of you. As an example, if it is stated in a group that flaming and trolling will not be tolerated, then there needs to be a mechanism in the tool to deal with those types of behavior and members of the group have to make use of those features.

With the IT@Illinois endeavor, there is a lot of opportunity to take these concepts and get IT professionals organized on campus without waiting for any conceptual decisions to be made. There are multiple efforts going on now, but I think one of the things lacking is an empowering tool. While there is a lot of motivation among the participants in efforts like IT professional orientation and peer coaching, there is an opportunity to improve the tools in use.