Here+Comes+Everybody


 * __Here Comes Everybody- Shirky__**
 * __Chapter Assignments__**

**__Debbie__** **__Harmoni__** **__Lucy__** **__Matt L__** **__Lilly__** **__Trey__** **__Matt W__** **__Annie__**
 * __1 Andrea__**
 * __2 Debbie__**
 * __3 Harmoni__**
 * __4 Lucy__**
 * __5 Matt L__**
 * __6 Lilly__**
 * __7 Trey__**
 * __8 Matt W__**
 * __9 Annie__**
 * __10 Half of the Group__**
 * __Andrea__ **
 * __11 Half of the Group__**

Chapter 1 :  It Takes a Village to Find a Phone  Shirky starts with a story…

The Players: Ivanna (Caucasian)- main character, wealthy white woman Evan Guttman (Caucasian)-Ivanna’s friend, a programmer Sasha (Hispanic)

Setting: May 2006, New York City

Problem: Ivanna leaves her Sidekick phone, with ALL of her wedding planning information, in the backseat of a NYC cab.

Steps Take to Solve this Problem: 1. Ivanna asks Evan to send an email to the phone offering a reward for its return. –No response so Ivanna buys a new phone. 2. The phone company loaded all of her previous information onto her new phone. Problem solved? Not yet. 3. Ivanna see pictures of a stranger on her phone—the person who took her old phone was taking pictures and they synced onto the new phone. Ivanna figured out she’s a girl, Sasha, from Queens and can see her email address. 4. Evan Guttman emails Sasha asking for the phone back. Sasha says NO! 5. A few not-so-friendly emails from Sasha get sent to Evan. 6. JUNE 6: Evan goes public and creates a webpage about the incident. He includes Sasha’s picture and a description of the events so far. 7. Evan’s friends email the story to other friends…the story grows. Friends find Sasha on MySpace. 8. THAT EVENING: Two Events ONE: Luis, Sasha’s brother, emails Evan and says he is a member of the military police—says Sasha bought the phone from a cabbie. Luis told Evan to stop harassing Sasha hinting violence if Evan didn’t lay off! TWO: Evan’s story appears on Digg.com 9. Evan begins receiving 10 emails a minute  with people offering encouragement and volunteering to help. 10. Evan continues to update his webpage (40 updates in 10 days) People locate Sasha’s address. 11. Evan creates bulletin board for readers to comment and share their feelings. (It took him trying three different platforms before he got a bulletin board that didn’t crash!) 12. As is typical of bulletin boards, many off-topic, off-colored comments ensued. 13. Evan and Ivanna file a report with the police who classify the phone as lost rather than stolen. Police not required to take action. 14. Several NYC gov’t officials and a police officer wrote in offering to get the complaint amended 15. Mainstream news outlets begin covering the story. 16. Public airing of NYPD’s refusal to treat this case as theft generated so many public complaints that the police reversed their decision and changed the paperwork to say it was stolen. 17. JUNE 15- Members of the NYPD arrest Sasha, a 16 year old. They recover the stolen Sidekick and returned it to Ivanna.

The Solution: Evan and Ivanna decline to press charges and Sasha is released. Ivanna’s wedding goes smoothly. Evan began getting freelance work doing PR.

Want to see more? Here’s Evan’s webpage. The last update was about the 20/20 Interview with Ivanna and Evan. http://www.evanwashere.com/StolenSidekick/

Story illustrates the power of group action given the right tools
 * Evan used existing social network and web tools
 * Evan not in it for the money—wants justice

This story demonstrates
 * How closely connected we all are to each other
 * Increased social visibility (i.e. Myspace, finding email addresses)
 * Old Limitations of media have been greatly reduced

Due to the WEB- cost of publishing globally has collapsed

New Leverage for Old Behaviors Humans are social creatures Society =product of groups and individuals

Groups are more important than we sometimes recognize ie Michelangelo- had assistants paint part of ht Sistine chapel ceiling New technology—equals new formings of groups

When we change the way we communicate (or form groups)- we change society.

Plausible promise- sweet spot (coined by Eric Raymond) Big enough idea to inspire interest, yet achievable enough to inspire confidence. (Example: Lost Sidekick Story- i.e. story was not just self-interest or too general

Expending resources to manage resources Every institution (ie Microsoft) lives in contradiction: it exists to take advantage of group effort, but some of its resources are drained by directing that effort.

We are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to form groups--all OUTSIDE the framework of traditional institutions and organizations.

The Tectonic Shift: Summarized in one sentence: Most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done.

These changes will TRANSFORM the world everywhere!

Everyone is a social media outlet. This chapter discussed the ways in which social media has changed over time with the advancements of technology. It states that it's difficult to now decipher between the "professionals" and the "amateurs". Many people who blog or journal in their spare time or for an organization call themselves bloggers or journalists. How is this different from the journalists whom work for the LA TIMES, for example? Both are writing opinions, information, facts, etc. about a topic of interests and others are reading... so what exactly constitutes being a "professional"? The dictionary defines journalist as the following, "A journalist collects and distributes information about current events, people, trends, and issues. His or her work is acknowledged as journalism..." Even the stay-at-home mom who keeps a regular blog, is then a journalist. In order to really separate the professional from the amateurs, the definition needs to be re-worked, otherwise everyone is a social media outlet.
 * Chapter 3 **


 * Chapter 5 - PERSONAL MOTIVATION MEETS COLLABORATIVE PRODUCTION **

Perhaps the most famous example of distributed collaboration today is Wikipedia, the collaboratively created encyclopedia that has become one of the most visited websites in the world.

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger founded Wikipedia in 2001 as an experimental offshoot of their original idea, a free online encyclopedia of high quality called Nupedia.

In the months after the original announcement, most of the effort had been spent on recruiting a volunteer advisory board and on establishing editorial policy guidelines and a process for the the creation, review, revision, and publication of articles. This process, intended to set a minimum standard of quality, had also set a maximum rate of progress: slow.

Increasingly frustrated with the slow pace, and aware that their own process had erected many new barriers to replace the ones the Web had removed, Sanger suggested a new strategy to Wales: use a tool called a wiki to create the first draft of Nupedia articles. The first wiki was created by Ward Cunningham, a software engineer. He observed that most of the available tools for collaboration were concerned with complex collections of roles and requirements- only designated writers could create text, whereas only editors could publish it, but not until proofreaders had approved it, and so on. Cunningham made a different, and radical, assumption: groups of people who want to collaborate also tend to trust one another.

Cunningham's wiki, the model for all subsequent wikis, is a user-editable website. Every page on a wiki has a button somewhere, usually reading "Edit this," that lets the reader add, alter, or delete the contents of the page. With a book or a magazine the distinction between reader and writer is enforced by the medium; with a wiki someone can cross back and forth between the two roles at will. (Flexibility of role is a common result of mass amateurization).

By placing the process in the hands of the users rather than embedding it in the tool, the wiki dispensed with the slowness that often comes with highly structured work environments.

Once Wikipedia was up, Sanger posted a note to the Nupedia mailing list, which by that point had about two thou sand members, saying, "Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes." The change was immediate and dramatic,

Seeing this success, Sanger shifted to the Wikipedia effort, dropping his Nupedia "editor in chief" title along the way and instead calling himself "Chief Organizer."

// Wikipedia's Content //

Mere volume would be useless if Wikipedia articles weren’t any good.

The most common criticism of Wikipedia over the years stemmed from simple disbelief: "That can't work."

Wikipedia, like all social tools, is the way it is in part be cause of the way the software works and in part because of the way the community works. TI Though wikis can be used for many kinds of writing, the early users were guided by the rhetorical models of existing encyclopedias, which helped synchronize the early work: there was a shared awareness of the kind of writing that should go into a project called Wikipedia.

Unmanaged Division of Labor Wikipedia doesn't operate at the scale of a neighborhood poker game; it operates at the scale of a Vegas casino. Something this big seems like it should require managers, a budget, a formal workflow process.

Without those things how could it possibly work? The simple but surprising answer is: spontaneous division of labor.

Here's how it works. Someone decides that an article on, say, asphalt should exist and creates it T The article's creator doesn't need to know everything (or indeed much of anything) about asphalt. As a result, such articles often have a "well duh" quality to them.

Once an article exists, it starts to get readers. Soon a self-selecting group of those readers decide to become contributors. Some of them add new text, some edit the existing article, some add references to other articles or external sources, and some fix typos and grammatical errors.

None of these people needs to know everything about asphalt; all contributions can be incremental.

And not all edits are improvements: added material can clutter a sentence, intended corrections can unintentionally introduce new errors, and so on. But every edit is itself provisional. This works to Wikipedia's benefit partly because bad changes can be rooted out faster, but also partly because human knowledge is provisional.

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product, and as a resuIt, it is never finished. For a Wikipedia article to improve, the good edits simply have to outweigh the bad ones.

Wikipedia assumes that new errors will be introduced less frequently than existing ones will be corrected. This assumption has proven correct; despite occasional vandalism, Wikipedia articles get better, on average, over time.

A car comes into being as it passes down an assembly from one group of specialists to the next-first the axle, then the wheels. A wiki's division of labor is nothing like that.

No one person was responsible for doing or even managing the work, and yet researching, writing, editing, and proofreading have all

This system also allows great variability of effort-of the 129 contributors on the subject of asphalt, a hundred of them contributed only one edit each, while the half-dozen most active editors contributed nearly fifty edits among them, almost a quarter of the total.

The inability to count on an employee's particular area of expertise, or even on their steady presence, would doom such an enterprise from the start. There is simply no commercially viable way to let employees work on what interests them as the mood strikes. There is, however, a non-commercial way to do so, which involves being effective without worrying about being efficient.

Wikis avoid the institutional dilemma. Because contributors aren't employees, a wiki can take a staggering amount of input with a minimum of overhead. This is key to its success: it does not need to make sure its contributors are competent, or producing steadily, or even showing up.

The majority of contributors edit only one article, once, while the majority of the effort comes from a much smaller and more active group. (The tw Since no one is being paid, the energetic and occasional contributors happily co-exist in the same ecosystem.

Furthermore, since anyone can act, the ability of the people in charge to kill initiatives through inaction is destroyed. This is what befell Nupedia; because everyone working on that project understood that only experts were to write articles, no one would even begin an article they knew little about, and as long as the experts did nothing, nothing happened.

Its very inadequacy motivates people to improve it; many more people are willing to make a bad article better than are willing to start a good article from scratch. The early successes of a simple model created exactly the incentives (attention, the desire to see your work spread) n needed to create serious improvements. " 'These kinds of incentives help ensure that, despite the day-to-day chaos, a predictable pattern emerges over time: readers con tinue to read, some of them become contributors.

And the key to creating those individual actions is to hand as much freedom as possible to the average user.

// A Predictable Imbalance //

Anything that increases our ability to share, coordinate, or act increases our freedom to pursue our goals in congress with one another.

The freedom driving mass amateurization removes the technological obstacles to participation. Given that everyone now has the tools to contribute equally, you might expect a huge increase in equality of participation. You'd be wrong.

In mailing lists with more than a couple dozen participants, the most active writer is generally much more active than the person in the number-two slot, and far more active than average. This shape is called a power law distribution.

The longest conversation goes on much longer than the second-longest one, and much longer than average, and so on. Bloggers, Wikipedia contributors, photographers, people conversing on mailing lists, and social participation in many other large-scale systems all exhibit a similar pattern.

The second surprise is that the imbalance drives large social systems rather than damaging them. Fewer than two percent of users ever contribute, yet that is enough to create profound value for millions of users. And among those contributors, no effort is made to even out their contributions.

The most salient characteristic of a power law is that the imbalance becomes more extreme the higher the ranking. This is an example behind the so-called 8O/20 rule. where. for example, 20 percent of a store's inventory accounts for 80 percent of its revenues, and

The most active contributor to a Wikipedia article, the most avid tagger of Flickr photos, and the most vocal participant in a mailing list all tend to be much more active than the regular participant, so active in fact that am measure of "average" participation becomes meaningless. The though the average is easy to calculate. It doesn’t tell you much about any given participant. The first is that, by definition, most participants are below average.

You cannot understand Wikipedia (or indeed any large social system) by looking at anyone one user or even a small group and assuming they are representative of the whole.

// Why Would Anyone Bother? //

"The Nature of the Firm" suggests that in organizing any group, the choice is between management and chaos; he assumes that it's very difficult to create an unmanaged but non-chaotic group. But lack of managerial direction makes it easier for the casual contributor to add something of value; in economic terms, an open social system like Wikipedia dramatically reduces both managerial overhead and disincentives to participation.

This desire to make a meaningful contribution where we can is part of what drives Wikipedia's spontaneous division of labor

The genius of wikis, and the coming change in group effort in general, is in part predicated on the ability to make nonfinancial motivations add up to something of global significance.

Wikipedia is peer production par excellence set up to allow anyone who wants to edit an article do so, for any and all reasons except getting paid.

// Social Prosthetics //

The question every working wiki asks of its users is "Who cares?” Who cares that an article on asphalt exists? Wikis reward those who invest in improving them.

Why doesn't Wikipedia suffer from the Tragedy of the Commons? Why haven’t free riders and even vandals destroyed it? The wiki format is another version of publish-then-filter coercion is applied after the fact rather than before. All edits are provisional, so any subsequent reader can decide that a change to an article is unacceptable, to be further edited or to be deleted. In the case of obvious vandalism, the review process happens astonishingly quickly.

Like everything described in this book, a wiki is a hybrid of tool and community. Wikipedia, and all wikis, grow if enough people care about them, and they die if they don’t. Wikis provide ways for groups to work together, and to defend the output of that work, but these capabilities are available only when most of the participants are committed to those outcomes.

let the community do as much as they possibly can, but where they cant do the work on their own, add technological fixes. Wikipedia is predicated on openness not as a theoretical way of working but as a practical one.

Wikipedia, with none of those things, does not have to be efficient-it merely has to be effective.

Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process: if enough people care enough about an article to read it, then enough people will, care enough to improve it, and over time this will lead to a large enough body of good enough work to begin to take both availability and quality of articles for granted, and to integrate Wikipedia into daily use by millions.

Chapter 6


 * Theme: Unlocking Action - Using Social Media As A Tool **

=
Where as in the past, you physically had to go out and protest at a given site, and literally transport a few thousand; today, with the use of social media, you can mobilize millions in a mere few hours. Social media is yet a revolutionary tool which aids in cyber initiatives like sit-outs, protects, demonstrations, boycotts, advocacy and cyber marches. Here Comes Everybody was to a certain extent, a stimulating reading experience. The author delivered several ways people use technology for social activism. Collective action requires the most commitment, but Shirky provides the reader with several cases of where people have come together through the new technologies to take action. Shirky conveys how social software can help, and how it allowed Catholics to protest against a Church corruption allegation. Shirkey uses an example, a group called VOTF-Voice of the Faithful, which acted to topple the Archbishop of Boston, who covered up years of sexual abuse perpetrated by his priest. We are still at the beginning of what Shirky describes as a new position in technology, and his central point is that we will be constantly surprised. He writes that we can't imagine all that will happen, and we don't yet have examples how things are being transformed through the new possibilities. Shirky's notion is that when people are given new and easy ways to collaborate – through im, email, social networking sites, wikis, one to one, one to many, many to many, and so on– then significant and astonishing things happen. Through the new tools we can elevate the ladder of sharing, cooperating, and taking communal action; overwhelming professions, churches, and dictatorial governments as we go along. Shirkey illustrates that there are not just changes taking place in technology but we are experiencing a culture change. He then uses another example where he provides us with what is similar to relocation but it’s what he calls a de-location, consequently a Virginia based church that excommunicated from its parish by de-locating and virtually joining up with another parish around the world in Nigeria, due to a gay priest being accepted in their dioceses=====

=Chapter 7 - Faster and Faster (trey) - sorry i missed out on this meeting - couldn't stay awake :(=

The speed of group action is increasing with rapid communication. Faster, like more, is also different.

Story of Leipzig, Germany. Protests of the GDR began small. As they realized they weren’t being stopped, they grew a little every week. By the time they wanted to stop it, the protest was too big. This is called an Information Cascade.

Shared awareness allows groups to work together more quickly and effectively.

Social awareness has three levels: 1. Everyone knows 2. Everyone knows that everyone knows 3. Everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows. The third level is the necessary step for real action.

So, a small protest turned into 400,000 people in November and the east german govt collapsed.

FLASH MOBS: 1st one in June 2003, at Macys in NYC. Invented by Bill Wasik of Harpers magazine. Flash mobs started being used for political reasons.

Story of Ice Cream mob in Belarus: After rigged election, people wanted to protest but there was a lot of oppression. They used a flash mob and had people show up and just eat ice cream. When a few were arrested for eating ice cream, they crowd took pictures and posted them etc. Other mobs involved reading, or smiling. The behavior wasn’t a threat, but the collective action showed the numbers. Where before, the Leipzig people had to organize in a visable way to protest, now social media tools made the organization of the group invisible, but the results can be immediately visible. Its hard to stop a plot when there is no plot. People can publish right to the web and leave their mark. Political action has changed when a group of previously uncoordinated actors can create a public protest that the government can neither interdict in advance nor suppress without triggering public documentation.

Replace Planning with Coordination: German small tanks were inferior but still won out because they used radios to coordinate. They had the tools AND knew how to use them. For coordinated effort, they needed two things: the radios, and the strategy of how to use them.

Plane stories: In 1999, passengers sat on runway for 5 hours. One passenger found the CEO of the airlines phone # and called. Then the pilot found out that they had the number and HE called, which finally got results and the people deboarded. There was bad press etc but the power was with the airline and the situation deflated. But, in 2006, passengers were delayed on the runway for 8 hours. After the ordeal, groups were formed, Congress was lobbied, thousands signed a petition, the Passenger Bill of Rights was designed.

The difference was that the web had now become a shared platform and online, the passengers were able to connect and coordinate their efforts.

HSBC decided to change a policy that affected student accounts without notice. A Facebook page was created by students to complain and protest. HSBC eventually backed down and reversed their decision. They didn’t back down because the students were unhappy, they did it because they were unhappy AND coordinated.

Blogger is invented which led to Twitter.

//Fitting Our Tools to a Small World// //"Large social groups are different from small ones, but we are still understanding all the ways in which that is true. Recent innovations in social tools provide more explicit support for a pattern of social networking called the Small World pattern, which underlies the idea of Six Degrees of Separation."//
 * Chapter 9 **
 * social networks manage to be sparsely connected
 * (most people have only a moderate number of connections)
 * but, despite that, these networks are...
 * efficient (people are connected by only a few links - Six Degrees)
 * and robust (the loss of a random connection, or even several, doesn't destroy the network)
 * Small World network -
 * two characteristics that allow messages to move effectively through the network
 * small groups are densely connected
 * large groups are sparsely connected
 * the existence of a handful of highly connected people enables the pattern




 * Chapter 11- Promise, Tool, Bargain**


 * Three Tools Promise, Tool, Bargain**
 * Promise-** creates the basic desire to participate
 * Tool-** What tool will best approach the promise the best?
 * Bargain-** Determines behavior (ie mailing list can vary in culture)

Promise is the most important factor and must hit a “sweet spot” in order to appeal to someone. Users of social tools make two decisions: 1. Will I like using this tool or participating in this group? 2. Will enough other people feel as I do to make it take off?

How to entice others to join: 1. make joining easy 2. create personal value for individual users 3. subdivide the community in a Small-world pattern