Among the top books in our hit parade:

Capitalism 3.0

Cyber-Marx

Free Software, Free Society

Democratization Innovation

Infotopia

Open Business Models

Open Life

Class of the New

Long Tail

Play Ethic

Starfish and Spider

The Wealth of Networks

The Wisdom of Crowds

Who Controls the Internet?

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Web search engines are not just indispensable tools for finding and accessing information online, but have become a defining component of the human condition and can be conceptualized as a complex behavior embedded within an individualâ€s everyday social, cultural, political, and information-seeking activities.

This book investigates Web search from the non-technical perspective, bringing together chapters that represent a range of multidisciplinary theories, models, and ideas. It examines the various roles and impacts of Web searching on the social, cultural, political, legal, and informational spheres of our lives, such as the impact on individuals, social groups, modern and postmodern ways of knowing, and public and private life. By critically examining the issues, theories, and formations arising from, and surrounding, Web searching, this book represents an important contribution to the emerging multidisciplinary body of research on Web search engines.

The new ideas and novel perspectives gathered in this volume will prove valuable for research and curricula in social sciences, communication studies, cultural studies, information science, and related disciplines.

2) WE THINK: mass innovation not mass production, by Charles Leadbeater [from his website]

We Think explores how the web is changing our world, creating a culture in which more people than ever can participate, share and collaborate, ideas and information.

Ideas take life when they are shared. That is why the web is such a potent platform for creativity and innovation.

It’s also at the heart of why the web should be good for : democracy, by giving more people a voice and the ability to organise themselves; freedom, by giving more people the opportunity to be creative and equality, by allowing knowledge to be set free.

But sharing also brings with it dilemmas.

It leaves us more open to abus and invasions of privacy.

Participation is not always a good thing: it can just create a cacophony.

Collaboration is sustained and reliable only under conditions which allow for self organisation.

Everywhere we turn there will be struggles between people who want to freely share – music, films, ideas, information – and those who want to control this activity, either corporations who want to make money or governments who fear debate and democracy. This conflict between the rising surge of mass collaboration and attempts to retain top down control will be one of the defining battles of our time, from Communist China, to Microsoft’s battle with open source and the music industry’s desperate rearguard action against the web.

Download the first three chapters of We Think.  There’s also a short animation explaining the book on Charles’ YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiP79vYsfbo

3) Music2.0, by Gerd Leonhard [from Gerd’s email]

I just wanted to let  you know that my new book “Music2.0″  is finally ready and can now be ordered at www.music20book.com. 

“Music2.0” is available both as a ‘real’ printed product, as well as a ‘pay what you want’ – pdf (I have heard this referred to do as ‘doing a Radio Head’ a few times… but whatever, that’s just the way I wanted to release this book); licensed under the 3.0 non-commercial use / attribution / share alike Creative Commons license. “Music2.0” is kind of like a ‘Best of Gerd Leonhard’ compilation – if I may say so myself ;- , 227 pages filled with the best blog posts and juiciest essays from the past 4 years, slightly remixed and tweaked, riffing on that good old subject of the ‘Next generation of the Music Industry’.

The book continues and expands on some of the ideas and models I cooked up in my first book “The Future of Music” (co-written with my colleague Dave Kusek). It describes what the next generation of music companies will look and feel like, and gets even deeper into some of my favorite buzz-phrases such as Music Like Water and the Flat Rate for Music, Feels Like Free (FLF), the Usator, Friction is Fiction, and the People Formerly Known As Consumers.  Oooops, yes, sorry for that geek-speak!

To get your copy of the book or to retrieve the ‘pay what you want’ pdf download link, hurry up (we don’t actually have that many copies with this first print run) and go straight to the www.Music20book.com site (no, it’s not very pretty but it works).
If you are ready to shell out some cash (yeah, we’ll take any currency, $, too;) and order the real thing, please note that we will accept Paypal (and credit cards, via paypal) and will ship anywhere in the world. The book is in a pocket-book format (perfect for those airplane seat pockets;).

I hope you’ll enjoy Music2.0 (printed or pdf’ed, feels-like-free or indeed… paid!)

Cheerio

Gerd Leonhard
www.mediafuturist.com
[email protected]

4) From Exchange to Contributions: Generalizing Peer Production into the Physical World, Edition C. Siefkes

A new mode of production has emerged in the areas of software and content production. This mode, which is based on sharing and cooperation, has spawned whole mature operating systems such as GNU/Linux as well as innumerable other free software applications; giant knowledge bases such as the Wikipedia; a large free culture movement; and a new, wholly decentralized medium for spreading, analyzing and discussing news and knowledge, the so-called blogosphere.

So far, this new mode of production—peer production—has been limited to certain niches of production, such as information goods. This book discusses whether this limitation is necessary or whether the potential of peer production extends farther. In other words: Is a society possible in which peer production is the primary mode of production? If so, how could such a society be organized?

Is a society possible where production is driven by demand and not by profit? Where there is no need to sell anything and hence no unemployment? Where competition is more a game than a struggle for survival? Where there is no distinction between people with capital and those without? A society where it would be silly to keep your ideas and knowledge secret instead of sharing them; and where scarcity is no longer a precondition of economic success, but a problem to be worked around?

It is, and this book describes how.

5) Digital Dharma. A Userâ€s Guide to Expanding Consciousness in the Infosphere, by Steven R. Vedro

Steven Vedroâ€s book, which we announced previously, is now out and available on the web and at bookstores. It tackles the inter-related development of personal and social development, with their enabling technologies. Vedro uses the seven-chakra metaphor to propose a “yoga of teleconsciousness”.

You will find various excerpts in his blog.  Here is a taste of Steven’s “Digital Dharma”:

We live in the age of instant communications. An electronic web surrounds the planet. Our ideas travel instantaneously to all points of the globe on electromagnetic waves and pulses of light. Emerging from what French philosopher-priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the shared noosphere of collective human thought, invention and spiritual seeking, the Infosphere – the totality of our electromagnetic systems for sharing knowledge, is now a field that engulfs our physical, mental and etheric bodies; it affects our dreaming and our cultural life. The evolving human nervous system has been “outered” as media sage Marshal McLuhan predicted in the early 1960â€s, into a global embrace that for all its wonder, has overwhelmed our senses and created new forms of media addiction. In the dire view philosopher William Irwin Thompson, our bodies are cooking “in a global mulligan stew of electromagnetic noise.”

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“We are standing at a crucial crossroads. Not only does the age-old ‘social question’ concerning the exploitation of human labor remain unresolved, but the plundering of natural resources has reached a point where humanity is also forced to politically deal with an ‘ecological question.’ Today, we have to make conscious choices about what direction society should take to properly meet these challenges…

“This is a highly accessible introduction to Social Ecology and Communalism, as it has been developed by one of the most exciting and pioneering thinkers of the twentieth century. Murray Bookchin’s political philosophy suggests that the solution to the enormous social and ecological problems we face today fundamentally lies in the formation of a new citizenry, its empowerment through new political institutions, and a new political culture.”

—Eirik Eiglad, from the Introduction

These four essays, written between 1989 and 2002 and collected here for the first time in this volume, provide an excellent overview of Murray Bookchin’s political philosophy.

Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) was a life-long radical—a trade unionist in the 1930s and 1940s, an innovative social theorist through the 1960s, a leading participant in the anti-nuclear wing of the Greens in the 1970s and 1980s, and co-founder of the Institute for Social Ecology. He was a prolific author and important thinker.Editor Eirik Eiglad has been involved with the ideas and politics of social ecology for more than fifteen years. He edits the journal Communalism.

2) Giving Knowledge Away for Free, by OECD
(From the eLearning blog)

OECD has just published a new book, called “Giving Knowledge Away for Free”, and has made it available as a free eBook. OECD wrote “Learning resources are often considered key intellectual property in a competitive higher education world. However, more and more institutions and individuals are sharing their digital learning resources over the Internet, openly and for free, as Open Educational Resources (OER). This study, building on previous OECD work on e-learning, asks why this is happening, who is involved and what the most important implications of this development are.”

It turns out that giving — far more than receiving — is a surprisingly potent force whose impact reverberates across an entire lifetime, nourishing health and happiness in astonishing ways. That’s the message of Why Good Things Happen to Good People, which weaves new science with profoundly moving real-life stories. Dr. Stephen Post’s institute has funded over fifty studies — from the likes of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and the University of Chicago — to support scientific research on the life-enhancing benefits of caring.

4) Rule The Web: How to do Anything and Everything on the Internet — Better, Faster, Easier, by Mark Frauenfelder
(Via The Boston Globe)

Frauenfelder’s “Rule the Web” includes tips on: starting a blog, getting word-of-mouth publicity for it, and following other blogs with an RSS reader; setting up a private wiki, joining an online social network that’s right for you, and sharing digital photos; browsing the Web free from viruses, ads, and spyware; shopping and selling online; downloading music and videos; using the Internet to become more productive at work and at play; protecting and tuning up your computer and software; and much more.

The book was published earlier this month, and instead of browsing through it, I’ve been carefully reading it from the first page forward. Thanks to Frauenfelder, I’ve finally figured out how to add a message board to any website (via QuickTopic), find photos online that I can use for free (via Open Photo, Flickr, and Creative Commons), edit and retouch photos online (via Snipshot), find unlisted phone numbers (via Zabasearch), and more — and that was just the first two chapters. Phew!

5) The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You, by Mark Buchanan
(From the Bloomsbury USA website)

For readers of Freakonomics and The Wisdom of Crowds, an enlightening introduction to a groundbreaking physics-based view of the social world that reveals the essential simplicity of human behavior.

The idiosyncrasies of human decision-making have confounded economists and social theorists for years. If each person makes choices for personal (and often irrational) reasons, how can peopleâ€s choices be predicted by a single theory? How can any economic, social, or political theory be valid? The truth is, none of them really are.

Mark Buchanan makes the fascinating argument that the science of physics is beginning to provide a new picture of the human or “social atom,” and help us understand the surprising, and often predictable, patterns that emerge when they get together. Look at patterns, not people, Buchanan argues, and rules emerge that can explain how movements form, how interest groups operate, and even why ethnic hatred persists. Using similar observations, social physicists can predict whether neighborhoods will integrate, whether stock markets will crash, and whether crime waves will continue or abate.

Brimming with mind games and provocative experiments, The Social Atom is an incisive, accessible, and comprehensive argument for a whole new way to look at human social behavior.

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Note: Support the P2P Foundation not only by buying books in our Bookstore, but also by entering Amazon.com via our Bookstore before making any Amazon purchase. The P2P Foundation will then receive much needed support from your purchases. (Please bookmark our Bookstore now! Thank you.)

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Flatness?
Today, the need to identify and instrumentalise “spatial practices” becomes significant due to the unprecedented visibility of what one might call “globalization at work”: from Iraq to Nepal, Dubai to Mumbai, a new atlas is being re-drawn for the 21st century, one that Thomas Friedman describes as a new “flatness”. Did Someone Say Participate? re-draws the map of participatory, spatial practice that is a function of such shifts.

Control?
What was once seen as the defensive preserve of architects – mapping, making, or manipulating spaces – has become a new “culture of space” produced and shaped by an ever increasing number of disciplines. Did Someone Say Participate? showcases a range of forward-thinking practitioners and theorists who actively trespass – or “participate” – in neighbouring or alien knowledge-spaces. They share an essential interest: the understanding, production and altering of spatial conditions as a pre-requisite of identifying the broader reaches of political reality.

Consensus?
The future spatial practitioner could arguably be understood as an outsider who, instead of trying to set up or sustain common denominators of consensus, enters existing situations or projects by deliberately instigating conflicts between often-delineated fields of knowledge. In this context, the spatial practitioner is presented as an enabler, a facilitator of interaction that stimulates alternative debates and speculations. Atlas? Rather than understanding this book as the next “atlas” of practice that presents an incontrovertible world-picture, it represents an early mapping exercise.. In this sense, the shape of the contents – designed and interpreted by the innovative graphic designers Åbäke – chart emerging knowledge-continents.

Participants?
There is no intention to “map” a particular generation here. It is the case that the “spatial pracititioner” may well be in their early 20s or indeed in their 50s, sharing common discoveries through entirely unrelated contexts. The disciplinary territories include art, curation, architecture, photography, geography, humanitarianism, politics, philosophy, urbanism, information technology, pedagogy and futurology.

Tactics?
Empowerment sometimes emerges in conditions that theoretically aught to thwart it. Knowledge is often generated at the edges or the gaps of ignorance. Participation is simply a tactic of complicit curiosity scaled to the space youâ€re currently in. We hope that the continents of knowledge in Did Someone Say Participate? will be welcome challenges not only for those involved in the future of architectural research and practice, but for anyone interested in navigating through current forms of cultural inquiry and debate.

Hot Spots: Why Some Teams, Workplaces, and Organisations Buzz with Energy – and Others Don’t, by Lynda Gratton
From Ms. Gratton’s website.

You always know when you are in a Hot Spot. You feel energized and vibrantly alive. Your brain is buzzing with ideas, and the people around you share your joy and excitement. The energy is palpable, bright, shining. These are times when what you and others have always known becomes clearer, when adding value becomes more possible. Times when the ideas and insights from others miraculously combine with your own in a process of synthesis from which spring novelty, new ideas, and innovation. Times when you explore together what previously seemed opaque and distant. We can all remember being in Hot Spots, when working with other people was never more exciting and exhilarating and when you knew deep in your heart that what you were jointly achieving was important and purposeful. On such occasions, time seems to rush by as you and those around you are Òin the flow.Ó1 Time even seems to stand still. We enjoy being part of a Hot Spot, and we are healthier, happier people as a result.

When Hot Spots arise in and between companies, they provide energy for exploiting and applying knowledge that is already known and genuinely exploring what was previously unknown. As a consequence, Hot Spots are marvelous creators of value for organizations and wonderful, life-enhancing phenomena for each of us.

GrameenPhone is the starkest example of inclusive capitalism, and Sullivan devotes just under half of his book to its story.

The second part of the book reports on how the external combustion engine is being successfully replicated in other areas of the global south. In Africa, for example, the sale of prepaid calling cards is a USD 3 billion business employing more than 200,000 indigenous entrepreneurs. Sullivan also explores the growing mobile-banking, or m-banking, industry, and the symbiotic relationship between cell phones and personal finance. And, he moves beyond cell phones by outlining Quadirâ€s current efforts to bring electricity to rural Bangladesh, suggesting the vast possibilities of applying the external combustion engine to promote inclusive capitalism while addressing unmet human needs.

You Can Hear Me Now is a well researched, engaging, and compelling account of a an entrepreneurial approach to business and development. Sullivan succeeds in balancing economic theory, history, humour, and personal experiences in a volume that is equally informative and inspiring. While Sullivan focuses mainly on the benefits of spreading information technology through the external combustion engine at the expense of potential drawbacks, such as electronic waste, his book showcases a development model that makes the future in some areas seem a little brighter.”

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Cultural Software offers a new theory about how ideologies and beliefs grow, spread, and develop– a theory of cultural evolution, which explains both shared understandings and disagreement and diversity within cultures.

  Cultural evolution occurs through transmission and spread of cultural information and know-how– or “cultural software “– in human minds. Individuals embody cultural software: they are literally information made flesh. They spread it to others through communication and social learning. Human minds and institutions provide the ecology in which cultural software grows, thrives, and develops. Human cultural software is created out of the diverse elements of cultural transmission, also known as “memes.”

  Cultural Software draws upon many different areas of study, including anthropology, evolutionary theory, linguistics, sociology, political theory, philosophy, social psychology and law. The book’s explanation of how shared understandings arise, how cultures grow and spread, and how people of different cultures can understand and critique each other’s views should be relevant to work in many different areas of the human sciences.

Endgame, by Derrick Jensen
[From Endgame‘s website]

Having long laid waste our own sanity, and having long forgotten what it feels like to be free, most of us too have no idea what itâ€s like to live in the real world. Seeing four salmon spawn causes me to burst into tears. I have never seen a river full of fish. I have never seen a sky darkened for days by a single flock of birds. (I have, however, seen skies perpetually darkened by smog.) As with freedom, so too the extraordinary beauty and fecundity of the world itself: Itâ€s hard to love something youâ€ve never known. Itâ€s hard to convince yourself to fight for something you may not believe has ever existed.” –from Endgame, Volume I

Hailed as the philosopher poet of the ecological movement, best-selling author Derrick Jensen returns with a passionate forecast of how industrial civilization, and the persistent and widespread violence it requires, is unsustainable. Jensen’s intricate weaving together of history, philosophy, environmentalism, economics, literature and psychology has produced a powerful argument that demands attention in the tradition of such important books as Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and Brigid Brophy’s Black Ship to Hell

Ed.: Check out the excellent Google videos linked to from this site.

The Logic of Sufficiency, by Thomas Princen
[From Dave Pollard’s excellent blog.]

Thomas Princen’s The Logic of Sufficiency builds on the sustainable economics theory of Herman Daly, which I’ve written about before on these pages. In this book, sufficiency is suggested as the underlying organizing and decision-making principle for economic activities, replacing efficiency. After laying out the theory in Part One of the book he illustrates its application (and how it came to him) through a series of real-life case studies taken from very different economic situations around the world.

This book is an important advance in thinking about complexity and sustainability, and I recommend it for anyone planning to create, or even thinking about creating, models of a better way to live or make a living. We need to work together to develop a theory of sufficiency and sustainability, so that, in the face of the deniers and technophiles and efficiency luddites, we can not only say that our models are intuitively superior, but also show compellingly that they are more rational. We have a lot of work to do.

[The following excerpts are from 2 book reviews from Mute magazine – Culture and politics after the net:]  Happy to describe media cultures in ecological terms, net users may be unaware of the heavy ecological cost of communications networks. But can environmental justice and labour movements learn a trick or two from net culture? Soenke Zehle reviews two recent books:

High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health, by Elizabeth Grossmann

[High Tech Trash] is the most recent attempt to turn the dreadful stories of high-tech pollution, not unheard of but perhaps too scattered across research reports and academic anthologies to reach a general audience, into a captivating narrative. Grossmann includes chapters on raw materials, the environmental and human health impacts of electronics manufacturing, e-waste exports and recycling, and a conclusion that calls for a new land ethic.

[…] Trying to bring all of this together is not easy, so Grossmann concludes by calling for a new ‘land ethic for the digital age’ to convince her readers to rethink their collective commitment to seeking out convenience, speed, and the next new thing.

Challenging the Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in the Global Electronics Industry, by Ted Smith, David A. Sonnenfeld, and David Naguib Pellow, eds.

Grossman wrote her book because she couldn’t find a non-academic title dealing with the environmental implications of globalised electronics manufacturing and disposal. But there is a brand of activist research texts that are neither general audience nor conventionally academic, and this is one of them. Challenging the Chip introduces the transformation processes already taking place across this industry, not only in greater detail than Grossmann, but also from the perspectives of the activists and researchers involved, with a corresponding emphasis on a sharing of experiences and strategies. In 25 chapters organised into sections on the state of the global electronics industry, on labour rights and environmental justice, and on e-waste and extended producer responsibility, the authors want to ‘provide a vision of what a sustainable electronics industry can look like’, linking environmental justice, the precautionary principle, and extended producer responsibility in a ‘triad of sustainability’. And improvements notwithstanding, it becomes apparent that the electronics industry has yet to live up to the ‘electronics sustainability commitment’, a pledge demanding that ‘[e]ach new generation of technical improvements in electronic products should include parallel and proportional improvements in environmental, health and safety, as well as social justice attributes’ – as our electronic gadgets become faster, their eco-social footprints should also become smaller.

These two titles are not simply about the electronics industries, but about the widening scope of economic and environmental justice and creative grassroots responses to the global spread of the Silicon Valley experience. Supported by visions of technological transcendence, the electronics industry has effectively distracted public attention from the environmental and health implications of its products. Yet driven by grassroots organisations like SCCOSH the SVTC, it was Silicon Valley where the mythology of electronics manufacturing as a clean industry was first unmade. Sharing these histories, and they way they have resonated in centers of electronics manufacturing across the globe, can contribute to the a transformation of the way the electronics industry operates.

Buy these and related books in the P2P Bookstore.

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Online and On-Land Go Hand in Hand
As Craigslist demonstrates, localness matters: relationships can be started online, but they are strengthened and deepened by in-person activities. Research indicates that online and on-land communities reinforce and strengthen one another. Virtual communities are strongest when they are attached to geographically based communities. One group of researchers reports, “Heavy internet use is associated with increased participation in voluntary organizations and politics. Further support for this effect is the positive association between offline and online participation in voluntary organizations and politics.”²

            Since 2001, Meetup.com has been the engine for an amazing amount of connectedness; working at the intersection of online and on-land activity, it has been responsible for the creation of over 100,000 clubs involving over two million people. The concept of Meetup is so simple that it is brilliant. Scott Heiferman, one of the co-founders of MeetUp, describes the genesis of the site this way, “How do you start an association today? Do you need a building in Washington? No, you go online.”³Â Â  We are self-organizers, and MeetUp created a simple mechanism for people with similar interests to form their own local group. It highlights the best of online and on-land worlds: the efficiency of online organizing with the intensity of on-land relationships.

            Meetup was quietly plugging along helping people to self-organize, meet locally and have a drink, trade stories and make new friends when the 2004 presidential campaign began in earnest. The Dean for President campaign was not a virtual campaign—it didnâ€t happen just in cyberspace—it exploded in hundreds of communities around the country when it began to organize local gatherings through MeetUp. In his book, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi describes the frustrating, head-banging first discussions he had with his campaign colleagues when he advocated the need to use “meetups” as part of a strategy to gain grass-roots support for the candidate. Taking their cues from their technophobic candidate, the members of the campaign staff, except for the one webmaster, just didnâ€t get it. The resistance to using the Internet for a grass-roots campaign, Trippi writes, was similar to the resistance of companies and corporations to using the Internet for advertising. “Forty years of reliance on television advertising has atrophied creativity, forcing everyone to approach every problem the same way.” The answer, for Trippi, was using the networking power of the Internet to empower campaign participants to create their own campaigns as a part of, but not dictated by, the national effort.⁴

            When the Dean Meetups were finally posted, the number of people participating in local gatherings went from 432 to a high of 190,000 within a yearâ€s time. This explosion of activity helped to turn meetup into a noun, just as Google has become a verb. Dean enthusiasts transitioned from e-mailing one another to talking face-to-face in a local pub or Starbucks. Meetups also helped to create friendships among like-minded individuals that have lasted beyond this one campaign and this one candidate.

            MoveOn.org provides another example of the importance of on-land connections to supplement online efforts. MoveOn is the online advocacy group founded by Wes Boyd and Joan Blades in 1998 with the goal of getting Congress to stop the Clinton impeachment activities and “move on” to more pressing issues. MoveOn exploded in size and influence largely due to the founders willingness to let their members take the lead on determining their strategy.  In the years since its inception it has created a membership base of more than three million people through viral marketing, which takes place when individuals pass on e-mails to friends and family, who in turn spread the word to an ever-widening circle of contacts. Thatâ€s certainly an enormous achievement. The 2004 presidential campaign mobilized millions of people, but, ultimately, MoveOn was criticized for concentrating too much on fundraising at the end of the campaign and not being effective at mobilizing voters. In fairness to MoveOn, voter mobilization was never a core competency of the organization. The complaints, I believe, speak more to the incompetence of the Democratic Party than to MoveOnâ€s capability.

            To its credit, MoveOn has recognized its limitations, one of which was the lack of local connectedness. In March 2005, Micah Sifry, the executive editor of the Personal Democracy Forum reported that “MoveOn.org has quietly decided to experiment with a new form of off-line organizing[,] . . . to support the formation of ongoing local MoveOn Teams, focused on the group’s issue campaigns.” In the past MoveOn had organized sporadic house parties and local calling parties as components of larger campaigns and not as part of its own movement building.   MoveOnâ€s Washington, D.C., staff person, Tom Matzzie, reported to Sifry that the organization recognized that it had to become more than an online community if it was going to enact significant political change.⁵ MoveOnâ€s desire to evolve into a permanent, sustainable force for social change speaks to the important, symbiotic relationship between cyberspace and local space.

Networks and Organizations
When I was in graduate school, we had an assigned text titled Organizations in Action, by James D. Thompson.⁶ I liked it, particularly because it was short. One of the key concepts of the book was that of organizational boundary spanners. Thompson described them as people who interact with the outside world, such as customers and constituents, on a regular basis. They receive useful information and also push information out. Social workers, community organizers, and receptionists are typical boundary spanners in activist organizations. In the Connected Age, everyone in your organization is a boundary spanner.

            Imagine how different your work would be if instead of thinking about functions and departments, you thought about networks and connections. In the Connected Age, networks trump hierarchy. Sustainable social change is going to come from those organizations that can engage, facilitate, and strengthen their networks rather than organizations that push out strategies and messages to a passive audience through large advertising budgets.

            […] There is significant tension between how we are taught to view organizational life and how organizations really work.

The post P2P Book of the Week, Excerpt 3: Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age, by Allison Fine appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Free Schuylkill River Park!
 
The Free Schuylkill River Coalition used e-mail advocacy, blogs, and constituent mail to:

·        Increase its list of supporters more than tenfold
·        Line up elected-official support at the local, state, and national levels
·        Increase participation at local rallies
·        Force a major railroad company to negotiate

In 2001 the good news was that a $14 million pedestrian pathway along Philadelphiaâ€s Schuylkill River was finally close to completion. The bad news was that the CSX Railroad, one of the largest rail networks in the United States, was threatening to close existing track crossings that allowed users of Schuylkill River Park to reach the new path.

To the surprise of many, the powerful railroad company was forced to rethink its plans because a small band of residents used the Internet to organize dispersed constituents and elected officials into a dynamic force called the Free Schuylkill River Coalition.

Free E-Mail Advocacy Tools
For their first action, the residents launched an e-mail advocacy campaign to get people to e-mail the governor about their objects to the grade closings. To launch the e-mail advocacy campaign, they used a free e-mail advocacy service for grass-roots organizations called CitizenSpeak (http://www.citizenspeak.org). They created a CitizenSpeak account and filled out a form that asked for the text of the e-mail letter and the e-mail address of the governor. CitizenSpeak automatically generated a unique web address specific to their campaign. The coalition members e-mailed this link to the fifty members of the local neighborhood association that the association had e-mail addresses for.

The results were overwhelming. Over 150 people participated in the first week, thanks to a CitizenSpeak “Tell-a-Friend” feature, which allows participants to easily forward messages to their contacts. Using CitizenSpeakâ€s reporting functions, the coalition was able to download the 150 participants†contact information. An overwhelming percentage of participants provided in their e-mails personal statements that helped refine the groupâ€s issues. The additional demands were included in a second e-mail campaign, which netted a 30 percent increase in the groupâ€s list of supporters, once again at zero cost.

The Blog
In the text of their e-mail advocacy letter, the coalition invited readers to link to their newly created blog (www.freetheriverpark.org.). The blog provided additional information about the campaign, including pictures of grade crossings in other cities that refuted CSXâ€s liability concerns.

To create its blog, the coalition used TypePad (www.typepad.com), a low-cost and easy-to-use hosted weblogging service that gives users a rich set of features for immediately sharing and publishing information. Users of TypePad can create photo albums, add text, invite and manage comments, add track backs, and monitor weblog statistics. No HTML skills are required.

Constituent Mail
To keep in regular contact with its growing constituency and to maintain high levels of interest and readiness to participate in actions, the Free Schuylkill River Coalition signed up for Constituent Mail (http://www.constituentmail.com)—an affordable and easy-to-use online e-mail management service that lets organizations maintain and segment a database of users for personalized, HTML e-mail communications with click-through and open-tracking capabilities.

The coalition used Constituent Mail to e-mail its list of supporters and invite them to attend the First Free Schuylkill River Park Presidents†Day Rally. The e-mail directed visitors to the blog, where they could download flyers to promote the rally and learn more about the cause. Despite freezing temperatures, more than one hundred people turned out for the rally. Reporters were on hand from a radio station, three TV stations, and the Philadelphia Inquirer to help spread the word.

Campaign Outcomes
As a result of integrating various Internet tools with traditional organizing strategies, the Free Schuylkill River Coalition multiplied its list of supporters tenfold, averaged over forty hits on its website a day, totaled over four thousand hits on the blogâ€s photo album, and, most important, won a major concession from CSX. Despite the railroad companyâ€s previous refusal to meet with the group or city officials, CSX agreed to negotiate with the city and to address the coalitionâ€s concerns.

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Social Networks
Networks are an ingrained part of our lives—so much so that weâ€ve almost stopped noticing how prevalent they are. Physical networks like electricity grids, facilitative networks like the Internet, and social networks like the PTA and religious congregations surround us.

            Two key characteristics of social networks are critical to their success. First, successful networks have hubs of information and leaders who drive the work. Second, information in social networks flows in a “friction-free” way to enable and empower people to work quickly at the outer fringes of the network.

            Social networks are the perfect renewable energy source. A power grid loses overall potency the farther it spreads. The more connections and the broader the network, the more energy it takes to fuel the overall grid. A social network is just the opposite: the more widely flung it is, the more powerful and resilient it becomes. If we could bottle social networks, we would have the perfect fuel because as they grow they get stronger not weaker—and at no extra cost.

            Social-change movements are often catalyzed and led by people who can crystallize a problem and spur their social networks into action. Martin Luther King Jr. worked through the African American churches; Mothers Against Drunk Driving through PTAs; and MoveOn.org through friend-to-friend e-mails. For people and entities dedicated to social change, social networks present the greatest opportunity to build strong constituencies.

            Think about your social networks; your nuclear family or members of your church, sorority, neighborhood association, softball team. In an increasingly noisy world, you may get a lot of information from TV or online, but you get your trusted news—the news you are most inclined to believe—the same way that your parents and grandparents did, from your social networks. These people help you to norm, to figure out what you believe in relation to what others believe about an issue, whether itâ€s raising school taxes or Aunt Sophieâ€s new hairstyle. These are your trusted sources for finding a dentist and picking a summer camp for your children. Because of the power of social networks TV news usually needs to quiet down a bit, marinate for a while, before it settles into conventional wisdom. Who won a political debate? Wait a week or so. Only after people talked and wrote did we collectively decide that Al Goreâ€s heavy sighing and Gerald Fordâ€s belief that Poland was free of the Soviet Union were serious gaffes.

Facilitative Networks
The Internet is an ever-growing network of networks. Thatâ€s why surfing the â€net is so much fun. A recipe for strawberry-rhubarb pie links to a website about the history of Southern food, which leads to a site discussing William Faulkner novels, and so on. Each one of those sites has its devotees, who are connected to all the devotees of the other sites, and this interlocking system creates connections that continue to grow and expand.

            The World Wide Web enables nontechnical users to “see” everything that is going on in cyberspace and to add to it. It is all there: billions of bits and bytes of information, gossip, and articles. Star Trek fans chat about whether the Borg can ever be beaten; single people find dates and spouses; bereaved parents comfort one another; cancer patients exchange information about new treatments. The Web spread faster and wider than any previous technological development because we could readily see that accessing this giant box full of information would be fun.

            What we werenâ€t prepared for was how using the Web would strengthen existing relationships at the same time that it created new ones. We all bring our own social connections wherever we go, and so, in retrospect, it makes sense that we simply brought them online with us as well. We have the ability to talk or write often and inexpensively to people who are special to us. They may be down the hall or across the country or even overseas, geographically dispersed as never before. We can share newsworthy information—and annoying jokes—with our whole network of friends and family, instantly.

            Remember how hard it used to be to organize a family cookout, when you had to call everyone to check dates first, hand out potluck assignments, and then send out invitations? Now one group e-mail does the trick. How about the difficulty of staying in touch with your college roommate when she moved from Chicago to Seattle? Now you can instant-message her every week to keep up on events and swap digital photos of your kids.

            Advertising professionals use the term stickiness to describe ads that have longevity because people cannot get them out of their heads. The Internet is “sticky” in that social bonds between people who may have only one small common interest become increasingly stronger, broader, and more intertwined.  My husband bought a digital picture frame for his grandmother in Florida. The frame automatically downloads pictures of her great-grandchildren from a web server every day. Our Bubbles doesnâ€t have to know anything about computers. She just plugs her frame into a wall socket and plugs the phone line into a phone jack, and magically new photos appear as fast as we can take them. In this way, under the radar screen, social ties have grown in the Connected Age. The rise of MySpace.com and other networking sites demonstrates the interest that people have in becoming connected to others across geographical, economic, racial, and social divides, even without a specific purpose.

            Craig Newmark took the concept of cyberspace as a community a quantum leap forward with Craigslist. The site was started in 1995 as a free space for sharing information about social events in San Francisco. It has since become an international marvel that serves 190 cities in the United States and around the world. Over ten million people a month use Craigslist. The site now charges for classified ads in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles only to support itself, but it is far more than classified ads online. Craigslist is a dating service, a hub for bartering goods and services locally, and a forum for discussions. Although Craigslist has spread around the world, the focus of the site has always been to strengthen ties among people in local communities; connections newspaper classified ads can never create. Craigslist enables millions of strangers to build relationships that result in someone buying furniture, a lawyer bartering services with a plumber, and people finding dates in Boise, Boston, and even Rome.

Allison Fine [email protected]

The post P2P Book of the Week, Excerpt 1: Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age, by Allison Fine appeared first on P2P Foundation.