But unlike 18 years ago, this time I knew where the snow was falling, in real-time, and exactly what was happening with the trains too. How? Because of the power of mass collaboration. In a twist of fate, those new tools enabled me to embark on my journey to London this evening to listen to Clay Shirky talk about that very subject at LSE.

Clay Shirky delivers a précis of “Here comes everybody“ (now available in paperback: UK|US) in these 5 words: Group action just got easier. The book is something of a reference text for proponents of the power of social networks, and a concept will be familiar to readers of CauseWired.

Clay’s roots go deep back into the early days of the Internet. He has studied and written about them at length. Clay says that there are two things he has learnt from the last 15 years: Fast is different than slow and big is different than small. That might sound obvious, but it is actually profound in understanding these new tools.

“When it comes to networks, you can’t just extrapolate from small and slow to understanding the dynamics of large and fast.” Clay Shirky

Today’s networks, both in terms of telecommunications and social tools, are certainly both large and fast. In conversations I often frame the issue as quantitative change versus qualitative change. Technology that gains traction creates one or both of these. Quantitative changes are simply being able to do what we did before, but faster or larger. Qualitative changes are ones that fundamentally alter what we do or the way in which we do it.

It would seem logical that the linear nature of quantitative changes would make them much easier to predict (small and slow to large and fast), while qualitative changes would be more difficult, because of their disruptive nature. At least that is the commonly received wisdom. My experiences with technology say it doesn’t actually work that way.

People mis-predict technologies and put them into the wrong one of these buckets. Entrepreneurs usually believe they have something that produces a qualitative change, when it is actually a quantitative one. Conversely, many technologies that produce quantitative changes at first go on to affect society in a qualitatively way. The automobile changed how quickly we could get from A to B. Slow to Fast. Quantitative. But in doing so it changed where we could work, then our social circle and, ultimately, how society itself is constructed.

Lots of people view social media and social networking sites as agents of qualitative change. I think that doing so both overstates and understates them. Imagine, for a minute, that mass media had never happened. No radio. No TV. No newspapers. Wouldn’t it be quiet? You’d be able to hear the conversations.

Now, introduce social software. You’d have a nice linear move towards conversations that can take place across the globe rather than across the living room. From conversations with several people to ones that include hundreds. Sound familiar? They might include multimedia objects like photographs and videos too. The latter makes it tempting to compare phenomena like Facebook and Twitter to television or radio. That really isn’t a useful comparison. While they can, and do, turn into broadcast tools, with a single video receiving millions of views, they are misunderstood when viewed in that frame. What we are looking at is a return to a bigger faster version of conversations that were, rather that something that has never been.

Back to professor Shirky: We live in a time where tools like these, that lower the hassle factor of finding one and other and enabling collaboration, are changing the way that society works. Tools that started their life in the technical community have now spread out to touch every aspect of today’s society.

In the last 48 hours alone the BBC had tens of thousands of people sharing pictures and videos of the snow fall in the UK. I’ve watched myself and other Twitter users use the #uksnow tag, followed by the first part of their post code and a rating in messages to created data that produced a real-time view of the snow situation around the UK (thanks to an app built by Ben Marsh).

Another Ben, Ben Smith, has produced uktrains – a twitter feed with the very latest information on what is happening to train services in the disruption (there’s a wiki and a post about both of these on TechCrunch).

It’s all about the Benjamins, as a US rapper once said. Actually, it isn’t. These apps were both free. They might not be perfect – how do people agree on what constitutes a 4/10 rather than a 8/10 snow rating? – but they are more than “good enough” and certainly much better than the nothing that was before.

How much investment would have been required to build systems like this prior to web 2.0 and mass user contributed data? The user contribution of data is a major disruptor for traditional publishers and information services. If people are prepared to do what was once paid a job for free, that changes business models, at the very least.

We are in the midst of massive value destruction. Somewhere value creation is going on, but we haven’t quite found out where yet. On-line bulletin boards launched in the 1980′s, so the papers have had 20 years to get ready. While the world has changed around them, they have remained static.  ”This isn’t the transition from business model a to model b,” said Clay, “it is the transition from business a to business models b-z.” While a paper might report that X has happened, social media says X has happened, and this is what you can go and do about it.

Clay cited the example of the MySociety campaign, via a Facebook group, that saw Parliament reverse its attempt to conceal MP’s expenses. He also recounted the counter example of President Obama’s change.gov website. Within a short time after its launch, legalising Marijuana (for medical uses) was voted as the top public policy question facing America. As Clay notes, perhaps it ought to be a little lower down the list with matters like two wars and some collapsing banks that have to be dealt with – although I wonder if there might be some correlation there.

Clearly mass collaboration isn’t going to solve every problem. For the first time in public, Clay said, “I don’t think the technology is ready for the mass legitimisation of initiatives… …There need to be checks and balances applied”. That is a big, and wise, shift from his previously utopian view of what could be achieved. I’ve posted about crowds not providing the wisest answer for every situation before. When we think about the idea of direct access into the political process, we might want to think carefully about what exactly we are wishing for. The tools are fantastic for gathering feedback and generating content, but decision making requires a degree of sophistication that the tools do not provide, yet.

The problem now is not technical capability, it is legitimacy. Under what circumstances do you take the advice from user generated media and when do you ignore it? On-line we can’t do “one person one vote” – the basis of the democratic franchise – so we can’t legitimise it.

The problem is one for business leaders too. The answer may end up coming from government. What (now President) Obama started on the campaign trail, he will have to continue into the Whitehouse. Having opened the door to mass collaboration, that crowd is still looking over his shoulder and will not accept being shut out. Once you build a community, it doesn’t conveniently go away when you no longer have a need for it, it has a life of its own (something to note for businesses that just dabble in social media). 

This will be a new and interesting phase for the tools of mass collaboration. ”It is not just about politics, it is about government, and they are subtly different things,” observes Shirky.

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New Services

Skip forward three decades and things are evolving in a different direction. Services like Fire Eagle enable a number of applications to understand where you are, and Brightkite (in closed beta – email me for an invite), Dopplr and a swarm of others mean that you can ‘discover’ nearby friends/contacts or even total strangers. Other services like Flickr (best known for its photo sharing – although it now does video too) and even Twitter are location aware.

The Benefits?

How does that help with productivity? The answer is: a lot. Dopplr can reduce travel by enabling you to identify fellow travelers, potentially sharing transport or eliminating trips all together. If I discover that Sharron, from the Paris office, is going to be in London this week that might save me a trip. Brightkite helps me quickly find a local Internet cafe or the hotel where friends are staying. At the other end of the spectrum, finding photos ahead of time on Flickr might save me getting lost, or change my holiday plans!

The Practicalities

Many of these location based services are dependent on access to data on your current location, but constantly typing in where you are can become a drag. However, with more and more devices having built in GPS, reporting your location (we’ll come back to that) and tagging photographs and videos with geographic information is now a relatively simple task. Geo-tagging has become a major geek fad. It is still not as seemless as I’d like on my Nokia N95, but perhaps that isn’t such a bad thing. This week I signed up to Pachube (currently in beta), which is a service that enables a device to stream environmental data and share it globally. I was hoping to get some wind data for my home hacking activities, in preparation for homecamp this weekend. No joy so far, but it is still early days.

Near Me

So, we have location based data behind location based services. Lots of data means an opportunity for lots of searching, an opportunity not lost on Google. If you use the latest version of the Google app for the iPhone (or iPod touch), it takes your location into account when it selects search results for you. Google searches have been location aware for a long time, but with more location aware devices, and the marketing fraternity on the case, it is going to a whole new level.

Google maps are an interesting way of discovering things. From a creating a ‘find us’ page with a pin in the map, to searching for local shops, Google’s map functionality has become almost as ubiquitous as their traditional web search engine. Putting your site onto Google Maps is relatively straight forward (give it a try).

Nice as all that is, that isn’t the most exciting thing about location based services. Back to those social networking services. Adding location into the mix provides the opportunity to rekindle local communities, connecting people in neighbourhoods, who might otherwise have never met. At this point, some of you might be perplexed. Meet people in the locality? Your either thinking “but everyone knows everyone anyway” or “but no-one talks to anyone”. There again, you might be comfortably in the middle of the two. It depends where in the country (and in which country) you live. Where I am, the commuter lifestyle and long working hours mean that much of the local sense of community has dwindled away. There is little engagement in local matters. A few brave souls attempt to keep a bit of a fire going, but it is a battle against apathy and that lack of time.

Cue location based services. From Facebook to Brightkite, from blogs to Twitter, local people are rediscovering each other. More than that, they are finding common causes. What is a community after all, if it isn’t a group of people centred about a common purpose? It was during a conversation with Tom Watson MP – Minister for Digital Engagement – last week that I realised the significance of these communities mapping on to geographical political infrastructures: influence. Just as the communities described in Cause Wired were able to organise on-line to create changes in the off-line world on an international level, local groups can affect the local level.

The space is not without its issues (see this post about post code data), with access to data and privacy being major concerns. However, the next few years will be about the Internet becoming an increasingly local phenomenon, rather than a global one. We have local community based blogs and websites, groups on social networking sites and local meet ups and that is all before the new wave of location aware devices are in broad use. We going hyper-local, and it may just be the most disruptive phase of the Internet yet.

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 If you look at my copy of CauseWired, you’ll see that I’ve marked more than one or two pages out, and if you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know that I’ve been reading it for quite a while. Reading. Thinking. Reading.

It is worth remembering where I am coming from here. I got into the Internet because I was captivated by the power it had to connect people, and the things that happened when it did. I saw technology as a tool for creating positive change.

The companies I have worked for have lead me into commercial business. I’ve worked to create markets, fund companies, sell companies and buy companies, but in parallel to that I’ve also served on the board of trustees for a charity and run with the occasional social cause. I’m no expert on philanthropy or social action, but I do see it as an essential balance to the activities of the commercial world. It is something that the commercially-minded should be actively engaged in. It is no coincidence that some of the richest people on the planet are the greatest philanthropists.

CauseWired, or rather “CauseWired – Plugging in, Getting Involved, Changing the World,” to give the book its full title, makes a big claim. It is about changing the circumstances of others, through your own actions, something that Tom Watson knows about. This particular Tom Watson isn’t the UK MP (here), he’s this one, the US journalist and media critic (fuller bio on the Changing Our World site). There is a link between them, I’ll come back to. The book charts how social networks, like Facebook and a range of more specialist sites, are changing the world of charities/nonprofits and social causes.

Let me take this post as an example of the new dynamic social media (and social networking) is creating. I found out about the book via twitter, got details via a blog post and contacted the publishers via email. I started following Tom, via twitter, as I was interested in his work. Through Twitter I realised that Tom (US) knew Tom (UK), who I’ve followed on twitter since the New York Digital Mission.

 I usually post pictures of my travels to photo-sharing site Flickr, and recently posted one of my good self reading CauseWired. Tom commented on the photo, tweeted about it and linked to it in a post on his blog [I hope you are still managing to follow the thread!] The Amazon site picked up that blog post, and so, currently, there I am reading in a picture on the Amazon page for the book (here). I’ve just put that link as my Facebook status update, and… To be continued.

Now, none of that has changed the world, although I’m hoping that someone who reads the book as a result will. However, there are now a few hundred people who know we have a shared interest and skills that can be brought to bear on a cause. Connections and conversations on this kind of global scale would have been unlikely before the web, or more specifically before social media came to the web. Activists can amplify their efforts, create awareness and join forces with like minded individuals. That, in essence, is what CauseWired is about: How new communications technology is revolutionizing the flow of money and talent in the third sector.

The book weaves a course across the short history and global geography of the CauseWired phenomenon. The introduction felt a little long, but I have been buried in much of the subject matter for a long time so that may just be me. Once I was through that, I started busily scribbling notes and pondering deep thoughts.

Reading the book was like seeing from the other side of a two way mirror. I know the technologies and many of the causes that Tom uses as examples, but in telling the inside story, he brings them to life with a new freshness. The smaller examples in the book are even more interesting than the larger ones. Traditional broadcast media often leads the rally for the big causes. Social media has created the bandwidth for the smaller ones to emerge, the ones that don’t get big media air-time, in their early days at least. That is a qualitative change in the way that things work.

The big take aways and aha’s for me:

• There is a big difference between being aware or interested and engaged and active.
• We’ve been doing this stuff ‘forever’ – I remember charitable activity on the Bulletin boards in the 80′s – it is the tools and scale that has changed.
• This is yet another inter-generational fault-line.
• The shift from anonymity to authenticity is high-impact. “On the Internet no-one knows you are a dog” was 90′s. “I am…” is the 00′s.
• The powerful stuff happens when the on-line meet off-line and the off-line comes on-line.
• Tom Watson mentions Tom Watson in the book, in the context of UK open government, a slightly surreal moment.
• There’s more… Which I’ll come back to in future posts.
• Reading this book will be expensive – I’ve added lots of the books mentioned on to my Amazon wish list, and found some interesting causes.

If you’re in business, and you plan to hire or work with millennials, you better have a cause and/or be involved in one. CauseWired is a good place to start to understand that world. This book doesn’t aim to dig into the depths of social media. It isn’t going to lose the uninitiated, and experts shouldn’t expect any great revelations in that domain. It does illuminate wired causes, and provide a wealth of illustrations. If you work for a charity or not-for-profit, read this book. Digest it. Then read it again. It is the new shape of your world.

For our own mental well being, all of us need to be involved in something that transcends the ‘me’ and engages with the ‘us’, something that reaches beyond the ‘now’ to the tomorrow and beyond. If you haven’t done that yet, then Tom’s book will give you insight into what can be achieved, together with a list of places to get engaged in a rewarding way.

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