Review of ‘Here Comes Everybody’ by Clay Shirky
Imagine that you could get people to do valuable things for you for free, like writing and distributing book reviews. That’s exactly what’s happening on the web today. Clay Shirky, in his book ‘Here Comes Everybody’, looks at the effects of the internet on producing economic value without the effort and expense of establishing an organization. He argues that the cost of organizing certain activities, such as publishing book reviews, has fallen to almost zero. Web services, such as Flickr, blogger.com, Amazon reviews, and Wikipedia are successful because they allow people to voluntarily contribute to a goal with minimal organizational effort.
Many of the examples in the book are well known (though some, like the use of blogs to organize protests in Belarus, are less known and wonderful). What makes Shirky’s book useful is the analysis that he does of the examples. Various models are proposed; a particularly useful model is promise, tool, bargain. He argues that a new group makes a promise (‘lets put together photos of mermaid parades’), then provides tools to achieve that promise (Flickr), then makes bargains to achieve the goal (the agreement not to post off-topic images).
A quick read for a pretty good payoff.
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
