Distributed Flashmob
February 2, 2006
Nova Spivack and I have been dreaming the same dream: of an online system that uses bottom-up idea generation to self-organize mass collective action. He calls his fictional system “ThePeople.net”.
Members of ThePeople.net agree to give 15 minutes of their time each week to do whatever ThePeople.net as a whole decides to do that week. So, for example, if the community decides that this week everyone will give $5 to a homeless person, that’s what you do. If the community decides that this week on wednesday at 12 noon everyone will stop what they are doing, stand up and announce “ThePeople.net” and then continue what they were doing as if nothing happened, then that’s what you do. It’s a new kind of social contract.
Now how does the community decide what the members of ThePeople.net will do each week? For this to be truly emergent democracy, we don’t want anyone to have control, we want the decision-making process to be truly bottom-up. So here’s what I propose: Any member can suggest an action to the community. The community members then vote on the actions that are most interesting.
I have my own opinions on how decision-making could improve on simple voting in this system, but I am absolutely enamored with the overall bottom-up idea. I really like the possibility of playful or humorous flashmob-type acts in addition to the usual do-gooding. But it makes me think that just one site is not enough. The greatest participation would come with those collective actions that most closely fit the values and desires of the community. I would rather see this system as a general purpose tool utilized by all sorts of communities for co-creating, choosing and enacting their collective will: church groups, war-protesters, elementary school classrooms, corporations, communes, et al. Just as a Wiki is a general-purpose tool for coauthoring documents, I’m talking about a tool for coauthoring collective action.
The wonderful thing I always bring up in regard to this hypothetical system is its inherent capacity for self-reflection and autocatalysis. Assume you have such a system. The team of people involved in building it plus anyone else interested in its development can use the system itself to generate ideas on how to improve it. Open source thought. In other words, use version 1.0 to design version 1.1. You have yourself a snowball.
Lacking nothing better at the moment, all I can do is make my own little snow-pebble and pitch it down the slope: let’s build this thing.
Posted by Daniel in : Collective Intelligence, Research, Technology1 comment so far
