I was listening to Occupy Wall Street’s Beka Economopolous, and I couldn’t help it: my mind wandered to pitches I’ve heard in the startup world, especially the part when the founder gets to the bulletpoints on consumer engagement. I was in Manhattan yesterday and had stopped by NYU’s Kimmel Center to hear a panel of political organizers and theorists from across party lines discuss “network democracy”. This chat-fest was run by the Personal Democracy Forum and lamely promoted under the title “From the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street and Beyond”.
I quickly learned from the panelists–which included NYU’s hyper-optimistic Clay Shirky, Tea Party Patriot cofounder Mark Meckler, and The Starfish and Spider author Ori Brafman– that there’s not much daylight between a startup working towards a hockey-stick growth curve and an activist group seeking something like a political IPO–say, a change in policy or new laws.
In both cases, the same tactics are employed: a combination of game mechanics, old and new marketing ideas (customer segmentation and branding), a bit of transmedia news staging, and social media for sharing experiences and building links.
Shirky: Collaboration without cooperation.
More intriguing to me was that this ostensibly political discussion was not so much about movements and leaders and parties as about process and tools and decentralized collaboration.
In other words, we’re talking Information Technology.
Here’s an area where Occupy Wall Streeters and Tea Partiers agree: both groups affiliated themselves with open-source ideas. Anyone can fork off the main bit of code (or idea or brand), make it their own, and then upload it to share with others. For those keeping score, Linux was mentioned several times by panelists, Android not at all.
Shirky, bless him, had the best open-source anecdote. He described how one of his students had come up with some software–hey was it PHP-, Ruby-, or Python-based?–which he though would be useful to the Occupy movement. When it came time to give it to them, it became clear that there really was no one person who could manage the code. This enterprising student was told essentially to spread the word at Zuccotti Park, and if the app was used, people will know about it through their social networks. If not, it will just fade away.
Shirky’s big point was that open-source “modularity”– a fancy way of saying APIs–allows large-scale collaboration without the overhead and bureaucracy that one would normally see in top-down organizations. There’s simply less friction involved in getting a project off the ground with open and cloud-based (something that was not, but should have been talked about yesterday evening) software–whether it’s started by two founders or two activists.
Shirky put it best when he said the open-source movement and network democracy is “collaboration without cooperation.”
What does this mean for legacy government organizations? No one seemed to have an answer.
I for one hated the idea, which was brought up, for using a Wiki model for crafting new laws.
