Swarmwise – The Tactical Manual To Changing The World

Swarmwise – Εγχειρίδιο Τακτικής για να Αλλάξει ο Κόσμος (σε διαδικασία έναρξης για μετάφραση)

Swarmwise – The Tactical Manual To Changing The World. Chapter One. Swarm Management INFOPOLICY: Swarmwise – The Tactical Manual To Changing The World. Chapter One.	Η σοφία του Σμήνους - Εγχειρίδιο Τακτικής για να Αλλάξει ο Κόσμος. Κεφάλαιο Ένα. Η Διαχείριση του Σμήνους INFOPOLICY: Swarmwise – The Tactical Manual To Changing The World. Chapter One.
Somewhere today, a loose-knit group of activists who are having fun is dropkicking a rich, established organization so hard they are making heads spin. Rich and resourceful organizations are used to living by the golden rule – “those with the gold make the rules”. New ways of organizing go beyond just breaking the old rules into downright shredding them – leaving executives in the dust, wondering how that band of poor, rag-tag, disorganized activists could possibly have beaten their rich, well-structured organization.	Κάπου σήμερα, μια χαλαρά-δεμένη ομάδα ακτιβιστών περνώντας καλά και διασκεδάζοντας, ξεκινά μια πληθωρική, εδραιωμένη οργάνωση, τόσο δυνατή που κάνει τα κεφάλια να γυρίζουν, να την βλέπουν με θαυμασμό και απορία. Οι κατεστημένες πλούσιες και πολυμήχανες οργανώσεις έχουν συνηθίσει να ζουν με το χρυσό κανόνα, που λέει ότι - "those with the gold make the rules" (όσοι έχουν τα λεφτά, θέτουν και τους κανόνες). Οι νέοι τρόποι οργάνωσης έχουν προχωρήσει πολύ πιο πέρα, διαλύοντας τους παλαιούς κανόνες - αφήνοντας τα ακριβοθώρητα στελέχη των επιχειρήσεων πίσω τους, να τρώνε την σκόνη που αφήνουν, και μένουν αυτά τα στελέχη, με την απορία να αναρωτιούνται, πώς μια μπάντα φτωχών, κουρελήδων, αποδιοργανωμένων ακτιβιστών, θα μπορούσαν ενδεχομένως να νικήσουν την δική τους πλούσια, καλά δομημένη οργάνωση.
On June 7, 2009, the Swedish Pirate Party got 225,915 votes in the European Elections, becoming the largest party in the most coveted sub-30 demographic. Our campaign budget was 50,000 euros. Our competitors had spent six million. We had spent less than one per cent of their budget, and still beat them, giving us a cost-efficiency advantage of over two orders of magnitude. This was entirely due to working swarmwise, and the methods can translate to almost any organized large-scale activity. This book is about that secret sauce.	Στις 7 Ιουνίου του 2009, το Σουηδικό Πειρατικό Κόμμα πήρε 225.915 ψήφους στις ευρωεκλογές, και έγινε το μεγαλύτερο κόμμα στο πιο πολυπόθητο ηλικιακό δημογραφικό σύνολο εκλογέων, αυτό των κάτω από τα 30. Ο προϋπολογισμός της εκστρατείας μας ήταν 50.000 ευρώ. Οι ανταγωνιστές μας είχαν ξεπεράσει στους δικούς τους προϋπολογισμούς τα έξι εκατομμύρια ευρώ. Εμείς είχαμε ξοδέψει λιγότερο από το ένα τοις εκατό του δικού τους προϋπολογισμού, όμως και πάλι καταφέραμε να τους νικήσουμε, με μια σχέση απόδοσης στον λόγο κόστος-αποτελεσματικότητας, με ένα πλεονέκτημα στο αποτέλεσμά μας, που ήταν πάνω από δύο τάξεις μεγέθους από τα δικά τους. Όλο αυτό έγινε μόνο και μόνο λόγω της εργασίας μας που βασίστηκε πάνω σε μια οργάνωση με την σοφία του σμήνους (swarmwise), και με μεθόδους που μπορούν να εφαρμοστούν σε σχεδόν οποιαδήποτε οργανωμένη δραστηριότητα μεγάλης κλίμακας. Τούτο το βιβλίο είναι σχετικό με αυτό το μυστικό συστατικό της πετυχημένης μας συνταγής.
A swarm organization is a decentralized, collaborative effort of volunteers that looks like a hierarchical, traditional organization from the outside. It is built by a small core of people that construct a scaffolding of go-to people, enabling a large number of volunteers to cooperate on a common goal in quantities of people not possible before the net was available.	Η οργάνωση σμήνους, είναι μια αποκεντρωμένη, συλλογική προσπάθεια από εθελοντές που ομοιάζει με μια ιεραρχική, παραδοσιακή οργάνωση όταν την κοιτάς από έξω. Είναι χτισμένη μέσω ενός μικρού πυρήνα ανθρώπων που κατασκευάζουν γύρω τους μια κλιμάκωση με την συμμετοχή από ενθουσιώδεις ανθρώπους, επιτρέποντας ένα μεγάλο αριθμό εθελοντών να συνεργάζονται με ένα κοινό στόχο, με τέτοιο συνολικό πλήθος ανθρώπων που δεν θα ήταν εφικτό πριν, όταν δεν ήταν διαθέσιμο το διαδίκτυο.
Working with a swarm requires you to do a lot of things completely in opposite from what you learn at an archetypal business school. You need to release the control of your brand and its messages. You need to delegate authority to the point where anybody can make almost any decision for the entire organization. You need to accept and embrace that people in the organization will do exactly as they please, and the only way to lead is to inspire them to want to go where you want the organization as a whole to go.	Δουλεύοντας με ένα σμήνος, απαιτείται από εσάς να κάνετε πολλά πράγματα με έναν εντελώς αντίθετο τρόπο από ότι έχετε μάθει μέχρι τώρα, ίσως σε κάποιο αρχετυπικό (παλαιάς κοπής) σχολείο για επιχειρήσεις. Θα πρέπει να απελευθερώσετε τον έλεγχο της οργάνωσή σας και την ανταλλαγή των μηνυμάτων μέσα σε αυτή. Θα πρέπει να αναθέσετε αρμοδιότητες σε τέτοιο βαθμό, σε σημείο που, ο καθένας θα μπορεί να πάρει σχεδόν οποιαδήποτε απόφαση για ολόκληρο τον οργανισμό. Θα πρέπει να δεχτείτε και να αγκαλιάσετε το γεγονός ότι οι άνθρωποι της οργάνωσης θα κάνουν ακριβώς ότι θέλουν, και ο μόνος τρόπος για να τους οδηγήσετε θα είναι να τους εμπνεύστε να θέλουν να πάνε όπου θα θέλατε η οργάνωση, ως σύνολο, να πάει.
It is only as you release that control, the kind of control that organizations and managers have held close to heart for centuries, that you can reap the benefits of the swarm: the same cost-efficiency advantage and execution-speed advantage against the competition that the Swedish Pirate Party enjoyed. This book will teach you those methods, from the initial forming of the swarm to its growth and ongoing maintenance and delivery. It will not teach you the underlying theory of psychology and sociology – merely share experiences and methods that have proven to work in practice.	Μόνο όταν αφήσετε αυτόν τον έλεγχο, το είδος του ελέγχου που είχαν και τηρούσαν οι οργανώσεις και οι διαχειριστές τους, ευλαβικά για αιώνες, μόνο τότε θα μπορέσετε να καρπωθείτε τα οφέλη του σμήνους: το ίδιο πετυχημένο αποτέλεσμα στον λόγο κόστος-αποτελεσματικότητα και το ίδιο πλεονέκτημα ταχύτητας-εκτέλεσης έναντι του ανταγωνισμού σας, που και το Σουηδικό Πειρατικό Κόμμα κατάφερε να απολαύσει. Σκοπός αυτού του βιβλίου είναι να σας διδάξει τις μεθόδους αυτές, από την αρχική διαμόρφωση του σμήνους, στην ανάπτυξή του και την συνεχή συντήρηση και απόδοση του. Δεν θα σας διδάξει τη θεωρία της ψυχολογίας και της κοινωνιολογίας που μπορεί να υποβόσκει σε αυτό - απλώς θα μοιραστούμε μαζί σας τις εμπειρίες και τις μεθόδους μας, που έχουν αποδειχθεί ότι λειτουργούν στην πράξη.
When I kickstarted the swarm of the Swedish Pirate Party, I had posted a rough manifesto on a rather ugly web site and mentioned the site just once in a chat channel of a file-sharing lobby. That was all the advertising that ever happened; the next day, the party had hundreds of activists. Timing, social context, and message is crucial – but if you have those three, your initial swarm will form like bees to honey in hours. Growing it and maintaining it will also be crucial, but those are the next challenges in line. We take one challenge at a time.	Όταν πρωτοξεκίνησα το σμήνος του Σουηδικού Κόμματος Πειρατών, είχα δημοσιεύσει ένα πρόχειρο μανιφέστο, σε μια μάλλον άσχημη ιστοσελίδα και αναφέρθηκα στην ιστοσελίδα αυτή μόνο μία φορά σε ένα κανάλι συζήτησης (chat channel) του λόμπι για το file-sharing (μοίρασμα αρχείων). Αυτή ήταν και όλη η διαφήμιση που έγινε ποτέ για την ιστοσελίδα. Την επόμενη μέρα, το κόμμα είχε εκατοντάδες ακτιβιστές. Ο χρονισμός, το κοινωνικό πλαίσιο, και το μήνυμα είναι ζωτικής σημασίας - εάν έχετε αυτά τα τρία, το αρχικό σας σμήνος θα σχηματιστεί, όπως σχηματίζεται ένα σμάρι από μέλισσες πάνω στο μέλι μέσα σε ώρες. Το να το μεγαλώσετε σωστά και να το διατηρήσετε, είναι επίσης ζωτικής σημασίας, αλλά αυτές είναι οι επόμενες προκλήσεις που έχουμε μπροστά μας. Παίρνουμε μια πρόκληση κάθε φορά.
As we describe the swarm concept, it is easy to think of pure decentralized amorphous clouds of people, like Anonymous or the Occupy Wall Street movement. However, while these swarms share values, they do not share direction or method. That means they are confined to succeeding on small projects that span a relatively small number of people over a relatively short timespan, even if each of those small projects build gradual awareness of the Anonymous or Occupy brands.	Όπως έχουμε περιγράψει ήδη την έννοια του σμήνος, είναι εύκολο να το σκεφτούμε ως, ένα καθαρά αποκεντρωμένο άμορφο σύννεφο (cloud) ανθρώπων, όπως οι Anonymous (Anonymous (group), From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) ή το κίνημα Occupy Wall Street (Occupy Wall Street, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). Ωστόσο, ενώ αυτά τα σμήνη μοιράζονται κοινές αξίες, δεν συμμερίζονται κοινή κατεύθυνση ή μέθοδο. Αυτό σημαίνει ότι περιορίζονται να έχουν επιτυχία σε μικρά έργα (projects) που καλύπτουν ένα σχετικά μικρό αριθμό ανθρώπων σε σχετικά σύντομης διάρκειας χρονικό διάστημα, ακόμη και αν κάθε ένα από αυτά τα μικρά έργα οικοδομούν μια σταδιακή συνειδητοποίηση αναγνωρισιμότητας από το κοινό, για τους Anonymous ή το Occupy.
The weak cohesion of the Anonymous and Occupy brands can partially be ascribed to their choice of being leaderless. While this brings resilience, as no leader can be targeted by adversaries, it sacrifices direction and purpose. I’ve found that the typical Internet community methods of inclusion, when combined with strong leadership, works much better to achieve global change than working leaderlessly under little more than a common flag.	Η αδύναμη συνοχή αναγνωρισιμότητας των Anonymous και του Occupy μπορεί εν μέρει να αποδοθούν στην επιλογή τους να είναι ακέφαλα. Αν και κάτι τέτοιο φέρνει την ανθεκτικότητα τους, αφού δεν υπάρχει ηγέτης και δεν μπορεί να αποτελέσει στόχο για τους αντιπάλους τους, κάτι τέτοιο όμως θυσιάζει την κατεύθυνση και τον σκοπό. Έχω διαπιστώσει ότι οι τυπικές μέθοδοι ένταξης των κοινοτήτων του διαδικτύου, σε συνδυασμό με την ισχυρή ηγεσία (ηγεσία και όχι αρχηγία), λειτουργεί πολύ καλύτερα για την επίτευξη μιας παγκόσμιας αλλαγής, από ότι καταφέρνει ένα σχήμα χωρίς ηγεσία και μόνο με την δέσμευση να βρίσκονται κάτω από μια κοινή σημαία.
I learned some of these techniques while being trained for officer’s rank in the Army, and even more of them by participating in many online communities. But the secret sauce recipe of swarm cost-efficiency was hit only when you took an officer’s training in maintaining strong group values, mixed in the net’s strong participatory values and low-cost mass communication, and added a dash of management experience from the dot-com era at the turn of the century.	Έμαθα κάποιες από αυτές τις τεχνικές, ενώ εκπαιδευόμουν για το βαθμό του αξιωματικού στο στρατό, και ακόμη περισσότερο από την συμμετοχή μου σε πολλές online κοινότητες. Αλλά το μυστικό συστατικό κόστους-αποτελεσματικότητας της πετυχημένης συνταγής ενός σμήνος, μπορεί να επιτευχθεί μόνο αν έχετε μαζί, την κατάρτιση ενός αξιωματικού στη διατήρηση ισχυρών αξιών μέσα σε μια ομάδα, και την αναμίξετε με ισχυρές συμμετοχικές αξίες μέσω του διαδικτύου και με χαμηλού κόστους μαζική επικοινωνία, και πρόσθεσε και μια δόση εμπειρίας από την διαχείριση των dot-com, την εποχή που άλλαζε ο αιώνας. (Dot-com bubble, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
That dot-com era was quite special as a manager in the IT field. If your people didn’t like what you said at the morning meeting, they would merrily walk out of the building and have a new job before lunch. Your paycheck was far more replaceable to them than they ever were as employees to you. People didn’t work for the money.	Εκείνη η εποχή των dot-com, ήταν ειδικά ξεχωριστή στους διαχειριστές στον τομέα της πληροφορικής. Τότε, εάν οι άνθρωποι δεν τους άρεσε αυτό που θα τους λέγατε στη πρωινή συνεδρίαση, θα έφευγαν από το κτήριο άνετα και θα έβρισκαν μια νέα θέση εργασίας πριν καν έρθει η ώρα για το μεσημεριανό γεύμα, κάπου αλλού. Ο μισθός που τους δίνατε ήταν εύκολο να αντικατασταθεί για αυτούς, παρόλο το ότι, τους είχατε προσλάβει ως εργαζόμενους σας. Οι άνθρωποι δεν εργάζονταν για τα χρήματα.
Therefore, this experience carries over directly to working with volunteers, where people don’t work for the money either (as they aren’t getting any). Leadership and positive reinforcement is key.	Ως εκ τούτου, αυτή η εμπειρία, μας μεταφέρει απευθείας στην συνεργασία με την συμμετοχή εθελοντών, όπου οι άνθρωποι δεν εργάζονται για τα χρήματα (δεδομένου ότι δεν παίρνουν καθόλου χρήματα). Η ηγεσία και η θετική ενίσχυση είναι το κλειδί.
Perhaps most significantly, focus in the swarm is always on what everybody can do, and never what people cannot or must do.	Ίσως το πιο σημαντικό είναι, η επικέντρωση στο σμήνος είναι πάντα σχετική με το τι μπορεί να κάνει ο καθένας, και ποτέ με το τι οι άνθρωποι, δεν μπορούν ή δεν πρέπει να κάνουν.
This sets it completely apart from a traditional corporation or democratic institution, which focuses sharply on what people must do and what bounds and limits they are confined to. This difference is part of why a swarm can be so effective: everybody can find something they like to do, all the time, off a suggested palette that furthers the swarm’s goals – and there is nobody there to tell them how things must or may not be done.	Αυτό θέτει κάτι εντελώς άλλο, από ότι μια παραδοσιακή εταιρεία ή έναν δημοκρατικό οργανισμό, που εστιάζουν ακριβώς σε αυτό, στο τι, οι άνθρωποι, πρέπει να κάνουν και στο ποια είναι τα όρια και οι περιορισμοί μέσα στα οποία πρέπει να δρουν. Η διαφορά αυτή, είναι ένα μέρος του γιατί ένα σμήνος μπορεί να είναι τόσο αποτελεσματικό: ο καθένας μπορεί να βρει κάτι που του αρέσει να κάνει, όλη την ώρα, επιλέγοντας από μια προτεινόμενη παλέτα δράσεων που προάγει τους στόχους του σμήνους - και δεν υπάρχει κανείς εκεί για να τους λέει πως πρέπει ή δεν πρέπει να γίνουν τα πράγματα.
Rather, people inspire one another. There are no report lines among activists. As everybody communicates with everybody else all the time, successful projects quickly create ripples to other parts of the swarm. Less successful ones causes the swarm to learn and move on, with no fingers pointed.
If you want leadership in a swarm, you stand up and say “I’m going to do X, because I think it will accomplish Y. Anybody who wants to join me in doing X is more than welcome.” Anybody in the swarm can stand up and say this, and everybody is encouraged to. This quickly creates an informal but tremendously strong leadership structure where people seek out roles that maximize their impact in furthering the swarm’s goals — all happening organically without any central planning and organization charts.
At the bottom line, what sets a swarm apart from traditional organizations is its blinding speed of operation, its next-to-nothing operating costs, and its large number of very devoted volunteers. Traditional corporations and democratic institutions appear to work at glacial speeds from the inside of a swarm. That’s also why a swarm can change the world: it runs in circles around traditional organizations, in terms of quality and quantity of work, as well as in resource efficiency.
THE SWARM IS OPEN
A key aspect of the swarm is that it is open to all people who want to share in the workload. Actually, it is more than open – everybody in the whole world is encouraged to pick work items off a public list, without asking anybody’s permission, and just start doing them. There is no recruitment process. Anybody who wants to contribute to the goal, in their own way and according to their own capacity, is welcome to do so. This contrasts sharply with hiring processes at traditional organizations, where people have to pass some kind of test in order to start working for the organization.
The advantage of this approach is that resources of the swarm aren’t spent keeping people out of it, but are spent getting people in to it. Granted, some work will be a duplication of effort since many people will be working on the same thing when nobody gets to tell other people what to do – but the result will be several solutions that are tried in parallel, and the swarm quickly learns which solutions work and which don’t. The workflow becomes an iterative, evolutionary process of trial and error, of constantly adapting and improving, without anybody’s supervision to make it happen.
Being open and inviting is a key defining feature of a swarm.
AND TRANSPARENT
The swarm isn’t just open, it is also transparent as a defining feature. There are almost no secrets at all. This can be a mind-boggling concept, coming from a traditional organization.
Everything is transparent by default. Financial records are transparent for all to see. Discussions about strategies and tactics are transparent for all to see (and open for all to participate in). Conflicts are transparent for all to see. This is because all discussions happen in places where everyone can see them.
This provides for trust and confidence. Since everybody can see all the information and all the discussions in the entire organization, it provides a very powerful sense of inclusion.
It also provides an extremely effective rumor control. It is an inoculation against distrust, since distrust depends on information starvation and people drawing their own conclusions from incomplete data.
Transparency is also effective at preventing scandalization: there have been several instances in the Swedish Pirate Party where media caught wind of a conflict, sensationalized it in a typical tabloid fashion, at which point a normal organization would have capsized – but since everybody reading the stories were able to go to the source and read the actual and original exchange of words, there were no rumors and there was no “he said, she said”. Conflicts do not escalate beyond control when this transparency is in place.
Of course, this doesn’t mean every discussion over coffee or a drink must be recorded. That would create an untenable workload, and couldn’t be enforced anyway. But it does mean that work isn’t applied to keep some people away from information that is available to other people – so when discussions are held online, they remain recorded and they remain readable.
“Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.” — Commissioner Pravin Lal
In the few cases where secrets are kept, they are to protect the privacy of people in the swarm, and anybody can easily find exactly what information is kept secret – and more importantly, why it is kept secret, and who has the knowledge of it.
An example of a legitimate secret in a swarm could be the identities of donors, in order to protect the donors and prevent conflicts of interest as people would consciously or subconsciously try to please the larger donors rather than work toward the overall goal of the swarm. The person administering the bank account and/or credit card records would know this, but would be tasked with keeping it to themselves.
Last but not least, being fully transparent alleviates the problem in traditional chain-of-command structures where somebody in the middle may distort information passed up or down, either consciously or subconsciously, in the scenario where every link in the chain is an information bottleneck. By making all the information available to everybody, nobody will have the ability to distort it to parts of the organization. Conversely, nobody speaks for other people in a swarm, as everybody has their own voice. This prevents factionalization, as there aren’t any traditional middle managers who can set their own goals that conflict with those of the overall swarm.
SO YOU HAVE A PROVOCATIVE IDEA?
You are probably reading this book because you have one or a couple of provocative ideas lurking in the back of your head, and are looking for ways to realize them. Here, then, comes the boring part of realizing them: have you done the math?
All swarms are a matter of quantity. Quantity of people. Like army ants in the Amazon rainforest, it is a matter of overpowering your opponents with sheer biomass through superior ability of organization and ability to channel volunteer energy – using your organizational agility to always be immensely stronger than your adversaries, whenever and wherever you choose to appear, just like the army ants overpower an opponent by their ability to quickly direct and relocate their local biomass advantage.
So this is the first hurdle your idea must pass: are enough people affected by this idea, and can a large enough amount of people be energized to contribute to it in order to pass the critical threshold? Can the threshold be identified, and if so, how many people must get onboard for your idea to succeed?
As we can see, this is where it gets a bit traditional. We must determine what the success criterion for the idea is. What event constitutes success, and what does it take to get there?
For a new political party like the Swedish Pirate Party, the success criterion is easy to determine: get elected. There are many small steps on the road there, of course, and many steps after that goal has been achieved (such as staying elected). But it gives us a tangible goal to work with.
Let’s see how this goal breaks down.
We would need activists in quality and voters in quantity. Politics, after all, is strictly a numbers game. It is a spectator sport performed in public.
In the case of the Pirate Party, the trigger for quantity was file sharing. In 2006, about 1.2 million citizens – voters – in Sweden were sharing culture and knowledge in violation of the copyright monopoly, and didn’t see anything wrong with that, but were still being actively demonized by the establishment.
To get into Parliament, you need 225,000 votes. This meant that if just one-fourth of the people thus demonized were angry enough about it, and didn’t take that kind of treatment sitting down, then the Pirate Party would be in Parliament. That was our goal, posted on the very first day on the website: 225,000 votes. It was credible, it was tangible, it was inclusive, it was world-changing.
Of course, there were other factors in society as well to this conflict, the underlying themes being freedoms of speech and expression as well as general net liberties. But if you start talking about abstract concepts, you’ll just have yawns among your prospective volunteers. We’ll need a large recruitment surface with concepts that are easy to relate to people’s everyday lives in order to grow the swarm to critical mass.
Once inside the swarm, people and activists will strive to understand the concepts on a deeper level. We need that too. But the surface area of the swarm’s idea must be large enough to attain the sufficient quantity of people for success.
Your idea must be possible to break down into that kind of math. How many people engaged at a minimum level, equivalent to voting, buying a product, or signing a petition, do you need to succeed?
You need to identify the group of people affected in a positive direction by your provocative idea, estimate the size of that group, and then make an educated guesstimate as to what portion of this group may engage in the swarm at the lowest level of activation.
However, remember the scale of the quantities of people we’re talking about. Swarms typically engage hundreds of thousands of people, even millions. They’re operated and coordinated by some thousand people who contribute to the swarm in their spare time, and maybe – just maybe – there are one or two full-time people coordinating the bulk of it.
Your swarm may have lower requirements for success than engaging one million people, of course. Only you can know that. But at least, you need to take your best guess at the numbers.
This is hard, because best guesses are all you’ll ever get. For instance, a women’s rights party in Sweden – which is already among the most gender-equal countries in the world – potentially affects a full half of the voter base. But can you activate a large enough portion of those people on the idea of further equalization of the genders? (It was tried. It turned out that you couldn’t.)
In contrast, three years after launch, in 2009, the Swedish Pirate Party got 225,915 votes in the European Elections, securing its first seats. The math had checked out beautifully from my initial estimate of 225,000 votes.
So for the rest of this book, we are going to take a hard look at your idea on how to form a swarm, and see what is required to realize it, the way the Swedish Pirate Party realized its success and started changing the world.
We’ll start with looking at the launch moments of the swarm, and see how intense they can be, and discuss how a scaffolding of go-to people – officers – can be organized in order to enable the swarm all across the ground you intend to cover. We’ll be discussing techniques and methods for the swarm itself, even going down to practical things like handing out flyers, and how you teach people to hand out flyers effectively
Going from there, we’ll take a closer look at how you can manage the day-to-day operations of the swarm – one portion classic project management, one large portion of wisdom about conflict resolution, and a portion of methods on preserving the swarm’s goals, culture, and values as it grows.
Finally, we’ll take a look at how you use the resulting swarm organization to deliver those large-scale results that change the world, as well as what happens when you succeed too well.
But first things first. Let’s return to that provocative idea of yours, lurking in the back of your head, and discuss how we can begin realizing it.
This is the first chapter of Swarmwise, a book arriving this summer. Did you like it? It’s going to be free to share (it, like this excerpt, is CC-BY-NC), but you can also buy it hardcover.
EXCERPT FROM UPCOMING BOOK http://falkvinge.net/files/2011/06/Swarmwise-Temp.jpg This is a part of the upcoming book Swarmwise, due in the summer of 2013. It is an instruction manual for recruiting and leading tens of thousands of activists on a mission to change the world for the better, without having access to money, resources, or fame. The book is based on Falkvinge’s experiences in leading the Swedish Pirate Party into the European Parliament, starting from nothing, and covers all aspects of leading a swarm of activists into mainstream success.
About The Author: Rick Falkvinge http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/3d0f5f0abb40ac682e9ea7c9e5e4410b?s=72 Rick is the founder of the first Pirate Party and is a political evangelist, traveling around Europe and the world to talk and write about ideas of a sensible information policy. He has a tech entrepreneur background and loves whisky.