What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [24]
Zuckerberg did what comes naturally to a native of the web. He went to the internet and downloaded images of all the pieces of art he knew would be covered in the exam. He put them on a web page and added blank boxes under each. Then he emailed the address of this page to his classmates, telling them he’d just put up a study guide. Think Tom Sawyer’s fence. The class dutifully came along and filled in the blanks with the essential knowledge about each piece of art, editing each other as they went, collaborating to get it just right. This being Harvard, they did a good job of it.
You can predict the punch line: Zuckerberg aced the exam. But here’s the real kicker: The professor said the class as a whole got better grades than usual. They captured the wisdom of their crowd and helped each other. Zuckerberg had created the means for the class to collaborate. He brought them elegant organization.
Look at your constituents, customers, community, audience—even your competitors—and ask how you can bring them elegant organization, especially now, as the internet disrupts everything. Where some see a new world disorder, others see the opportunity to bring organization. This strategy is the foundation for so many internet companies: Google helps us organize around search, advertising, maps, documents, and more. Its mission, after all, is nothing less than to organize the world’s information. eBay lets us organize markets for merchandise. Amazon helps us organize communities of consumer opinion around every product offered there. Facebook and other services like it—LinkedIn (big in business), Bebo (big in Europe), Google’s Orkut (big in Brazil and India), and StudieVZ (big in Germany)—help us to organize our friends and colleagues. Skype, AOL, and Yahoo give us the tools to collaborate through chat, phone, and video, organizing our communication. Flickr lets us organize our photos and also communities of interest around them. del.icio.us does the same for our bookmarks and web recommendations. Daylife organizes the world’s news. BlogAds lets bloggers organize ad networks. Wikipedia’s platform enables us to organize our collective knowledge. Dell’s support forums organize customers’ knowledge. The internet brings us so many new paths to people, information, and functionality that we need help making sense of it. We’ve long needed help organizing ourselves. Government and media did that for us. Then internet portals and online media followed their centralized worldview. But the next generation of organizational enterprises—the Facebooks, Flickrs, and Wikipedias—don’t organize us. They are platforms that help us to organize ourselves.
In his book Here Comes Everybody, New York University professor Clay Shirky argues that self-organization is a key to understanding the internet’s impact on society. We can now organize without organizations. That is his law. Shirky studied the early years of Meetup, a New York company that uses internet tools to enable groups of people to get together in person. Its founder, Scott Heiferman, was inspired by Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone, which argues that our communities are unraveling as we become more disconnected. Heiferman wanted to fix that by enabling groups to come together. “Use the internet to get off the internet,” Meetup’s home page urges. Where others saw disorder, Heiferman saw opportunity. In Shirky’s examination of Meetup’s first year, he learned that the groups that organized were not what you’d expect. The most popular? Not soccer moms or football fans or knitting circles but witches. Yes, witches. With reflection, this makes sense. Witches have so few ways to organize covens or coffee klatches. Meetup helped them