Here Comes Everybody
I’m currently reading Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without organizations by Clay Shirky, which is a cracking good read. There is one passage early in the book which really resonates with what we are trying to do with Beanbag.
From Sharing to Cooperation to Collective Action
For the last hundred years the big organizational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state , directing the effort in a planned way, or by businesses competing in a market. This debate was based on the universal and unspoken supposition that people couldn’t simply self-assemble; the choice between markets and managed effort assumed that there was no third alternative. Now there is.
The Web is enabling people with shared interests and common goals to come together to tackle old problems in new ways and to challenge the status quo. It allows large numbers of people with wildly varying levels of time, energy and commitment to all contribute meaningfully to a collaborative effort without the overhead traditionally associated with building an organisation. A group can be much more fluid and correspondingly more efficient at realising its goals.