Internet’s Reach Changing How Groups, Individuals Take Action

The Internet is transforming the way groups come together and take action, Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, told 1,400 charity technology officials, consultants, and company representatives gathered here at the Nonprofit Technology Conference.

“We are living in the middle of the biggest expansion of expressive capability in the history of the human race,” said Mr. Shirky,

Previous communications revolutions were either good at sending one-way messages to large groups of people, like the printing press or broadcast television, or at getting small groups of individuals to talk to each other, like the telephone, he said.

“The Internet is the first medium that brings the many-to-many pattern, two-way group communication into the media landscape,” Mr. Shirky told the audience. “For the first time, we have the ability to put them together. It isn’t just listening to one source at a time. You can also talk back and you can talk sideways.”

What’s more, he said, the Internet is absorbing everything that came before it.

“The medium is subsuming all previous media as they go digital, which means that not only do we have the many-to-many pattern, but we have the broadcast pattern and the two-way communication pattern existing in the same environment,” said Mr. Shirky.

These changes, he said, have had profound implications for organizing people to take action.

“When we see large-scale organized action in the world, we are used to there being some managed organization behind it, driving it,” said Mr. Shirky. “That is now no longer the case. Organizations no longer have the monopoly on organized activity.”

Institutions in society — nonprofit organizations included — are at the beginning of a long process of reinventing their roles in a radically different media landscape.

During this period of transition, he said, groups shouldn’t commit to a single course of action. “Find the person who’s got the big idea, who’s got the idea that could transform everything once it’s adopted, and lock them out of the building,” said Mr. Shirky. “Do not let them back in until they come back with 10 medium-sized ideas or 100 small ideas.”

Using “open source” software rather than proprietary tools is a moral issue that extends beyond technology and affects all of the causes and people that nonprofit organizations serve, Eben Moglen, founder of the Software Freedom Law Center, told participants.

The idea that knowledge is something that can be owned and therefore controlled is the cause of most human misery, said Mr. Moglen. “There are people who will die because the knowledge of the molecule that might help them not to die is owned knowledge,” he said. “Someone has secured for the substantial portion of a human lifetime the exclusive right to deploy that knowledge, which raises its price, decreases its availability, and condemns some people to extinction.”

Knowledge as a commodity also explains why such a small percentage of people worldwide have access to education, said Mr. Moglen.

“How many of the Einsteins that ever existed were allowed to learn physics?” he asked the audience. “One or two, maybe?”

But digital technology, which allows information to be duplicated at no additional cost, calls into question the rationale for the ownership of knowledge, Mr. Moglen argued.

“If we could feed everybody by cooking one breakfast and pressing a button, what would the case be, what would the argument be for charging people more for food than they can afford to pay?” he said. “Of course, we can’t just cook one breakfast and press a button, but we can make one operating system and press a button.”

Using open-source software products that were created collaboratively and can be shared freely chips away at the system that seeks to control knowledge for profit, Mr. Moglen told the audience.

“We are not merely making our own businesses cheaper to run or even more efficient, more pleasant, more simple, more stable, we are also addressing a root issue of injustice,” he said, “because we are reducing the political and economic might of knowledge that can be owned.”

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A new guide to low-cost software systems that help charities manage their donor records was released at the conference.

The report — which was published by the Nonprofit Technology Network and Idealware, a nonprofit group in Portland, Me. — reviews 33 fund-raising packages.

Information about the guide is available at http://www.nten.org.

More articles about the technology conference are available here.