I've been reading Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. I'm not actually that far into the book yet, so there's time for him to come back around, but as yet, I'm finding a lot in the book to disagree with.

Yesterday's discovery of Dooce's clotheswasher issues have added to my dismay. I'm taking a completely different angle than the readers she complains about. Really, I'm not complaining about her at all -- I'm glad she got her washer issues sorted out. But in a similar way to what irritates me about Here Comes Everybody, she makes a point to say that the power of Twitter that we should all use is one that empowers the common man to make changes for the good.

I simply don't think that power exists for people who aren't Dooce or Clay Shirky.

And what really ticks me off about it is that they write blog posts and books about how anyone can use the Power Of Twitter (or similar crowdsourcing online social whatevers) to change the world, but what they seem to fail to mention is that it doesn't hurt - nay, it's required - to have a million followers, or to be the first person to do a thing.

If it was that easy, then Bosch would have heard the Rescue Mission of Salt Lake crying for new appliances and heeded their call. It's not that easy. You need someone with a million followers to bring it to light. And even then, it works once: There aren't free Bosch appliances going to every rescue mission everywhere.

I think that if everyone who lost a cell phone wrote about it online and submitted it to Digg, we'd pretty much not care about that any more. In fact, just after reading the one story presented in Here Comes Everybody, I already don't care about your lost phone being found by some defiant teenager.

What I doubt is that the promise of the power of the crowd extends to my 251 followers, most of whom are bots trying to sell me better hosting, porn, or more followers.

Ultimately, I think that the internet, the social web, has the power to do what these pundits describe, but only under very special circumstances, and certainly not for the people who need it most. In the worst case, this tripe is bought and consumed by people who want to use it to sell me more junk. The altruist in me wants to see positive social change, but I don't see this ending that way. It looks to me like email, yet another avenue for spam.

Alex and I have been going back and forth in comments over the areas of our interest that overlap. In his recent post, he asks, "how long can organic communities self-moderate?"

I admit that I haven't read the Starfish and the Spider, although I did just one-click it into my Kindle, so it's doomed to suffer my analysis. Nevertheless, I had some comments about how leaderless organizations can thrive, particularly in open source communities, of which I happen to be a part of a couple.

Obviously, one of my passions is working with Habari and the people that have come together around that common goal. When we started, there were just four of us, each with various levels of ability and availability. I think you can pretty well call that "leaderless", since we all worked in tandem, and any small change any one person made was easily detected and reviewed by the other three. But as the project has grown, I think there is some kind of tragic irony in that the size of the operation inevitably leads toward a need for at least an informal management structure.

Of course, any of the Habari folks reading would rightfully start screaming at my last statement. The cornerstone of our philosophy is that no animal is more equal than any other. Still, without naming myself supreme ruler of the project, I think there remains a practical aspect to several individuals having responsibility for making things work and controlling the direction development takes.

What I've always hoped with Habari is that the community would fracture, but in a good way, and that the different aspects of the system would be able to communicate with each other in a way that is productive for the whole. An example of this came up today regarding our published documentation.

We've been using TiddlyWiki for our distributed documentation - the manual - which is supplied with the source of the software, separate from the online wiki. Basically, the large online docs have been distilled into a neat little dynamic wiki manual that comes with the software. A few folks who are less technically inclined decided to make documentation their project, and upon reviewing what we had, concluded that the manual was nice but not internally consistent, because it simply pulls parts of the larger wiki. As a result, they have started rewriting the manual as a single cogent file.

Following pointing out this effort on IRC today, I was asked by the person who originally suggested TiddlyWiki for the manual as to why we were dropping TiddlyWiki. My response to him was basically that some folks had decided to own it, and what they were doing was probably better for the project in the long run, and how could I not support that? And I think he agreed with my reasoning. But also, a personal reason - one that might or might not have been implied - was that I didn't really want to have anything to do with the manual.

I long ago realized that I simply can't keep the whole project in my mental scope any more. Back when it was just four guys, I could keep track of every change. Now there are 25 PMC members, and many, many more contributors and users that supply insights and patches with a regular flow. I can't possibly track it all in a way that makes my own contributions worthwhile. So I've decided that if people come along that want to manage a part of the project, they present their ideas well, show some vision I can get behind, and lead other people to follow them there -- I am behind that effort. And those are the people we're looking to promote to the PMC as leaders anyway.

To that end, we've been working out a way of handling when splinter groups want to take on specific tasks like these. We call them "working groups". The concept may be familiar. We started out with some formal guidelines that explain how the groups must be formed and to whom they report, and many of these processes are followed and documented, but personally I think that even as informal groups these units work fine.

The key feature is that there is always reporting back to the main group. They make plans and present them, and the main group has the opportunity to provide more insight, to join, or to dissent. Although the working groups may go off on their own to implement the plan, they don't do everything in secret or behind a gate. Anyone has the ability to shift in or out of a working group as his interest dictates.

This has been working well for documentation as well as code. Some of our larger initiatives have started out as branches created by others who want to work on a specific task together. The larger group provides some oversight, but the working group is mostly autonomous until the code is submitted for merging. Then others review the code as necessary.

I suppose it's easy to quantify the project in terms of output, but longevity has a lot to do with the social formula too.

Completely separate from the users of WordPress, the community of developers for WordPress used to spend quite a lot of time talking on IRC. At some point, because this relationship was not encouraged, the heart of the system died. Now on the WordPress IRC channel, some developers might idle, but it's mostly a desolate place where people come to ask questions that echo into the oblivion, unanswered.

I assume that the social structure for WordPress has moved elsewhere. Perhaps it's within Automattic itself, or in the halls of the many competent WordPress consulting companies that have formed. But it has changed over time.

I'm hoping that we've made some decisions early on that will affect how Habari lives and works long-term. We may individually have plans for making commercial moves with Habari in the future - not Habari itself but services around it - but the social network (not Facebook, but a network of real people) we're trying to build will hopefully stay strong until the project is obsolete.

Being a worldwide community, we rely on leaders even in different timezones. When I sleep someone is leading the community. Even when I'm around, I'm not always "present", and other people fill in. Part of that is related to how the project gives people more control, more involvement. Part is that the people actually care to do it. When the people who are involved don't care any more, they should move on. I hope that we can keep adding people who care enough to keep things going as much as I do.

I'm not really sure that answers any specific questions, but it's how things are, and how we've managed to survive this long, and hopefully what will keep us moving.

I've just finished a science fiction book by Vernor Vinge called "A Deepness in the Sky", and one of the themes of the book is technological collapse; how civilizations can only live so long and evolve so technically before they implode. The trading race that travels and trades between these civilizations sees everything and deals with everyone. Along the way, they record this knowledge and the knowledge makes them great and lasting. By adhering to a set of social rules and general beliefs, they are able to outlast their customer civilizations. It reminds me quite a lot of what I think organic communities need to survive, not so much that a strict process is followed, but that the entire race of people shares a belief that powers their way of life.

I've gotten a flood of new people following me on Twitter over the past couple days. If you had done this a week ago, you would already know all about how hectic my work has been this week, how I missed my train into the city to meet up with that work this morning, and how I plowed into the back of a BMW on 202 as a result of missing my train.

If you had signed up a month or two ago, you would have been able to follow my Habari tour from Philly down to BlogOrlando up to Columbus and back. In fact, I told Berta- Don't expect me to call, you will be more informed about what I'm up to if you look at my Twitter page.

So what's so great about Twitter? If you had asked me this or why I signed up back when I first heard about it, I would have told you, seriously, I haven't the foggiest clue. Today, I have very specific reasons why Twitter, as simple and stupid-seeming as it is, is one of the best ideas to land on the web in a while, and would confess to being unable to do a ton of stuff I've done over the last few months without it.

I think the key to Twitter is this: You must get as many of your IRL (in real life) friends to follow you as possible.

Don't mistake this for some kind of social network friend gathering. The goal is not for you to follow people, the goal is for people to follow you. Sometimes, you can do this simply by following your friends to begin with. If you're me, you're discerning about who you choose to follow -- I choose a person either because I like to know what they're doing every day, or their physical proximity to me is such that knowing what they're up to can be helpful. There are people out there who "follow" hundreds of people. I can't imagine that the signal/noise is very useful for following in that case.

In this situation, don't be offended that I'm not following you. When you see how I use Twitter, you might understand better. I also change who I follow depending on where I am, or who I want to know about at the time. In most situations you want to be clued-in on events that are local only to where you are, not events that are happening elsewhere. You don't follow your friends when they're all on the other coast unless you're looking to be depressed about everything you're missing. Also, the flavor of updates is something to take into consideration. The frequency and content of Twitter postings, just like a blog, should be used to decide whether to follow someone, friend in real life or not.

So when you've got your network of followers, what can you do? Here's an example...

I've met a few really great people in Philly, and they follow me on Twitter. I follow these guys too, so that I know what's going on downtown in case I want to try to be involved.

When meeting clients in a rented office space in the city this week (sorry, couldn't use IndyHall for a number of reasons), I didn't really know the area well enough to pick a good local place for a first-time visitor cheesesteak lunch. I sent out the word on Twitter looking for a good place to eat. By lunch time, I had several responses, we chose one and had one of the best cheesesteaks ever.

When BlogPhiladelphia was in town, I sat across the table from Colin who - I kid you not - Twittered for beer. Seriously, the Twitter was like, "My beer glass is empty." Moments later, Colin had free beer, without leaving the table or even speaking. (Unfortunately, most of Colin's tweets from that July evening have mysteriously disappeared, but there is still photographic "evidence".)

That's a silly example of the practical use of Twitter. Sure, these examples are not Earth-shaking, but when I twittered about my unexpected traffic encounter this morning, guys at IndyHall were able to tell my client that I was going to be late even though I did not have a phone number to call there or my client's cell number handy. I don't care how you slice it, that's useful.

If you're just signing up for Twitter to be on the bandwagon, that's ok. I see a lot of folks now using the Habari plugin to post new posts to Twitter (like this one will be shortly) which is neat if people aren't already reading you via a newsreader. It's nice to have your blog writing tracked among other "what I'm doing right now" entries. If that's all you're using Twitter for, you're really missing out on a useful internet tool with influence in the real world. Hopefully, that'll just get you in the door and you'll start using it more and seeing the usefulness of the service beyond a simple vanity notification system.