Howard Rheingold
Exploring the Social Institutional Dimensions of MoSoSo Design: Are Smart Mobs Institutions for Collective Action?
Biography
Howard Rheingold is the author of Smart Mobs The Virtual
Community Tools for Thought; was the editor of The Whole Earth Review,
The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, and HotWired; founded
Electric Minds, Brainstorms; and teaches Toward a Literacy of Cooperation at
Stanford.
Position Paper
Mobile devices, SMS, and the Internet are the hardware and
protocol enablers for new forms of collective action in the political, social,
cultural, economic spheres I call “smart mobs.” With a billion and a half
people on the planet carrying wireless devices, and the Internet population
approaching a billion, the technical substrate is in place.
Now, moving to the next layer, social software middleware
enables people to use this infrastructure to form groups; the idea of a
category of Mobile Social Software is based on the recognition that there many
different ways, appropriate for many different kinds and sizes of groups, for
people to connect and act via this infrastructure.
The next layer, built on the technical and middleware
infrastructure is psychosocial, not technical: the ways in which people use,
are enabled, afforded, encouraged, or discouraged from using the
infrastructure. If there are many flavors of MoSoSo and ways of using it, I
believe it makes sense to ask “What are the dimensions of variation of MoSoSo, explicitly
in regard to collective action?”
Political scientists and sociologists, starting with Ostrom,
and since her pioneering work, others such as Baland, Platteau, and Wade, have
been studying the institutions for collective action that form successfully or
not around common pool resources such as fisheries, watersheds, forests, the
Internet. Each of these authors have offered a set of design principles that
appear to be present when attempts to organize such institutions succeed, and
absent when these institutions fail. Are there relevant design principles for
successful smart mobs?
Do Ostrom et. al’s principles furnish hints?
Dimensions and design principles might well include such
examples as exclusivity/inclusivity (free-registered-invitation), privacy (none
in Flickr or del.icio.us, and that’s part of their success, but the purpose of
Groove is bounded sharing), minimal contributing set (what is the minimum size
group necessary to accomplish various forms of mobile collective action?),
geolocality/globalness/glocality, identity and presentation, etc.
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