Launching your swarm

(Excerpted from Swarmwise by Rick Falkvinge.)

Your idea needs to be tangible, credible, inclusive, and epic. Tangible: You need to post an outline of the goals you intend to meet, when, and how. Credible: After having presented your daring goal, you need to present it as totally doable. Bonus points if nobody has done it before. Inclusive: There must be room for participation by every spectator who finds it interesting, and they need to realize this on hearing about the project. Epic: Finally, you must set out to change the entire world for the better — or at least make a major improvement for a lot of people.

Having an idea is not enough; the idea and its plan must energize people. So don’t worry about advertising. Mention your idea and plan in a couple of places where your intended activists would typically hang out. That’s enough.

The idea doesn’t need to be polished. The important thing is to put that stake in the ground, start attracting people, and start working your way to the goal. There’s just no way you will be physically able to give them all instructions on a one-to-one basis.

SURVIVING THE INITIAL IMPACT

Their attention span is short; you need to respond. You also need a focal point for their interest — something as simple as a signup page or a forum.

The swarm can do it for you, if you let it. And you must.

The swarm’s very first task will be to self-organize, and it excels at such tasks. But it is you who must set the structure and explicitly give the swarm the task to self-organize.

Initially, you will be able to coordinate at most thirty groups, so create a discussion forum with at most that number of subgroups. You’ll likely want to have people on streets and in squares cam- paigning for the swarm’s cause before long, so subdividing your hatchling swarm by geography works well.

Try to pick your geographical division so that the typical size is about seven members and no subgroup has more than thirty members. Don’t announce this intent, as doing so would cause a distracting discussion about that action: just create the subgroups in a way that will cause this division to happen.

The magic numbers seven, thirty, and 150 are deeply integrated parts of the human social psyche.

Tell people to introduce themselves to one another. Getting the basic structure in place is first priority, enabling further absorption of more activists into the swarm.

As leaders [or liaisons] get picked by the subgroups, contact those leaders in person and introduce yourself.

You’ll also want to set up a subforum where these subgroup leaders can discuss things between themselves and with you. Make sure that other people can read it. Don’t keep secrets; rather, let everybody see the ongoing growth of your swarm.

(A couple of weeks from this point, you will realize that you’ll need an intermediate layer of officers in between you and these thirty — a few of them will have lost interest and gone radio silent, and you won’t have noticed, because thirty people are too many to keep track of to that level if they don’t contact you. Therefore, you will want an intermediate layer of five or six people.)

The swarm needs to be given a task immediately that allows it to jell properly. If you just tell people to go to a forum, they will lose interest in a week if nothing more happens.

It needs to be a task that looks challenging but is doable, provide for internal competition between the subdivisions and it needs to be a task where everybody can see the clear benefit to the swarm.

What this does is cause the swarm to learn how to work together. You should update the overall progress of the goal at least daily.

Getting people to know other people should be an overarching goal of your activities at this point.

Do encourage people to meet, and be very clear that they should not make it formal.

Once such meetings become regular, make sure that newcomers feel welcome. Start every meeting with an introductory round.

The organization consists only of relationships between people. For every new relationship that is created, the organization grows.

DEALING WITH ATTENTION JUNKIES

Some people will demand attention from you personally, think very much in terms of rank and hierarchy, whereas other people will think in terms of getting stuff done and changing the world.

As long as you keep the swarm open and transparent, these kinds of people won’t be able to hijack it.