Getting your swarm organized

(Excerpted from Swarmwise by Rick Falkvinge.)

While the effective swarm consists almost entirely of loosely knit activists, there is a core of people — a scaffolding for the swarm — that requires a more formal organization. It is important to construct this scaffolding carefully, paying attention to known facts about how people work in social groups.

In building this scaffolding of go-to people, of the swarm’s officers, it is your responsibility to be aware of limits to group sizes that prevent further growth once reached, and break up the groups that reach these sizes into smaller subgroups when that happens. Any organization copies the methods and culture of its founder. This means that the swarm will do exactly as you do, regardless of persistent attempts to teach them good manners. The only way to have the swarm behave well is to behave well yourself.

The few people upholding the scaffolding of the swarm will resem- ble a traditional hierarchical organization. The role of this scaffolding is not directing and controlling the masses. Rather, its role and value is in supporting the other 95 percent of the organization — the swarm — when assistance, support, or resources are needed.

Working groups larger than seven people fragment into two smaller groups.

The social complexity of the group increases much faster than the group size.

For every geography, we will probably have four function offi- cers and one or two deputies in addition to the geography leader.

No geography leader should have more than six people working directly with him or her in a given context.

150 appears to be a limit hardwired into our brains. It is our maximum tribe size. In a given context, we have the capacity to know this many people by name and have the loosest of bonds with them.

Groups above 150 people in size will lose the social bonding required for efficiency and, well, the fun.

However, you probably won’t have any formal group of this size. Rather, it is the informal groups that inevitably form that you need to pay attention to, and how they — once they hit this limit — can prevent further growth of the swarm.

Keep formal working groups in the scaffolding to about seven people. When several groups are working together, try to keep the size at or below thirty. Finally, pay close attention to when informal swarm groups approach 150 people in size. When that happens, take steps to break them up in smaller subgroups.

Scaffolding sounds very much like a traditional, hierarchical, boring organiza- tion. So what is new?

The new part is the entire swarm around the scaffolding, and the role that these officers must take in order to support it. One key insight is that the responsibility of the swarm leaders is not so much managerial as it is janitorial. Nobody answers to them, and their task is to make sure that the swarm has everything it needs to self-organize and work its miracles.

leadership in a swarm is received through inspiring others: standing up, doing without asking permission, and leading by example.

What you need to do is to communicate very clearly what you want to see happen and why. If people agree with you, they will make that hap- pen, without you telling a single person what to do further.

You cannot and should not try to tell anybody in the swarm what to do; rather, your role is to set goals and ambitions.

In a swarm, working groups will form by themselves left and right to accomplish subtasks of your overall vision, subtasks you haven’t even identified.

Your passion for the swarm’s mission is going to be key in making this happen. You need to constantly show your passion for the end goal, and those who see and pick up on your passion will seek out things they can do to further it — all on their own. Your role in this is to lead by example. People will copy you, in good weather and bad. Therefore, make sure you’re being seen in good weather.

Self-organization doesn’t necessarily follow geographical boundaries. This is fundamentally good; you will have groups that form around accomplishing specific tasks that are geographically unbound,

We can optimize for speed by removing all conceivable bottlenecks.

We can optimize for trust by keeping the swarm transparent and giving everybody a very far-reaching mandate. We would establish this mandate by very clearly communicating that different people drive the swarm’s goals in different ways, and that we all trust one another.

We can optimize for scalability by constructing the entire scaffolding at its finished size. We would leave upwards of 99 percent of the roles in the scaffolding empty for now.

In general, we can divide the people of the swarm into three groups by activity level: officers, activists, and passive supporters. The officers are the people in the scaffolding, people who have taken on the formal responsibility of upholding the swarm. Activists are the actual swarm, the people that make things happen on a huge scale. The passive supporters are people who agree with the goals as such, but haven’t taken any action beyond possibly signing up for a mailing list or membership. (The passive supporters may sound less useful to the swarm, but they are the primary recruiting base.)

A leader and a deputy divide the work between themselves, so activity doesn’t stop. four function leaders: one function leader each for PR/media, for activism, for swarmcare, and for web, information, and infrastructure.

The activism leader would not lead activism as such, but rather support it (as is the case with all of these roles), responsible for the practical details, such as PA equipment, permits, and other details on the ground.

The person responsible for swarmcare would welcome new activists into the swarm and continually measure the overall health of it.

Finally, the information-and-web guy is the person who maintains the infrastructure of a blog or other web page that summarizes the relevant information of the swarm in this particular geography.

These boxes are all empty to begin with; organic growth is crucial. The organizational chart should lag slightly behind the observed reality.

One person should have one role in the scaffolding. Watch out for people who start advertising many titles. Empty boxes in the scaffolding’s organization chart are not bad.

When working with a swarm, almost all of the cooperation happens over a distance — so you must find ways to compensate for the lack of eye contact and subtle body language that otherwise keep a team jelled.

Have regular meetings over the phone or over a chat line. The purpose is for everybody to know the state of the whole.

These meetings should be limited to seven people if on the phone, or thirty people if in a chat channel.

Some swarms or subswarms have preferred physical meetings. While such meetings provide for a lot higher bandwidth, their timing and location can also serve to lock out activists.

Limit the meeting to a strict time frame. Address the important things first.

Meetings are a necessary evil, because people who are eager to be part of the swarm can easily see meetings as the purpose of the swarm.

Bureaucracy and administration will very easily swell to become self-justifying, even in a swarm of activists. Do not let this happen. Keep reminding people that meetings are there for the purpose of synchronizing the work done to advance the external purpose of the swarm, and that every minute spent with each other is a minute not spent changing the world.

People will do as you do, exactly as you do, even if and when you are having one of the worst days of your life.

Take good care of yourself.

understanding, patience, collegiality, and passion are values that you want to show.

Trust in people in the swarm to further the swarm’s goals, even if they choose a different way of doing so than you would have chosen, and even if you can’t see how it could possibly work.

Once they realize they have a full mandate to work for the swarm in the ways that they can, they will just do so.

three-pirate rule: if three activists agree that something is good for the organization, they have a green light to act in the organization’s name. They should never ask permission.

This is a mechanism for self-empowerment, and never a mechanism that allowed three activists to tell somebody else what to do or not do. As a final note on trust, the part about trusting people to act for the best interest of the swarm is crucial. This means that there is never a blame game; if something goes wrong, the swarm deals with it after the fact and never spends time worrying in advance about what might go wrong. If something doesn’t go as intended, the swarm learns from it and moves on. On the other hand, if something is wildly successful, it gets copied and remixed across the swarm with new variants to get even better. This happens organically, without you needing to interfere, as long as activists can publish their successes.