What are the relevant Design Principles for Smart Mobilisation - Howard Rheingold

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 (1992) principles furnish hints? Ostrom claims that "all efforts to organize collective action, whether by an external ruler, an entrepreneur, or a set of principals who wish to gain collective benefits, must address a common set of problems." These problems are "coping with free-riding, solving commitment problems, arranging for the supply of new institutions, and monitoring individual compliance with sets of rules." Ostrom found that groups that are able to organize and govern their behavior successfully are marked by the following design principles:

1. Group boundaries are clearly defined.
2. Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions.
3. Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules.
4. The rights of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities.
5. A system for monitoring member's behavior exists; the community members themselves undertake this monitoring.
6. A graduated system of sanctions is used.
7. Community members have access to low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms.
8. For CPRs that are parts of larger systems: appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.

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.

Agrawal (2002) highlights the need for further research to focus on the Contextual requirements that enable such sustainability. Jones, Humphreys (2005) include an analysis of infrastructural requirements.

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.

References

Axelrod, Robert. 1984. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books. For a recent review of subsequent research on the topic, see Robert Hoffmann. 2000. Twenty Years on: The Evolution of Cooperation Revisited. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation vol. 3, no. 2.

Hardin, Garrett. 1968. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science (162):1243-1248.

Baland, Jean-Marie, and Jean-Philippe Platteau. 1996. Halting Degradation of Natural Resources: Is the a Role for Rural Communities? Oxford: FAO & Clarendon Press.

Olson, Mancur. 1971. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ostrom, Elinor. 1992. Crafting Institutions for Self-Governing Irrigation Systems. San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies Press.

Agrawal, Arun. 2002. The Drama of the Commons. National Academy Press