A few weeks ago, a project to document every single living species on the planet was launched on the internet.

For the first time in history, the 1.8m plants and animals, fungi and bacteria (and other microorganisms) that constitute life on Earth will be collated in a single place. An army of unpaid volunteers, largely amateurs from outside the scientific community, is being asked to carry out this enormous endeavour. Unsurprisingly, within hours of its launch, the embryonic Encyclopedia of Life (eol.org) had crashed.

The encyclopedia, which was back online swiftly, didn’t crash because many of its creators were unpaid volunteers, or because all previous attempts to build a catalogue of the planet’s species had also failed, but because the site housing the first 30,000 pages received, before lunchtime, a staggering 11m visits.

We’re all geeks now

In other words, it collapsed under the weight of expectation, as New York University professor Clay Shirky says, the project proved so popular “it tapped into a latent need” — the world’s nature enthusiasts’ need to share information with others on the Internet.

Shirky’s new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising without Organisations provides a timely reminder of how the nature of organising ourselves is rapidly evolving.

You may have already recognised a lot of what Shirky, a professor at NYU’s interactive telecommunications program, says: that it’s suddenly easier to organise both large and small groups of people. But what’s so new about this, he says, is the ubiquity of it all. “This time around it’s not just geeks and early adopters who are taking advantage of social media,” he says. “Now the technology is so prevalent that it’s everybody.”

Resembling a bald, bespectacled Tom Hanks, Shirky ruminates about how we sit on the cusp of a new age of collaboration born out of cheap access to communications technology. He argues that simple tools like email, the internet and the mobile phone are making it “possible to achieve large-scale coordination at low cost. It is now possible for serious complex work to be taken on with [little or no] institutional direction,” he says.

Take the Encyclopedia of Life, for example. It demonstrates that massively complicated projects can be achieved by a mass of self-coordinated volunteers at a fraction of previous costs. “It just wouldn’t have been possible five years ago,” says Jesse Ausubel, chair of the steering committee attempting to organise the collective knowledge of the world’s life scientists.

Shirky quotes many examples of the rise in collaborative action due to the ease of communication and its and falling costs: from millions of Americans raising funds for Barack Obama’s presidential bid to Tibetan bloggers highlighting the brute force of the China.

EOL is just the latest example of mass collaboration and innovation outside the usual formal structures. It may have the backing of big research institutions like Harvard and the technical assistance of Microsoft, but most of its construction is being farmed out to thousands of volunteers. Even EOL’s £25m budget is meagre when you consider it is due to last 10 years - a project charting the entirety of planetary life is run on the budget of a provincial zoo.

Trouble ahead?

Shirky is not alone in seeing a sweeping societal shift now that social media has become as common as television. This month sees the publication of We Think, by Charles Leadbeater (charlesleadbeater.net). In it he argues that the internet is ushering in a new age of meritocracy, as more of us can participate in the production of culture and contribute ideas to the “cultural stew” of weblogs, Facebook and YouTube. But he also warns of the forthcoming struggles between those who wish to share information and culture and those who wish to control the activities. As Leadbeater says in his introduction, the conflict “between the rising surge of mass collaboration and attempts to retain top-down control will be one of the defining battles of our time”.

Leadbeater explains how new forms of self-organisation still require leadership of a different kind — “one that does not instruct but encourages them to find better solutions together within the same sets of rules and values.
These new communities are not without order and hierarchy however. Often they have an inner core group that get them going. But these hierarchies are more open, more meritocratic than traditional hierarchy.”

Eastern innovators

Leadbeater thinks the US is ahead when it comes to exploring innovative organisational structures like the Encyclopedia of Life. But, perhaps, the new forms of organisation might most effectively take root elsewhere.

“Many of the most radical innovations will come in the rapidly developing world — China and India and Asia, Africa, South America — where people will need to innovate low-cost collaborative solutions, (yet still) they have strong rural traditions,” he says.

So the real question is: how far can it go? Shirky champions the fact that Wikipedia is the 11th biggest website in the US and the UK. But that still leaves 10 corporations, with more traditional hierarchies and management structures above it.

He also admits that if a traditional car company ran along the same lines as Wikipedia it would quickly go out of business. Others such as Nicholas Carr, through his blog Rough Type (roughtype.com), have argued that the new freedoms championed by the likes of Shirky and Leadbeater only displace more expensive professional alternatives, to the detriment of the greater common good.

But maybe it helps to think of it like this: if the world’s life scientists wanted to produce a collaborative book of all the 1.8m species known to humankind and potentially millions more unknown ones, they would need a very long bookshelf. The sum of 1.8m pages would require the equivalent of a book 300ft thick. A website is a lot easier to handle, and if we can all help to write it, why shouldn’t we?