SWARMWISE The TAcTicAl MAnuAl To ChangIng thE World Rick FalkvIngE SWARMWISE The Tactical Manual to Changing the World RICK FALKVINGE This is version 1.1 (first edition, second revision) of Swarmwise. The differences from the first print revision are mostly cosmetic. You are free to make as many copies of this book as you like and share with friends and strangers, as long as you credit the author and you don’t sell them. Actually, you’re not just free to share copies with your friends, but downright encouraged to. If you like this book, why shouldn’t you share it with your friends? Formally, this book is under copyright monopoly until January 1, 2034 — twenty years from publication. During that time, it is licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial-Attribution 3.0 license, meaning what is said above about free shar- ing. These are the same terms as suggested in the author’s previous book, The Case for Copyright Reform. Commercial exclusive rights rest with the author for the twenty years. ISBN-10: 1463533152 ISBN-13: 9781463533151 Library of Congress Control Number : 2013909028 CreateSpace Publishing Platform, North Charleston, SC “Your most valuable asset isn’t your employees,” I told the executive. “Your most valuable asset is the thousands of people who want to work for you for free, and you don’t let them.” SMARMWISE CONTENTS PART I: BUILDING THE SWARM 1. Understanding The Swarm..............................................13 The Swarm Is Open.................................................................19 …And Transparent..................................................................20 So You Have A Provocative Idea?..........................................23 2. Launching Your Swarm...................................................31 Surviving The Initial Impact...................................................38 The Swarm’s First Task...........................................................44 Dealing With Attention Junkies.............................................46 3. Getting Your Swarm Organized: Herding Cats...............51 The Three Magic Group Sizes................................................52 Self-organization......................................................................61 Org Charts And Organic Growth..........................................64 Meetings As Heartbeats...........................................................72 Meetings Gone Overboard......................................................74 A Culture Of Leadership And Trust.......................................76 4. Control The Vision, But Never The Message...................85 You Do The Vision, The Swarm Does The Talking............89 5 S WA R MW IS E Help The Swarm Remix The Message...................................96 Take To The Streets................................................................97 Scale Out, Out, Out...............................................................108 PART II: LEADING THE SWARM 5. Keep Everybody’s Eyes On Target, And Paint It Red Daily.......................................119 Project Management And Self-organization........................124 Draw The Timeline For All To See......................................128 Setting Visible, Activating, And Inclusive Goals..................132 Different Leadership Styles....................................................139 6. Screw Democracy, We’re On A Mission From God.......151 Meritocracy And The Law Of Two Feet.............................157 Empowering Like Crazy For Fun And Profit......................159 Mistakes Allowed Here..........................................................163 The Magic Of The Consensus Circle...................................165 Organizational Astronauts.....................................................169 Dividing Scarce Resources....................................................172 Rewarding People..................................................................173 Tampering With The Goal Of The Swarm.........................175 Meetings Revisited.................................................................177 Dealing With Mavericks.......................................................180 6 RICK FALKVINGE 7. Surviving Growth Unlike Anything The MBAs Have Seen.....................................187 Broadcasting And Maintaining Values.................................189 Decentralized Leadership, Empty Boxes...............................203 Grow With Having Fun........................................................204 Grinding, Grinding, Grinding..............................................205 Maintain One Value Set, One Value Base............................207 Seriously, One Power Base....................................................214 PART III: DELIVERING WITH THE SWARM 8. Using Social Dynamics To Their Full Potential..............223 Social Links.............................................................................224 Growing On The Edges........................................................225 Heartbeat Messages................................................................226 Understanding The Activation Ladder.................................228 Mobilizing Activists...............................................................231 Calls To Arms: Perception Is Reality....................................233 More Ways To Trick Perception..........................................236 Respecting Anonymity..........................................................237 Rewarding The Long Tail....................................................239 Using Attention To Build A Community............................242 9. Managing Oldmedia.......................................................253 Owning Your Issue In Oldmedia.........................................265 7 S WA R MW IS E Media Breakthroughs.............................................................266 The Gandhi Scale Is Accurate...............................................267 Who Writes The Press Release?............................................268 Avatar Faces Of The Swarm..................................................269 Getting Face Time: Be Where Cameras Are.......................271 Scoring Those Op-eds...........................................................273 Set Up A Press Center............................................................277 10. Beyond Success...............................................................283 The Day After Success...........................................................285 Going International...............................................................288 Don’t Shoot For The Moon..................................................292 Final Words............................................................................295 APPENDICES ETC. Workshops And Keynotes.....................................................299 Acknowledgments.................................................................301 Index.......................................................................................303 8 December 29, 2005, in the afternoon, about tea time. I call my old friend Rickard “Richie” Olsson, who has known my entre- preneurial spirit for a long time. We even shared an apartment once, a long time ago, where he was subjected to my wild ideas on a daily basis. I have this new idea and want him to be the first person to know about it and give me his reaction to it. “Hey, Richie, you know that project that went wild a while back? I’ve been thinking of something. I may have a new project in the works here that can potentially take on quite a high profile — higher than, say, the Pirate Bay.” A heavy sigh is heard on the other end. “What has gotten into your mind this time?” P A R T I BUILDING THE S WARM CHAPTER ONE Understanding the Swarm Somewhere today, a loose-knit group of activists who are hav- ing fun is dropkicking a rich, established organization so hard they are making heads spin. Rich and resourceful organiza- tions are used to living by the golden rule — “those with the gold make the rules.” New ways of organizing go beyond just breaking the old rules into downright shredding them — leav- ing executives in the dust, wondering how that band of poor, ragtag, disorganized activists could possibly have beaten their rich, well-structured organization. On June 7, 2009, the Swedish Pirate Party got 225,915 votes in the European elections, becoming the largest party in the most coveted subthirty demographic. Our campaign budget was fifty thousand euros. Our competitors had spent six million. We had spent less than 1 percent of their budget and still beat them, giving us a cost- efficiency advantage of over two orders of magnitude. This was entirely due to working swarmwise, and the methods can translate to 13 S WA R MW IS E almost any organized large-scale activity. This book is about that secret sauce. A swarm organization is a decentralized, collaborative effort of vol- unteers that looks like a hierarchical, traditional organization from the outside. It is built by a small core of people that construct a scaf- folding of go-to people, enabling a large number of volunteers to cooperate on a common goal in quantities of people not possible before the net was available. Working with a swarm requires you to do a lot of things com- pletely opposite from what you learn at an archetypal business school. You need to release the control of your brand and its mes- sages. You need to delegate authority to the point where anybody can make almost any decision for the