The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

• Author: Harris, Paula
• Position: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations - Book review

Here Comes Everybody:. The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

Author: Clay Shirky

Publisher: The Penguin Press HC

Publication Date: 2008

Length: 336 pages

Price: $25.95; $16 in paperback

ISBN: 978-1594201530

Source:us.penguingroup.com

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Information management is evolving from controlled centralized systems with restricted access to decentralized systems with seemingly free access. This transition has been evident over the past decade, with traditional enterprise content management products adding modules that include more open forms of collaboration, such as wikis and blogs.

Your organization's culture and its core businesses will often determine how quickly it adopts these new ways of collaboration and communication using social media tools its employees use in their personal lives--for example, Facebook and Twitter--to enhance its competitive advantage.

Social networking in all of its forms is the newest challenge to the information management and compliance communities. The choices are to be reactive or to be proactive. If your organization is to survive in this changing economic and technical world, there is only one choice: you must understand the medium and the challenges and be prepared to provide a point of view on how social networking can or cannot be leveraged for your organization.

Clay Shirky's Here Comes Every. body: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations helps frame up how Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, and social networking have evolved and the impact these open systems have, not only on organizations, but also on society as a whole. In fact, these tools people are pushing organizations to re-think current paradigms of how people work on a global scale.

Why Social Networking?

Why is social networking such a force, and why do people want to participate when there are no financial incentives? Shirky opines it is because individuals have found a medium through which they can be heard. He takes this theme and logically traces how what he calls individuals "finding their voice" has pushed the envelope on collaboration and added legitimacy to worldwide collaboration tools, such as Wikipedia.

He further theorizes that individuals often coalesce into groups with shared interests and vision. Stay-at-home morns form new friendships and share lessons learned on a regular basis. Those more technically inclined can participate in product development.

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