Civic participants don’t aim to make life better merely for members of the group. They want to improve even the lives of people who never participate…

One of the biggest changes in our society is the shift from prevention to reaction…

Sharing thoughts and expressions and even actions with others, possibly many others, is becoming a normal opportunity, not just for professionals and experts but for anyone who wants it. This opportunity can work on scales...

Information sharing produces shared awareness among the participants, and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by tying the user’s identity to the identity of the group.

When we change the way we communicate, we change society

The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from ‘Why publish this?’ to ‘Why not?

Upgrading one’s imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.

For the last hundred years the big organizational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state, directing the effort in a planned way, or by businesses competing in a...

Tragedy of the Commons: while each person can agree that all would benefit from common restraint, the incentives of the individuals are arrayed against that outcome.

Until recently, ‘the news’ has meant to different things – events that are newsworthy, and events covered by the press.

Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.

How we treat one another matters, and not just in a “it’s nice to be nice” kind of way: our behavior contributes to an environment that encourages some opportunities and hinders others.

The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion.

The low cost of aggregating information also allowed the formalization of sharing […].

[T]he ways in which the information we give off about our selves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier...

Public and civic value require commitment and hard work among the core group of participants. It also requires that these groups be self-governing and submit to constraints that help them ignore distracting and entertaining material...

[N]ew technology enables new kinds of group-forming.

Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.

[T]he category of ‘consumer’ is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity.

People want to do something to make the world a better place. They will help when they are invited to.

Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.

Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.

This work is not easy, and it never goes smoothly. Because we are hopelessly committed to both individual and group effectiveness, groups committed to public or civic value are rarely permanent. Instead, groups need to...

In a profession, members are only partly guided by service to the public.

Tools that provide simple ways of creating groups lead to new groups, […] and not just more groups but more kinds of groups.

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

[B]ecause the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organized way. New social...

Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move.

Wikipedia […] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.

The transfer of […] capabilities from various professional classes to the general public is epochal.

Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.

Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process.

Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups.

Personal value is the kind of value we receive from being active instead of passive, creative instead of consumptive.

The basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming ‘gather, then share’ into ‘share, then gather’.

[F]rom now on, the act of creating and circulating evidence of wrongdoing to more than a few people, even if they all work together, will be seen as a delayed but public act.