Just finished Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky. A good read on organizing without an organization. The point comes across repeatedly that the social web tools have provided the vehicle to make social change because the "barriers to entry" into an organization have dissipated to near zero. In other words free tools such as email, blogs, wikis, etc can be used to gather resources (people, and time) and focus their efforts (shared goals) and the ease of joining the "effort" swells their numbers at a rate faster than anticipated and gets their cause promoted faster than others.
I like the passage below as it related to libraries and information. It could serve as a headsup as we push the value of our services as we also need to get on the crest of this wave and ride it in to a place thats good for everyone.
"Professional self-conception and self-defense, so valuable in ordinary times, becomes a disadvantage in revolutionary one, because professionals are always concerned with threats to the profession. In most cases, those threats are also threats to society; we do not want to see a relaxing of standards for a surgeon or a pilot. But in some cases the change that threatens the profession benefits the society, as did the spread of the printing press; even in these situations the professionals can be relied on to care more about self defense than about progress. What was once a service has become a bottleneck. Most organizations believe they have much more freedom of action and much more ability to shape their future than they actually do, and evidence that the ecosystem is changing in ways they can't control usually creates considerable anxiety, even if the change is good for society as a whole."
