Swarms are messy.

Swarms cannot be controlled: only guided. They do not always grow into precisely the shape you had in mind. Sometimes they must be pruned, and the pruning is painful.
Swarms are not very well known. Trying to understand who is “in” and who is “out” is a challenge when there are many different levels of “in.” [...]

Why do you do what you do?

There are many reasons why we do things.
For example: because we have always done them, or at least done them for a very long time. Or, because we were told to. Or, because the community expects us to. Or, because we should be doing things.
Stop and ask yourself “why” you do something. And to your [...]

Statistics Journal: Online giving in 2009

Online giving by major donors The Chronicle of Philanthropy released a study of 3,500 donors in March 2009 which found: 4 out of 5 donors have made a gift online A little over half preferred to use the Internet for donations [...]

Review: The Global Mission Handbook

Steve Hoke & Bill Taylor have written a revised version of their classic Global Mission Handbook, available through Intervarsity Press (252pp, $13.68—wish they’d make a Kindle edition available!).
The book is divided into a beginning stage and then three phases: getting ready, getting there, and getting established. Each phase is further divided into several chapters, which [...]

Get a swarm started

We’ve talked a lot in the past about “how” to swarm. Most of our blogging and presentation is at one level—trying to introduce the concept of swarming to people who have never studied it before, and have no idea about the ideas of social networking, decentralized systems, complex adaptive systems, scale-free networks, etc.
Once you’ve got [...]

Missionary Advocate: How to be a Digital Curator

We all know about the explosion of information and its effect on us. More and more is being created on a daily basis: new articles, new books, new headlines, new videos, new music. We also know that more and more that is being created is either untrue, mindless drivel, evilly addictive, or simply not intended [...]

A problem of scale

The problem of world evangelization is not just a problem of apathy or inspiration. It is a problem of scale. We do not need just a few missionaries – we need a lot. By my estimate, close to 150,000.
Mobilizing one missionary is a wholly different task from mobilizing 150,000.
I haven’t seen anything yet to indicate [...]

Definitions: Resilience, Economics, Poor, Rich, Absolutes

Words are things that we use: sometimes carefully, sometimes carelessly. I have been scanning a lot of articles lately and thinking about resilient communities. I came to think about definitions, and feel some definitions are worth saying over again.
Rich or poor are difficult terms: they can be relevant or absolutes.
When we say someone is richer [...]

Upcoming Introduction to Swarming Seminars

I have not been posting as much lately because I have been preparing for the upcoming Introduction to Swarming seminars. Here’s part of what I’ve said in some emails about them.
SWARMS ARE NOT: crowds, mobs, or networks.  SWARMS ARE: highly decentralized, visionary, intimate, self-organizing, transformational, adaptive, open, rapidly-multiplying groups!
This past Monday we had an online [...]

Swarms have to be led

There are many different kinds of unpaid social structures into which we humans organize ourselves to accomplish things that are important to us but which are often ‘free’—that is, they generate no income. Some of these social structures include:

Crowds: large masses of groups who self-organize to share things (i.e. Flickr)
Networks: groups of people who come [...]