In his institutions vs. collaboration TED talk, Clay Shirky argues that a sufficiently coordinated public can (and should) more effectively generate content than a traditional institution. He says that it's in the institution's best interest to ignore a majority (perhaps 80%) of potential contributors, since they contribute a significantly smaller number of things (perhaps 20%) than the top minority of contributors. He calls it the 80 20 rule. But since the internet can allow all people to coordinate themselves, they can capture that additional 20% of value from those 80% of potential contributors.
More broadly, Clay takes the position that a small group of people — an institution, a company, an organization — will always be less effective than everybody. This point is as novel as it is obvious: what's valuable here is to create that polarization. The choice of those two alternatives, a small group vs. everybody. It's easy to look at the past and assume that institutions will play an important role going into the future, but Shirky says we should ask 'Why?'. Not only are institutions inherently marginalizing, exclusionary constructs, but they produce substantially worse results than a loosely (but efficiently) coordinated public.
Within the TED talk, Shirky talks about an important distinction between coordination and planning. He argues that as communication technology improves, planning becomes less necessary and can be replaced by coordination. He ties this back into his coordination vs institution theory by explaining that planning (for a select group of producers) is the value that institutions have been required for. If that planning can be replaced by coordination and technology, that value is diminished or extinguished all together. Thus, in Shirky's vision of the future, content is to be created in aggregate by a long tail of non-institutionally-supported individuals.
The past few years have shown the prescience of Shirky's predictions. All around the world, citizens have gathered together online to generate content ranging from air quality data through cat pictures. The Air Quality Egg project has created an enormous, worldwide distributed network of air quality monitors by fostering collaboration over institution. Every Air Quality Egg was installed by an unpaid (paying!) citizen who wanted to know more about the quality of their air. Initiatives in New York , Beijing , and London have had similar goals, and have been able to bring air quality issues to the attention of local government.
Similarly, the OpenStreetMaps project has better coverage in many parts of the world than Google Maps does. Like Wikipedia, their data is community-editable, and available under an open license. The community provides a variety of tools to aid contributors: a myriad of editors, a list of almost 800 well-defined humanitarian mapping tasks, all as simple as tracing the roads and schools on this satellite photo of an area where Ebola aid workers need better maps. By allowing the long tail of people to contribute and update their data, rather than relying on the institutional approach of major mapping companies like NAVTEQ or Tele Atlas, OpenStreetMaps gains a competitive advantage over Google's competing software. Shirky's proposed 20% more edits means tangibly better, more useful data.
Finally, it has been said that we're in some kind of 'golden age' of American television. But that content is increasingly produced outside of the institutions which traditionally created it. Netflix's original direct-to-web programming has shown that a major company from outside Hollywood (provided lots of money and resources) can successfully create popular television programs. Inspired by this example, Vimeo recently launched their 'first original series,' High Maintenance. An excellent, 2-year-old episodic comedy by husband-and-wife Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld, They produce about half an hour of video content per year. It's very good. Vimeo's best entrée into content was a low-budget webseries made by just-some-people. They learned what Shirky predicted: that the best content can come from the long tail. From creators below the scale that an institution can support. In a pre-internet world, creators like these couldn't exist.