Rickard Falkvinge - Swarmwise: The Tactical Manual to Changing the World

Swarmwise

The Tactical Manual to Changing the World

by
Rickard Falkvinge

2013

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Swarmwise
The Tactical Manual to Changing the World
Copyright 2013 Rickard Falkvinge

You are free to make as many copies of this book as you like and share with friends and strangers, as long as you credit the author and you dont sell them. Actually, youre not just free to share copies with your friends, but downright encouraged to. If you like this book, why shouldnt you share it with your friends?
Formally, this book is under copyright monopoly until January 1, 2034 twenty years from publication. During that time, it is licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial-Attribution 3.0 license, meaning what is said above about free sharing. These are the same terms as suggested in the authors previous book, The Case for Copyright Reform. Commercial exclusive rights rest with the author for the twenty years.
ISBN-10: 1463533152
ISBN-13: 9781463533151

Swarmwise is a tactical guide to changing the world using cost-efficient swarm methodology. It is a leadership handbook that outlines how the Swedish Pirate Party was able to beat the political competition on less than one percent of their budget, and shows how any cash- and time-strapped executive or manager can use swarm methodologies, whether the goal is business, social, or political.
That organization, founded by one man without resources, has now spread to over 70 countries using the same cost-efficient swarm methods.
Swarmwise will tell you what it takes to found a swarm of volunteers, to organize and energize it, and to lead it to success. The book doesnt go into theoretical detail, psychology, or deep research papers. Rather, it is very hands-on leadership advice from pure experience it covers everything from how you give instructions to new marketing assistants or activists about handing out flyers in the street, up to and including how you communicate with TV stations and organize hundreds of thousands of people in a coherent swarm. Above all, it focuses on the cost-efficiency of the swarm structure, and is a tactical instruction manual for anybody who wants to dropkick their competition completely no matter whether their game is business, social, or political.

Contents

Your most valuable asset isnt your employees,
I told the executive.

Your most valuable asset is the thousands of
people who want to work for you for free, and
you dont let them.

December 29, 2005, in the afternoon, about tea time.

I call my old friend Rickard Richie Olsson, who has known my entrepreneurial spirit for a long time. We even shared an apartment once, a long time ago, where he was subjected to my wild ideas on a daily basis. I have this new idea and want him to be the first person to know about it and give me his reaction to it.

Hey, Richie, you know that project that went wild a while back? Ive been thinking of something. I may have a new project in the works here that can potentially take on quite a high profile higher than, say, the Pirate Bay.

A heavy sigh is heard on the other end.

What has gotten into your mind this time?

PART I : BUILDING THE SWARM

CHAPTER ONE : Understanding the Swarm

Somewhere today, a loose-knit group of activists who are having fun is dropkicking a rich, established organization so hard they are making heads spin. Rich and resourceful organizations are used to living by the golden rule those with the gold make the rules. New ways of organizing go beyond just breaking the old rules into downright shredding them leaving executives in the dust, wondering how that band of poor, ragtag, disorganized activists could possibly have beaten their rich, well-structured organization.

On June 7, 2009, the Swedish Pirate Party got 225,915 votes in the European elections, becoming the largest party in the most coveted subthirty demographic. Our campaign budget was fifty thousand euros. Our competitors had spent six million. We had spent less than 1 percent of their budget and still beat them, giving us a cost-efficiency advantage of over two orders of magnitude. This was entirely due to working swarmwise, and the methods can translate to almost any organized large-scale activity. This book is about that secret sauce.

A swarm organization is a decentralized, collaborative effort of volunteers that looks like a hierarchical, traditional organization from the outside. It is built by a small core of people that construct a scaffolding of go-to people, enabling a large number of volunteers to cooperate on a common goal in quantities of people not possible before the net was available.

Working with a swarm requires you to do a lot of things completely opposite from what you learn at an archetypal business school. You need to release the control of your brand and its messages. You need to delegate authority to the point where anybody can make almost any decision for the entire organization. You need to accept and embrace that people in the organization will do exactly as they please, and the only way to lead is to inspire them to want to go where you want the organization as a whole to go.

It is only as you release that control, the kind of control that organizations and managers have held close to heart for centuries, that you can reap the benefits of the swarm: the same cost-efficiency advantage and execution-speed advantage against the competition that the Swedish Pirate Party enjoyed. This book will teach you those methods, from the initial forming of the swarm to its growth and ongoing maintenance and delivery. It will not teach you the underlying theory of psychology and sociology merely share experiences and methods that have been proven to work in practice.

When I kick-started the swarm of the Swedish Pirate Party, I had posted a rough manifesto on a rather ugly website and mentioned the site just once in a chat channel of a file-sharing lobby. That was all the advertising that ever happened; the next day, the party had hundreds of activists. Timing, social context, and message are crucial but if you have those three, your initial swarm will form like bees to honey in hours. Growing it and maintaining it will also be crucial, but those are the next challenges in line. We take one challenge at a time.

As we describe the swarm concept, it is easy to think of pure decentralized amorphous clouds of people, like Anonymous or the Occupy Wall Street movement. However, while these swarms share values, they do not share direction or method. That means they are confined to succeeding on small projects that span a relatively small number of people over a relatively short time span, even if each of those small projects builds gradual awareness of the Anonymous or Occupy brands.

The weak cohesion of the Anonymous and Occupy brands can partially be ascribed to their choice of being leaderless. While this brings resilience, as no leader can be targeted by adversaries, it sacrifices direction and purpose. Ive found that the typical Internet community methods of inclusion, when combined with strong leadership, work much better to achieve global change than working leaderlessly under little more than a common flag.

I learned some of these techniques while being trained for officers rank in the army, and even more of them by participating in many online communities. But the secret sauce recipe of swarm cost efficiency was hit only when I took an officers training in maintaining strong group values, mixed in the nets strong participatory values and low-cost mass communication, and added a dash of management experience from the dot-com era at the turn of the century.