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Mobilization Systems: technologies for motivating and coordinating human action

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Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Recently a number of techniques have been developed that stimulate people to act towards specific objectives. These include persuasive technologies, gamification, user experiences, and various methods and tools used in open-source and other communities to encourage and organize participation. After surveying various examples of such applications, we generalize these approaches by proposing a new theoretical framework. The basic concept is a mobilization system, defined as an ICT environment that motivates and coordinates the actions of people, so as to increase their focus and commitment, while minimizing distraction, hesitation and procrastination. We then analyze the fundamental mechanisms of (individual) motivation and (collective) coordination, starting from Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow and the mechanism of stigmergy. The basic requirements are clear goals in line with real needs, immediate and rich feedback, challenges in balance with the user's skill levels, and a shared workspace in which all tasks and results are registered for every contributor to see. We conclude our review of mobilization systems by pointing out their potential dangers, such as addiction and political or commercial exploitation, as well as their potential benefits, in domains such as work, health, education and research.

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to appear in: Routledge Handbook on Knowledge Economy, Education and Digital Futures, eds: Peters M. A., Besley

T. and Araya D., (Routledge, 2012 or 2013)

Mobilization Systems:

technologies for motivating and coordinating human action

Francis Heylighen, Iavor Kostov and Mixel Kiemen

Global Brain Institute,

Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Abstract: Recently a number of techniques have been developed that stimulate people to act towards specific

objectives. These include persuasive technologies, gamification, user experiences, and various methods and

tools used in open-source and other communities to encourage and organize participation. After surveying

various examples of such applications, we generalize these approaches by proposing a new theoretical

framework. The basic concept is a mobilization system, defined as an ICT environment that motivates and

coordinates the actions of people, so as to increase their focus and commitment, while minimizing distraction,

hesitation and procrastination. We then analyze the fundamental mechanisms of (individual) motivation and

(collective) coordination, starting from Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow and the mechanism of stigmergy.

The basic requirements are clear goals in line with real needs, immediate and rich feedback, challenges in

balance with the user’s skill levels, and a shared workspace in which all tasks and results are registered for

every contributor to see. We conclude our review of mobilization systems by pointing out their potential

dangers, such as addiction and political or commercial exploitation, as well as their potential benefits, in

domains such as work, health, education and research.

Introduction

The ubiquitous presence of ICT has spectacularly facilitated all activities that center on the storage,

communication and retrieval of information. If you want to investigate a particular domain, you no

longer need to travel to specialized libraries, spend hours combing through their card catalogs and

book racks, borrow the most relevant documents, and finally carry all these pounds of paper home

with you to read. Similarly, if you want to widely disseminate your ideas, you no longer need to

painstakingly type a manuscript on your typewriter, make photocopies of it, send them by post to

various publishers, and hope that you can convince one to invest a lot of money into editing,

typesetting, printing and eventually, a year or two later, distributing it to potential readers.

The physical effort needed to retrieve or publish information had one advantage, though: it

motivated people to be selective in what they read or communicate. As these obstacles have

disappeared, information is now being disseminated virtually without restrictions. The most obvious

effect is information overload, a form of mental bombardment that (Shenk, 1998) aptly

characterized as “data smog”, since it obscures rather than enlightens, while damaging health by

increasing stress levels. It is typically accompanied by a barrage of interruptions or distractions

caused by incoming emails, phone calls, text messages, tweets or “status updates”.

A less obvious effect is the accompanying choice overload (Schwartz, 2005): as the number

of available options for documents to read, products to buy, services to use, people to connect to, or

destinations to visit increases, people need to invest ever more effort in deciding which option they

should choose. Even when a decision is finally made, the decider is typically left with the gnawing

feeling that perhaps there was an even better option, thus feeling less satisfied with the choice. The

result is continuing anxiety, and a tendency to avoid or postpone such stressful decisions. This

phenomenon can be illustrated by a classic experiment in which prospective buyers are offered to

taste either half a dozen or several dozen types of fruit jam. Paradoxically, given the larger choice,

people are less likely to buy a pot of jam than given the smaller choice! (Schwartz, 2005) A final

effect is growing transience: nowadays people are both quicker to adopt and to abandon new

technologies, services, jobs, and even relationships, presumably because: (1) it has become much

easier to change such commitments; (2) there are so many more options to be explored; (3) new,

and potentially better, options appear at an ever faster rate.

The overall result is that it has become much more difficult for people to commit to any

particular choice, and much easier for them to get distracted and abandon whatever they are busy

with. The combination of distractability, lack of commitment, and procrastination (J. Heath &

Anderson, 2010) results in poorly focused, inefficient, unreliable, and stressful work. These

individual effects are magnified at the social level: when several people suffering from such lack of

dedication collaborate on a common project, the result can only be poorly coordination, since no

one knows exactly what to expect from the others. Thus, we come to the conclusion that while ICT

undoubtedly has increased the mechanical productivity of work, it may well have decreased our

psychological and social productivity, together with our overall level of involvement, satisfaction

and well-being.

The question then is whether information technology is able to compensate for these

unexpectedly vicious side effects. The thesis we wish to defend in this paper is that it can: there

exist a range of behavioral methods to effectively combat distraction, procrastination and lack of

commitment, while increasing focus, motivation and coordination (e.g. C. Heath & Heath, 2010;

Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). When these techniques are implemented in ICT, the result may be called

a mobilization system. According to the Oxford dictionary, to mobilize means to “organize and

encourage (people) to act in a concerted way in order to bring about a particular political objective”.

Given that any valuable objective deserves concerted action, the only generalization we need to

make is to leave out the adjective “political”. A mobilization system can then be defined as: a

socio-technological system that motivates and coordinates people to work towards a given

objective—thus efficiently rallying their efforts.

While the term “mobilization system” is new, the underlying ICT techniques have been

explored for at least a decade or two, under labels such as “persuasive technology”, “collaborative

technology”, “user experience”, and “gamification”. This paper will first review a number of such

existing approaches and then try to distill their common core in the form of a list of mobilization

principles. Finally, we will sketch both potential benefits and dangers of a more systematic and

widespread application of mobilization systems.

A brief survey of mobilization systems

Internet communities and collective action

The last decade has seen an explosion of spontaneous—yet surprisingly effective—collaborative

communities on the web. Perhaps the best-known examples are the different communities that

develop open source software, i.e. programs that not only can be freely used, but freely modified,

by anyone. These include some of the most commonly used programs on the Internet, such as the

Apache web server, the Linux operating system, or the Drupal content management system

(Kiemen, 2011). Similar communities are developing open access documents, i.e. texts that can be

freely consulted—and often edited—by anyone. The most impressive example is Wikipedia, the

global encyclopedia to which everybody can contribute, and which is by far the largest and most

complete encyclopedia that has ever existed (Arazy, Morgan, & Patterson, 2006; Kittur & Kraut,

2008). More traditional communities gather around a domain of interest, such as fans of a particular

musician, football supporters, bird watchers, users of a software application, or researchers working

on a particular subject. These communities typically organize by means of discussion forums where

a variety of questions are raised and if possible answered, after which the most important results are

aggregated in the form of a wiki website or a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions with their answers)

document.

What these communities have in common is that they collectively produce very useful—

and typically high-quality—applications and information, but this without any financial

compensation or legal organization. In other words, these communities consist purely of volunteers

contributing on an informal basis to a common project. From the perspective of traditional

economics and organizational theory, this is paradoxical (Heylighen, 2007): why would anyone

provide such valuable services to others without being either paid or ordered to do so? Several

authors have investigated the motives that incite people to contribute to such communities (Ghosh,

2005; Lerner & Tirole, 2002; Weber, 2004). These include curiosity, altruism, free expression, need

for belonging, desire for status and recognition, and the hope for future financial rewards for private

consultancy after being publicly recognized for one’s expertise. More interesting for our purpose

than these individual motivations, though, are the structures and processes that encourage

individuals to take part in such a collective enterprise, i.e. the underlying mobilization system.

A first analysis (Heylighen, 2007) points at two fundamental mechanisms: feedback and

stigmergy. By contributing a question, comment, answer, program, photo or any other input,

participants hope to get a reaction from the other community members, because that would give

them an indication of whether they are on the right path, or need to make some correction. Such

feedback provides valuable information that allows participants to get better in whatever they are

interested in. For example, a programmer who contributed a piece of code will benefit if a user

points out a bug in that code, suggests a way to extend it, or simply confirms that the job was well

done.

Stigmergy is a mechanism of spontaneous coordination between actions, where the result of

an individual’s work stimulates a next individual to continue that work (Parunak, 2006; Bolici,

Howison, & Crowston, 2009; Heylighen, 2011a). For example, a paragraph contributed to a

Wikipedia article may incite a later reader of that paragraph to add a reference or further detail,

which in turn may elicit further contributions from others. Stigmergic coordination does not require

any direct communication between the agents: the different contributors to a Wikipedia article

generally do not know each other, and do not discuss who should contribute what. It also does not

require any planning or supervision: each individual contributes whenever or whatever s/he deems

fit. The only thing needed is a shared medium or workspace in which clear traces of the work are

registered (Heylighen, 2011a; Parunak, 2006). The aggregated trace functions as a collective

memory that keeps track of the different contributions and indicates where further work may be

needed. This function is typically performed by the community website, such as the Wikipedia site.

A more advanced example of this functionality can be found in the issue queue used by

Drupal developers (Kiemen, 2011; Zilouchian Moghaddam, Twidale, & Bongen, 2011). This is a

community-maintained, ordered list of feature requests or problems that need to be addressed,

together with the status of the work being done on each. The issue queue makes it easy for

contributors to see where their contribution would be most helpful, and to keep track of the

advances made by others. It can be seen as a more spontaneous, self-organizing version of the job

ticketing systems that are commonly used in technical support centers, where each incoming

problem is assigned a “job ticket”, after which the ticket is assigned to one or more employees, and

monitored so as to make sure it is adequately dealt with (Heylighen & Vidal, 2008; Orrick, Bauer,

& McDuffie, 2000).

Web communities benefit from another ICT mechanism: the nearly effortless publishing of

information. This means that it does not cost anything for a person to make the results of her

personal activity available to others. Moreover, information is what economists call “non-rival”

(Heylighen, 2007; Martens, 2004): the fact that someone else uses it does not prevent you from

using it at the same time. This removes the main impediment against sharing: you do not lose

anything by offering the fruit of your labor to others; you merely gain an opportunity to get

something (feedback, a further improvement, recognition, a similar contribution…) in return. But

the “no cost” assumption should extend to the mental and physical effort you invest: contributing

should be so easy and transparent that you can do it without having to think about how to do it.

An example of a community that uses this principle to get people to act is Avaaz.org

(Kavada, 2009). At present, Avaaz appears to be the largest organization to mobilize people

globally for political action—with 14 million members in April 2012. Becoming a member is very

easy: you just submit your name, email address and country on the website. Members can vote on

which issues they consider to be most important. These include causes such as combating

corruption, preventing global warming, helping democratic movements, protecting Internet

freedom, or saving rainforests. For the issues elected as priorities, the organization then selects the

actions that are likely to produce the most effect for the least effort. These are typically sending

letters to members of congress about to vote on the issue, or submitting petitions to government

representatives. All members receive the text of the letter or petition together with background

information by email. They are then invited to support the action by signing this appeal. They can

do this simply by clicking a link. This automatically appends their name and coordinates to the list

of signatories. In this way, an appeal to amend a law about to be voted can gather millions of

signatories in a few hours time, thus inciting the lawmakers to take into account the opinion of this

worldwide community. This nearly effortless style of collective action has been called rather

disparagingly clicktivism (Karpf, 2010). Yet, up to now it appears to be quite effective, while

providing an interesting model of electronically supported democracy.

Another example of electronically supported political mobilization is the spontaneous

coordination of activities that led to the downfall of authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt

during the so-called Arab Spring (Sabadello, 2011). Here, Internet-based social media, such as

Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, allowed protesters to widely disseminate news while bypassing

official censorship, thus drumming up support for collective actions. This made it possible, for

example, to very quickly organize mass rallies, simply by announcing time and place, and

propagating this announcement to friends and acquaintances in nearly real time. A more playful use

of the same functionality can be found in so-called “flash mobbing” (Molnár, 2010), where a crowd

of people suddenly gather at a specific time and place to perform some synchronized action (like

dancing or playing music), just to impress the public.

More generally, platforms are being developed that allow citizens anywhere to report events

they witnessed to a central database, if possible uploading photos, movies or other evidence via

their mobile phones. A widely used example of such a platform is Ushahidi, originally created in

Kenya to trace cases of violence and intimidation during the elections there (Gao, Barbier, &

Goolsby, 2011). Such applications make it possible to document, analyze and map out instances of

e.g. traffic jams, crimes, infectious diseases, or earthquake damage, thus revealing the precise

degree and distribution of any such socially distributed problems. This in turns facilitates rapid

mobilization, targeting and coordination of remedial actions, an advantage particularly important in

situations of disaster relief (Gao et al., 2011).

Games and gamification

While Internet communities typically emphasize collaboration and sharing, there is another type of

mobilization system that emphasizes competition and rivalry: gaming environments. The games

available on the web are nearly infinite in their variety, but they all share the objective of scoring

points or winning, i.e. doing better than the others. This too is a powerful motivator, which

enhances focus, commitment and persistence. But games exhibit a variety of other motivators,

given that by definition they have been designed for enjoyment, i.e. for providing stimuli that

people find intrinsically pleasurable, so that they seek to collect as many as possible. Since the early

days of personal computers, gaming has become an increasingly popular pastime. This has led

programmers to create an ever-greater variety of ever more sophisticated games.

Up until recently, game design was largely intuitive: designers would create the kind of

games that they themselves would like to play, or produce variations on popular examples. Out of

the thousands of different games and their variants, the most enjoyable would typically spread

widely, and be regularly updated and expanded, while the less successful would eventually

disappear. This process of variation and natural selection produced an evolution towards ever

“fitter”, i.e. more enjoyable, games. The result is that the best games tend to be addictive, as players

are so strongly motivated to continue the play that they find it difficult to get back to their normal

activities (Grüsser, Thalemann, & Griffiths, 2006; Kim, Namkoong, Ku, & Kim, 2008).

With the variety of successful games available for examination, a number of observers have

started to make abstraction of the specific features of any particular game, so as to find common

patterns (e.g. Koster, 2005; Salen & Zimmerman, 2004). These have been called “game mechanics”

or “game design fundamentals”. While these principles help designers to produce more pleasurable

games, the more interesting use is to apply them in domains other than entertainment. For example,

given their ability to entice children and adolescents to focus on sometimes complex problems,

gaming techniques are being used in education to make learning more effective and enjoyable (e.g.

Dickey, 2006; Michael & Chen, 2005). An outstanding application is the Khan Academy

(Thompson, 2011), an educational website that combines video lectures on a variety of topics

starting from elementary mathematics, with game-like, computer-generated tests, in which learners

can assess their progress by scoring points, and getting bonuses that allow them to move to a higher

level.

But educational applications are merely the beginning: the recent development of

gamification applies the mechanisms of game design to enhance focus and motivation for nearly

any kind of activity (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, 2011; Zichermann & Cunningham,

2011). It is used in particular by businesses and organizations to goad people into performing tasks

that are useful for the organization—but not intrinsically rewarding for the individual. Examples are

participating in surveys, filling in forms, or joining customer loyalty programs. While performing

these activities, respondents are given the kinds of points, “badges”, or bonuses that are used as

symbolic rewards in games. This constant feedback motivates them to contribute additionally, so as

to attain ever-higher total scores. Moreover, the more points they have gathered already, the less

they are inclined to lose these points by prematurely stopping the activity—a psychological bias for

continuity known as “sunk costs” (Garland & Newport, 1991).

Communities too sometimes use gamification techniques to boost participation. The Avaaz

website, for example, exhibits a continually updated ticker listing the latest people to sign a petition,

together with the total number of signatories, so that contributors feel they participate in an

efficient, globally advancing movement. A more sophisticated example is Stack Overflow, a

collaboratively edited question and answer site—initially about programming problems, but later

extended via Stack Exchange to a network of sister sites covering such diverse topics as cooking,

physics, photography and language (Mamykina, Manoim, Mittal, Hripcsak, & Hartmann, 2011).

Participants in these communities can ask questions, propose answers, and vote on the questions

and answers from other participants. As members contribute more good questions and answers and

receive more positive votes, their status as recognized “experts” increases via a point system. This

allows them to reach increasingly advanced levels of privileges, so that the more active and

constructive contributors can make changes in the site organization that are impossible for

newcomers. Thus, every member has a continuing incentive to provide high-quality contributions,

making the community remarkably fast and effective in dealing with its problems (Mamykina et al.,

2011).

More generally, gamification applies a variety of game mechanics, i.e. techniques that help

to produce a compelling, engaging experience for the user or game player. They include:

• challenges or quests, in which the player is incited to achieve some difficult objective,

which the player has not reached before (i.e. novelty),

• scores or points, to quantify all the small, step-by-step advances accumulated by the player,

so that players get a continuous feedback about how well they are doing

• levels, which represent larger, discontinuous transitions to a higher degree of game

difficulty or status

• competitions or leaderboards, where players can compare their achievements with those of

other players, so that they are incited to do better than they did up to now

• narratives, in which the challenges are situated within a concrete context or storyline, so that

individual actions become part of an extended course of action within a meaningful

environment (Dickey, 2006; Heylighen, 2012a)

• epic meaning, in which the impression is created that the player is working to achieve a goal

that is particularly important or awe-inspiring (McGonigal, 2011)

• trophies or virtual goods, in which players receive virtual presents as a reward for their

achievement

• gifting, in which players get the opportunity to give virtual presents to other players, thus

tightening links of friendship or cooperation.

Persuasive technology and the user experience

To be fully effective, the mostly social dynamics within communities and games needs to be

supported by a good individual interface: users of a computer application should feel an intuitive

understanding and control of what is happening, and be stimulated to explore and extend their

mastery of the system. In other words, a good application should feel like a favorite tool or toy:

easy and fun to manipulate. This essentially subjective appraisal is what is usually denoted by the

rather ambiguous phrase of user experience (Garrett, 2002; Hassenzahl & Tractinsky, 2006). A

compelling user experience is what makes a person want to use the application again and again. It is

usually the result of smart design combined with extensive testing of the way users tend to interact

with the system. Classic examples of good design can be found in Apple products such as the

iPhone or the Mac operating system, and in Google web services such as Google Search or Google

Maps, explaining the popularity of these tools.

Some of the elements of well-designed user experiences are:

• simplicity: the number of components or options on a given screen are limited, and common

actions can be performed with a minimum number of steps

• esthetics: color schemes and designs are calm, elegant and pleasant; images, sounds and

movements are not coarse, grainy or jerky

• interactivity: the tool responds clearly, distinctly and immediately to different user actions

• intuitiveness: user actions have as much as possible the effects that a naïve user would

expect them to have (Spool, 2005)

• transparency: functions are self-explanatory, or can be understood after a minimal

investigation

• consistency: the same actions or interface elements always produce the same effects

• richness: the tool offers an unlimited variety of content or applications to explore

A good user interface will compel the user to extensively use the technology. The next step is a

technology that compels the user to do something beyond the technology itself. Fogg (2003, 2009)

has defined persuasive technology as “any interactive computing system designed to change

people's attitudes or behaviors”. Persuasive tools have been investigated especially with respect to

their ability to improve health and well-being, e.g. by motivating people to exercise regularly, quit

smoking, or stick to a more healthy diet (IJsselsteijn, de Kort, Midden, Eggen, & van den Hoven,

2006; Intille, 2004).

More generally, a persuasive system can be seen as an implementation of what has been

called the extended will (J. Heath & Anderson, 2010). This is a generalization of the idea that we

use various information technologies as external memories, so as to “extend our mind” into the

environment (Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Heylighen & Vidal, 2008). But mind encompasses more

than memory and information processing capability: it also includes the motivation, concentration

and determination needed to act effectively—i.e. what is conventionally called “will”. In our

present environment full of distractions and temptations, our willpower is heavily taxed. Therefore,

in general we need external support if we want to make sure that we stick to our intentions (Allen,

2001; J. Heath & Anderson, 2010).

A good support will not only keep reminders of what needs to be done, but provide the right

stimuli at the right moments to incite us to act in the right manner. For example, if you try to lose

weight, you will be helped by a tool that calculates the calorie content of your meals, suggests low

calorie alternatives, provides a variety of tasty recipes, keeps track of your weight, extrapolates how

much weight you would lose if you stick to the plan, and reminds you how much better you would

look and feel without that extra weight. While there does not as yet seem to be a general

methodology on how to design such tools, most of the used techniques are similar to the ones we

have surveyed earlier. Persuasive technologies will be more effective if they:

• tap into real needs (e.g. combating the dangers of obesity)

• present clear goals (e.g. realistic weight targets)

• make it easy to do what is needed (e.g. prepare healthy meals)

• give feedback about the progress made so far (e.g. compare your present weight with your

initial and ideal weights)

• provide clear visualizations of potential means or ends, so that users can easily imagine the

effect of their future actions (e.g. a computer-generated photo of how you would look after

losing all that weight)

• make use of social pressure (e.g. by pointing out the achievements of others)

• provide timely triggers to stimulate their users to do something (e.g. alarms to remind you to

exercise)

Principles of Mobilization

Now that we have reviewed a variety of specific technologies, it is worth trying to extract the

general principles behind the mobilization of action. A first step is to split the problem into its two

aspects: individual and collective. Individuals first of all need to be stimulated or motivated to act

effectively. Then, their actions need to be coordinated so that they help rather than hinder each

other, and collectively achieve an optimal result. Let us discuss these aspects in turn.

Individual motivation

Possibly the most useful paradigm to understand individual drive is the psychological concept of

flow, which was derived from numerous observations of how people feel while performing different

types of activity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2002). “Flow” refers to

the pleasurable state experienced when the activity, while intensely focused, proceeds in a

seemingly effortless, flowing manner—because every action immediately elicits the next action,

without any hesitation, worry or self-consciousness. In such a state, continuing the activity becomes

the only real concern, while everything else is pushed to the back of the mind. That is exactly the

kind of focus and commitment that we expect from a good mobilization system. The gratifying,

addictive quality of computer games is commonly explained by their capacity to produce flow

(Cowley, Charles, Black, & Hickey, 2008).

The basic conditions needed to generate flow are:

• the activity has clear goals;

• every action produces an immediate feedback.

• the degree of difficulty or challenge of the task remains in balance with the level of skill.

The formulation of goals seems the most obvious requirement for focus and commitment: the goal

functions like a target or “attractor” for the course of action, determining the direction for all future

activity (Heylighen, 2012a). It is this directing influence that precludes the hesitation that would

otherwise be elicited by an overload of choices. For example, for a rock climber trying to reach the

top, the direction is clear: up! On the other hand, for a tourist sauntering through a strange city

without specific destination, every crossroads presents a dilemma: left, right, or straight on?

An important aspect missing in typical flow models is that in order to produce enduring

commitment a goal should correspond to something truly valuable. For example, while the goal of

shooting a maximum number of spaceships in your game of Space Invaders may be clear, it does

not satisfy any real needs. Therefore, playing games, however enjoyable at the time, if continued

long enough will eventually leave you with the feeling of having wasted your time. One way game

designers try to overcome this limitation is by creating a sense of “epic meaning” (McGonigal,

2011), i.e. situating the game action in a narrative context which implies that something truly great

or valuable is being achieved (like saving the world from alien invaders).

But what then are these values that are able to motivate action? To understand values or

needs at the individual level, we can investigate the (extensive) psychological literature on

motivation, but there is no space here to go into any details. A commonly applied model is

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Heylighen, 1992; Maslow, 1970), which assumes that needs or

motives can be ordered from the most urgent or basic “deficiency needs” (hunger, thirst, security…)

to the more long-term “growth needs” (status, self-actualization, …). A more pragmatic list of

motives relevant for mobilization systems could be the following:

• (material) reward (e.g. receiving money or presents)

• learning (acquiring new knowledge and experience)

• belonging (being accepted as member of a community)

• altruism (helping others)

• status (being esteemed at least as high as others)

• achievement (being able to look back with pride on what you did)

Goals that contribute to satisfying one or more of these needs will obviously be more attractive or

compelling, and therefore more effective in mobilizing action.

The second component of the flow model is feedback. Knowing the general direction in

which your actions should lead is not sufficient to effectively get there: you should make sure that

every action has the intended effect. If the effect is not exactly what you expected, you will deviate

from the planned course of action. Even tiny deviations will gradually accumulate into a large

deviation, so that you may completely miss the target. The only thing that allows you to correct

such deviations is feedback: a response signal that informs you to what degree and in what direction

you have deviated from the intended path. For example, if you start walking towards a faraway

target, e.g. a tree in the middle of a plain, you will keep an eye on the target, and correct your

course as soon as you notice that you have deviated either to the left or to the right from the proper

direction. However, if a dense fog would arise so that you can no longer see the target, this visual

feedback signal would be lost, and you may continue to wander through the mist without ever

reaching your destination.

The flow paradigm emphasizes the immediacy of such feedback. Indeed, if a feedback signal

would only arrive after a finite interval, deviations could grow during that interval. Even when the

actual deviation would remain small, the absence of feedback would create a growing sense of

uncertainty about whether you are following the right course of action. And this uncertainty is

precisely what feeds the anxiety, hesitation and procrastination that we would like to avoid. Vice-

versa, each feedback signal is either a confirmation that you are on the right track, or an indication

of how you can get back on the right track. Therefore, any feedback signal, even if negative, boosts

your effectiveness, and therefore self-confidence, in continuing your activity, adding to the sense of

flow. (It must be noted, though, that the maximum interval between action and feedback depends on

the speed with which deviations are likely to grow: if the course of action is sufficiently clear or its

progression sufficiently slow so that there is no immediate danger of getting lost, you can afford to

wait before you get any feedback. This happens for example during activities that you have

mastered to such a degree that you feel very confident about being on the right track.)

Not just the immediacy, but the richness of the feedback helps to maximize flow. Minimal

feedback might tell you merely: “yes, you are on course” or “no, you have deviated”. (This would

be the equivalent of a game where you earn one point if you get it right and no point otherwise). But

the latter information would not be enough to steer an efficient course. Complex activities can go

wrong in many different aspects. Each aspect defines a dimension or degree of freedom in which

the course of action can vary. Effective feedback would inform you about the precise degree and

direction of the deviation in each of these dimensions, so that you know what correction to make.

Therefore, as we noted, a good user interface must be fine-grained and multidimensional, offering if

possible images, sounds, colors, and animations that react in tune with your actions. Ideally, the

channel of communication between user and system should have a high bandwidth, so that a lot of

information can be transmitted swiftly in both directions, from the user to the system (action), and

from the system to the user (stimulus, feedback). This maximizes the control the user can attain

over the system.

The final requirement for flow is the balance between challenges and skills. This means that

the task should not be too difficult for the level of skills available, but not too easy either.

According to the basic flow model (Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2002), a too easy task produces

boredom, as it does not fully engage the attention, while a too difficult one produces anxiety, as the

person becomes afraid to fail. Only a task that is challenging enough will engender the level of

intense, but tranquil, concentration that characterizes flow. There are two ways to control the

balance between challenges and skills: changing the intrinsic difficulty of the task, and changing the

person’s ability to cope with the task. At first sight, balance could be achieved by proposing a

relatively easy task at which the person is not particularly skilled. But a more advanced model sees

flow as emerging from high skills applied to difficult challenges (Fig. 1). In this more complex

model (Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2002), limited skills applied to limited challenges merely

produce apathy, as there is not much to create interest.

This means that a good mobilization system not only should present goals that are difficult

to reach, but provide the additional abilities necessary to handle that difficulty. This is the “new

skills” feature that characterizes a truly compelling technology: you will feel most stimulated to use

a tool if it allows you to tackle challenges that you could not tackle without it—albeit in such a way

that its use is fully intuitive and transparent. Eventually, a good tool should start to feel like an

augmentation or extension of yourself—the way a stick extends the reach of your arm, a telescope

extends your vision, and a notebook extends your memory.

A final addition to the flow paradigm is the observation that in “natural” environments

challenge levels vary. A mechanical application of the flow prescription would try to maintain the

challenge level within close boundaries around the skill level. But such a constant level of challenge

tends to become tiresome (Sorenson & Pasquier, 2010), as a person’s attention levels naturally

fluctuate. One solution is to let the degree of difficulty increase and decrease rhythmically, so as to

build in regular periods of relaxation—but this too seems somewhat artificial. Natural fluctuations

rather seem to be characterized by an irregular distribution governed by a power law: many small

ones, some medium ones, and few large ones. This means that the challenge level, while variable,

would mostly remain near to the one matching the skill level, but that from time to time a

particularly easy or difficult challenge would arise. During the easy challenges, the mind can relax

difficulty

ability

anxiety

boredom

flow

difficulty

ability

anxiety

boredom

flow

arousal

control

relaxation

apathy

worry

Figure 1: two models of flow as arising out of the balance between challenge (difficulty) and skill (ability). In the

simple model (left), the “flow channel” is defined by the near equality of difficulty and ability; in the more complex

model (right), flow only arises if both difficulty and ability are higher than average.

and recover, during the difficult ones it is stimulated to surpass itself. This is likely to keep the

attention ready for “surprises”, thus avoiding a sense of monotony setting in.

More generally, the flow paradigm lacks the notion of adventure (Dickey, 2006; Heylighen,

2012a), which can be characterized by a sequence of unforeseen challenges (dangers, opportunities,

surprises…)—as contrasted with the foreseen challenges that we call ‘goals’. It is the

unpredictability or unexpectedness of these challenges that creates the excitement that we typically

associate with an adventure, and that forms the basis of full emotional involvement. Adventure is

associated with the notions of exploration, curiosity and mystery: mystery can be defined as a lack

of prospect that incites the emotion of curiosity, which in turns incites exploratory action

(Heylighen, 2012a). Mystery and adventure are common features of game design (Dickey, 2006).

However, their role will need further analysis if we want to apply them systematically to

mobilization, given that they imply a level of uncertainty that—if experienced too intensely—may

produce the anxiety that mobilization systems are trying to avoid. On the other hand, the uncertainty

about what you will encounter next is of a different nature than the uncertainty about what you

should do next. The typical surprises experienced during an adventure (attack by a killer, discovery

of a treasure, spotting of a mysterious person…) do not leave much doubt about how to react (run

away, collect the riches, try to find out more…). Thus, they incite action rather than procrastination,

while contributing to a more intense mobilization of mental and physical resources.

Coordination

When several people work together, their actions need to be coordinated. This means, minimally,

that the actions do not obstruct or oppose each other (conflict, friction); ideally, that the actions

complement each other in such a way that together they achieve more than separately (cooperation,

synergy). In other words, coordination can be defined as the arrangement of actions across people,

places and times so as maximize synergy and minimize friction. In earlier work (Heylighen, 2012b),

we have analyzed coordination into four components: alignment, division of labor, workflow and

aggregation.

Alignment is the most obvious requirement for synergetic action: the different actions and

agents should point towards the same target(s). This means that the overall goals or values of the

participants should be consensual rather than conflicting. Consensus can be achieved explicitly or

implicitly. The simplest explicit method is voting: of the different objectives proposed, the ones that

gather most votes within the community are chosen as priorities. This is easily automated in a

mobilization system, e.g. by adding “like” buttons next to the different options, and counting which

ones are most popular. A better method lets dissenters propose arguments for why they like or

dislike certain options, so as to allow a more reasoned (and in general more broadly supported)

consensus to emerge. That is what happens in typical discussion forums, albeit in a rather anarchic

fashion.

This too can be further automated, so as to come to better conclusions more efficiently. The

Delphi technique, which uses several rounds of structured, anonymous, and moderated discussion,

is a classic method that has proven its value in a variety of settings (Keeney, Hasson, & McKenna,

2006; Linstone & Turoff, 1975). Some newer techniques extend this approach so as to be applicable

to larger groups while requiring less moderation: 1) the synthetron method lets the ideas that collect

most votes in a small group propagate across ever wider groups, while allowing people to improve

on the ideas they encounter, so that the best formulations eventually garner the widest acclaim

(Faieta, Huberman, & Verhaeghe, 2006); 2) argumentation mapping allows large on-line groups to

investigate very complex issues, such as climate change, by linking issues with arguments and

counterarguments in a growing public network (Iandoli, Klein, & Zollo, 2009; Klein, 2011).

Alignment can also happen implicitly or spontaneously, like in a conversation where people

mutually adjust their way of communicating without being aware of it. Such self-organization is

typically driven by a positive feedback, where the more alignment there already is, the more the

remaining people are incited to align to that emerging standard (Heylighen, 2012b). An example is

a call to hold a demonstration on a certain place at a certain time: the more people think that this is a

good idea, the more they will try to persuade their friends and acquaintances to join that meeting,

the more these friends will persuade their friends, the more people will agree to go to the meeting,

the more attractive it will seem to others to join that growing group, and so on, until a large crowd

gathers at the target event. This process too can be facilitated by using the right technological

medium, such as Twitter or text messaging.

When the target is not as simple as a time and place for meeting, alignment on a common

outcome tends to be a slower and more complex process. Here too, technology can facilitate what is

in essence a self-organizing process. An example is Wikipedia, where different contributors with

different opinions correct each other’s contributions, until a consensus—or at least a balanced

survey of pro and con views—emerges (Kittur, Suh, Pendleton, & Chi, 2007). The underlying

coordination mechanism here is stigmergy: contributors are in general not arguing with each other,

but with the aggregated “trace” of all previous contributions, by making what they consider

improvements here or there. If someone else considers the latest addition to be biased or inaccurate,

that person will make a further edit. Except for the most controversial issues, this back-and-forth

editing tends to converge to a version that is acceptable to all.

Stigmergy is also an excellent mechanism for achieving a division of labor: different people

normally have different abilities. Therefore, the most efficient organization of a collaborative work

is to let every person do that part of the work that s/he is best able to do. In a stigmergic medium,

like Wikipedia or a community-maintained list of feature requests, the work is laid out for every

one to see. Thus, every prospective contributor can choose the task that offers the best balance of

skills and challenges for that person. This basic form of self-organization can be enhanced with

various tools.

One technique is to characterize tasks (and potentially also people) with keywords or tags.

Such tags can be used to suggest a task to the people in the best position to deal with it. These are

not necessarily the most skilled people. For example, the profusion of development tasks has led the

Drupal community to introduce a “novice” tag (Byron, 2009), indicating that a task is easy enough

for an inexperienced person to handle. This reduces the workload on the experts, stimulates the

novices to acquire the necessary experience to contribute more efficiently, while offering a better

skill/challenge balance, thus stimulating flow. In Wikipedia too, there exist a variety of tags that

attract the attention of specific people to specific problems that an article being worked on may

have—such as lack of references, poor grammar, or need of expert review.

Tasks can also be directly suggested to specific individuals, by adding their names to a “to

the attention of” list for each task. These people will then be informed by the system about the task,

but maintain the freedom to ignore it, or to pass it on to someone else who is more fit. The system

should also keep track of which person has committed to perform which task. In that way, others

will know that their efforts are no longer needed for this particular job. Additionally, if the work

does not to seem to progress, they can remind the people assigned to it of their commitments. The

latter function could also be automated, letting the system send reminders at regular or

predetermined intervals, until the task is listed as “done” or “closed”.

Workflow is the serial complement to the parallel division of labor: a complex activity must

in general be decomposed not only in tasks done simultaneously by different people, but in tasks

that have to be done in a particular order or sequence. The “flow” in this case denotes the smooth

transmission of a partially finished work from person to person along the sequence. Workflow too

can be implemented in a simple manner using stigmergy: as soon as someone has finished part of

the work, s/he leaves the result in the shared medium, ready to be picked up and continued by the

next person capable and willing to work on it. Again, Wikipedia is a prime example of this

functionality.

Like in the case of the division of labor, this minimal support can be enhanced by letting

people add keywords, states or names that help to attract the right person to the task at each stage.

Issue queues (like the one used in Drupal) generally have a state function that directs the workflow,

e.g. from the state “new” (issue formulated but not yet addressed) to “active” (someone is working

on it), to “needs review” (work had been done, but must be checked by someone else), to “closed”

(the result has been approved). Other examples of states are “won’t fix” or “needs documentation”.

These would attract different users, specialized e.g. in difficult problems or writing documentation.

Contributors can also more actively send invitations to action to people they know, who may pass it

on to their connections. This process may be called challenge propagation, as challenges

(incitements to act) are transmitted from person to person along a technologically supported

network (e.g. using social media), until the challenge is completely dealt with (Heylighen, 2012c).

The final requirement for effective coordination is aggregation: the assembly of all the

different contributions into a coherent end product. Aggregation of results in a communal memory

is the essence of collective intelligence, as it synthesizes the diverse points of view, experiences and

knowledge of a group of individuals into a “wisdom of the crowd” (Heylighen, 2012b; Surowiecki,

2005). Again, stigmergy provides a robust default mechanism: people add their contributions to a

shared, structured workspace (e.g. a Wikipedia page, an argumentation map, or an Ushahidi

database of witness reports), thus ensuring that they become part of an articulated whole. In the case

of voting or other quantifiable actions, averages or distributions can be calculated automatically by

the system so as to reflect the collective wisdom of the community (Heylighen, 2012b).

Aggregation can also be performed by a moderator or editor, who gathers the most important

contributions, lays them out in a clear format, and possibly synthesizes them (like in the Delphi or

Synthetron techniques).

Synergy between individual and collective mobilization

At first sight, (individual) motivation and (collective) coordination may appear like independent

functions that are better implemented in separate systems. However, some further thought makes it

clear that the one directly reinforces the other. Committed and focused individuals are more

dependable. Therefore, it will be easier for them to collaborate in an efficient, coordinated manner

(Allen, 2001). Moreover, committed individuals will be more enthusiastic and persuasive in getting

others to join the cause, thus extending the group of “aligned” people.

Vice versa, when individuals feel aligned in their goals with others, they become more

motivated to work towards these goals. This can be explained by the universal motives of belonging

and altruism. When others want the same as you, you will feel a sense of group solidarity or kinship

with them, so that you become more committed to work for that community. Furthermore, the more

people around you are already aligned in their goals, the more you will be inclined to adjust your

own goals and values to theirs and thus join the group. Indeed, one of the most effective ways to

motivate people to do something is to point out that others already do it (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008).

This can be understood from the universal drive to imitate others and to conform to group norms.

In conclusion, motivation boosts alignment, while alignment boosts motivation.

Additionally, coordination boosts the sense of achievement: the more efficiently you collaborate

with others (e.g. because of good workflow, division of labor and aggregation), the more difficult

the challenges you will be able to tackle, and therefore the more flow you will experience. This

mutual reinforcement between individual and social stimulation explains why the most effective

mobilization tends to be found in communities—although we must not forget that mobilization

systems are also very effective for encouraging purely individual activities.

Finally, it is worth noting that the basic mechanisms for motivation and coordination,

respectively flow and stigmergy, are in essence two sides of the same coin. Both describe the close

interaction between an agent (the user) and a medium (the system or technology), so that an action

by the one incites an immediate response by the other. In the case of flow, the focus is on the

feelings of the user, with the medium merely providing the targets and feedbacks needed to keep the

user fully engaged. In the case of stigmergy, the focus is on the state (“trace”) of the medium, which

develops through the subsequent user actions it incites, up to the point where it offers an aggregate

solution to whatever challenges it started out with. The coordination between different user actions

is merely the byproduct of the fact that all users share this stimulation by the medium, and thus

effectively act in the same workspace on the same overall task.

The upshot of this symmetry between flow and stigmergy is that a technology good for the

one will in general also be good for the other: both require a medium that is very responsive, high-

bandwidth, and multidimensional, so that it can aggregate plenty of fine-grained data while

presenting clearly articulated challenges and feedbacks to its users. That is why the most effective

mobilization systems will both incite individuals and coordinate communities.

Applications and implications

We have reviewed a variety of examples as well as general principles for the technology-mediated

mobilization of action. Both practical experience and scientific theory suggest that such

mobilization systems can be very effective in getting people to act in a focused and coordinated

manner, towards either individual or collective goals.

Like with all technologies, this power can be used for good or for bad. Mobilization systems

can help people to work for their own well-being or for the benefit of society (Heylighen, 2009;

Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). Yet, they can also be used to exploit inherent human drives for selfish

purposes. Thus, mobilization systems create a variety of social, political and ethical issues

(Verbeek, 2006) that will need to be investigated in depth as the technology matures. While there is

no space here to go into detail, let us point out some of the more obvious risks of abuse as well as

potential benefits.

Potential dangers

We have already alluded to the common problem of game addiction (Grüsser et al., 2006). Similar

types of addiction are emerging with respect to various forms of social media that people use to stay

in touch with their community (such as Facebook or Twitter), and with technologies offering a

particularly compelling user experience (such as virtual reality). The underlying mechanism extends

to any kind of mobilizing technology: the feeling of flow produced by a well-designed system is

intrinsically pleasurable and stimulating, while making the user forget all concerns except the here-

and-now of the system. While the system may have been designed with the best intentions (e.g.

make the user study mathematics), such objectives should never override all other objectives (e.g.

the user needs to rest, eat, go to work, care for children, etc.). Yet, the nature of flow is to keep the

attention focused on a single task. If the mobilization system would moreover be designed so as to

minimize the natural reactions of monotony, fatigue or boredom that would normally set in after a

prolonged period of focused activity, the danger is real that the user would start neglecting real

needs. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence about players who become so immersed in their

gaming environment that they forget to eat and sleep, and go on for stretches of 36 hours or more

until complete exhaustion.

A possible remedy is to have built-in usage limits, so that the system would switch itself off

if it is used for more than a preset duration. Better even is that the user would be able to specify a

usage regime, so that the system would only be available for a certain number of hours per day,

week or month. This is already possible in some games. For example Blizzard, the company behind

some well-known online games like World of Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo, offers a “parent

control” mode allowing parents to regulate the playtime of their children.

In order not to brutally interrupt the flow state, the “switching off” at the end of the preset

period may happen in a gentle way, with the system providing a warning as the end of the period

comes nearer, and then becoming increasingly unresponsive until it stops functioning completely.

Some of the more challenging activities in World of Warcraft have a “cooldown” mechanism

illustrating this gentle decline of gaming abilities. Another useful feature illustrated by this game is

the difference between “fatigued” and “rested” states. Players adventuring too far may accumulate

fatigue. If their fatigue level increases too much, their game character sustains damage and

eventually dies. Resting happens while the user is logged out of the game. Its effect is to increase

the player’s gaming abilities. The fatigue/rest dynamic can motivate players not to spend too much

time in the game. But to effectively prevent addiction, such features would need more general and

explicit controls, e.g. specifying the maximum play and minimum rest periods under different

conditions.

Another major danger is that mobilization systems would be abused by commercial or

political organizations to influence and exploit unsuspecting users. Political mobilization is likely to

attract most controversy. However, the example of Avaaz (Kavada, 2009) shows that technology-

supported activism can be perfectly free and democratic, by making it equally easy for users to opt

out or to opt in to specific actions. More generally, advocacy groups throughout the world are

successfully using social media to stimulate democratic engagement (Obar, Zube, & Lampe, 2011),

by making it easier for members of the public to express their opinion and participate in collective

projects. Ideally, community members should not only be able to collectively choose objectives, but

abstain from participating in objectives for which they did not vote without feeling excluded.

Such democratically supported collective action is not necessarily positive or negative, but

its amplification by social media can produce a potentially dangerous acceleration of events. This

can be illustrated by the 2011 riots in London, which were initiated and coordinated with the help of

new media such as Twitter and Facebook (Baker, 2012; Bohannon, 2012). They resulted in a lot of

chaos and destruction throughout the city. Yet, in the following days the same social media were

used to organize a clean up, bringing the city in a very short time back to business as usual.

An even greater danger is the use of mobilization systems for propaganda by totalitarian

regimes or extremist factions that lack any kinds of democratic checks. Here, a mobilization system

could be used to stir up religious or ethnic hatred and orchestrate mass killings, as happened e.g. in

the 1994 Rwandan genocide. But that can be achieved as well with more traditional means of

mobilization, such as the RTLM radio station used in Rwanda for propaganda (Yanagizawa-Drott,

2010). We can only hope that in such situations the opponents of extremist actions would have

access to equally powerful mobilization systems, so as to be able to mitigate any incitements to hate

and violence. Still, considering the example of the London riots, we should be aware of the

potential for escalation, and the danger that the situation would accelerate out of control before any

countermeasures can be taken. In London, the damage was mostly material, but the propagation of

extremist messages and the ensuing alignment on coordinated aggression could well result in

irreversible human casualties.

Commercial exploitation of mobilization technology may be less spectacular, but more

insidious. All commercial organizations have the incentive to maximally extract profit from their

clients. If this cannot be achieved simply by offering the best products, the preferred strategy up to

now was advertising, i.e. trying to persuade potential customers to buy their products rather than

those of the competitors. The incessant stream of publicity undoubtedly contributes to the overload

of stimuli and choices that we discussed in the introduction. As people learn to turn away from such

unwanted distractions—e.g. by using technologies such as spam filters or ad blockers—

corporations seek more effective means of attracting and engaging customers. Viral marketing,

which uses the power of social media, and gamification are among the newer, more powerfully

mobilizing techniques.

While such technologies may benefit individual companies, competition between equally

valuable products is essentially a zero-sum game, meaning that gains for some will be

counterbalanced by equal losses for others. However, it is the public that will accumulate net losses:

mobilization systems by definition demand a lot of concentrated attention from their users, but this

energy will be lost in “games” that merely benefit one company at the expense of another, without

overall benefit for the public itself. The more effective the mobilization, the more mental energy

will be spent in going along with various marketing campaigns, and the less will remain for more

productive activities. The best way to minimize such “mental parasitism” may be to educate the

public about the powers and dangers of mobilization systems, emphasizing the differences between

frivolous and constructive uses, so that people can consciously decide to ignore a mobilization

system offered to them if it does not satisfy any real needs.

Potential benefits

Let us move on to the positive applications of mobilizing technologies. It seems that their power of

motivation and coordination is such that, if used for truly valuable activities, it could potentially

revolutionize society.

Perhaps the most obvious application is to make traditional work more productive and less

stressful (Allen, 2001; Heylighen & Vidal, 2008). Ideally, a good mobilization system should

produce a flow state for the employees, while efficiently coordinating their activities, so that their

work would achieve its objectives with much less waste of mental and physical resources, while

maintaining the sense of flexibility and serendipity needed to deal with a constantly changing

environment full of new challenges. Our institute has begun to implement such a system for

managing our own work, starting from the Drupal “issue queue”, but adding a number of more

advanced workflow and prioritization features. Similar systems can be (and are being) used for

volunteer work in communities, such as open-source development (Heylighen, 2007). This can

greatly enhance the effectiveness of non-profit organizations, e.g. in supporting sustainable

development in poor countries, or providing disaster relief (Gao et al., 2011). In business

environments, such systems are likely to boost productivity, flexibility and morale, while

minimizing distraction, burnout, and employee turnover.

At the government level, mobilization systems can be a powerful aid for implementing a

policy of libertarian paternalism (Heylighen, 2009; Thaler & Sunstein, 2008), i.e. inciting people to

do what is good for themselves and for society, but without legal enforcement. Rather than

prohibiting “bad behavior”, such an approach would organize the environment (i.e. create a

mobilization system) in such a way that people would feel motivated to spontaneously behave in the

right way. For example, instead of outlawing tobacco use, the government could provide

mobilization systems that would stimulate people to stop smoking. Such mobilization systems may

eventually become seamlessly integrated into the physical environment, as envisaged in the

scenario of ambient intelligence (Verbeek, 2009), i.e. an intelligent environment that automatically

responds to the needs and desires of the people present. As we saw, persuasive technologies may be

especially effective in encouraging a healthy lifestyle, and more generally in promoting overall

well-being and happiness (Heylighen, 2009; Thaler & Sunstein, 2008).

A particularly important application domain is education: in principle, mobilization

technologies should be able to substitute the traditional following of courses in a school or

university with a universal system of computer-guided learning supported via the Internet

(Heylighen, 2007; Thompson, 2011). Such automated teaching and testing of students would save

an enormous amount of money—a benefit crucial for boosting education in the poorest countries

and communities. Moreover, it would allow an education tailored to the specific needs of each

individual, as the system would be available at any time and place, and provide challenges carefully

tuned to the skills and needs of the learner, thus progressing at the fastest rate possible for that

person. Developing all the needed educational materials will still be a tall order, but this is already

being addressed by a variety of committed volunteers, communities, NGOs and governments. These

merely need better coordination—something that existing mobilization technologies (such as wikis)

already offer, as illustrated by wikiversity.org, an educational sister project of Wikipedia.

Educational applications are readily extended to scientific applications: the best teachers of

advanced knowledge are the researchers who participated in developing that knowledge. A good

system should help them to further develop that knowledge by keeping track of unsolved issues,

registering and linking together all ideas and data that seem relevant to solving that issue,

coordinating researchers working on related topics, eliciting feedback on new ideas, and analyzing

the resulting knowledge network to find the places where progress may be made most swiftly, so

that researchers can be directed to the for them most interesting challenges. We envisage that the

combination of these teaching and research applications would result in a mobilization system that

we have called the stigmergic university (Heylighen, 2011b), as it largely automates the functions

of a real university, while using stigmergy as a basic mechanism for developing, organizing and

disseminating knowledge.

Such a system would moreover facilitate the assessment of progress that is crucial for

education, as it provides the learners with the necessary feedback, while challenging them to attain

ever-higher scores. This is particularly difficult in the higher stages of education where studying

given material is gradually replaced by autonomous research and development. As a first example

of such an application, we have recently performed an experiment using an extended issue queue to

mobilize a large group of students to develop their own projects (Kiemen, 2012). Moreover, the

project of one student had to be formally evaluated by at least two other students via the same issue

queue. This made it possible to distribute the labor-intensive task of assessing original work, thus

reducing the workload on the teacher, while promoting the autonomy of the students.

This list of potential applications is by necessity incomplete: mobilization systems can be

used to stimulate any type of activity deemed valuable by some person or group. At the most

general level, mobilization technology is likely to become a crucial component of the planet-wide

collective intelligence that is emerging from the interconnection of all people via the Internet and

associated information technologies (Heylighen, 2008). Such a distributed intelligence, which is

perhaps best described by the metaphor of the Global Brain, may be able to tackle problems that are

as yet too complex for individuals or traditional organizations. Usually, studies of distributed

intelligence and of human-machine symbiosis focus on the acquisition, storage, retrieval and

processing of information, i.e. the cognitive dimensions of mental functioning. However, as we

noted earlier, a true mind or brain also has an intentional or motivational dimension, i.e. a will. This

conative function (Huitt & Cain, 2005; Poulsen, 1991) just as much needs technological support in

order to deal with the growing number and complexity of available options for action (J. Heath &

Anderson, 2010). Mobilization technology may help us to align the scattered wishes, desires and

intentions of millions of people, thus gathering the momentum, engagement and “political will”

necessary to tackle truly global problems, such as climate change (Iandoli et al., 2009; Klein, 2011).

This is probably the greatest prize of all. But whether mobilization technology would be sufficient

to achieve it remains of course very speculative at this stage…

Conclusion

We have defined a mobilization system as an ICT-supported form of organization that stimulates or

motivates people to work towards some goal(s), while efficiently coordinating their actions. The

need for such systems follows from the overload of information, distractions and choices that we

are confronted with. This bombardment with scattered stimuli produces anxiety, hesitation, and

procrastination, while making it difficult to remain focused and committed. Collaboration between

uncommitted, distractible and stressed individuals without clear objectives is highly inefficient.

Working at cross-purposes in such an erratic, fragmented manner can only waste resources.

We have argued that the first requirement for effective mobilization is the creation of a state

of flow. Such a mental state is characterized by an intense but relaxed focus, a disregard for any

worries or distractions, and a seemingly effortless progression towards a challenging target. Flow

can be produced by formulating clear goals, preferably in line with real needs, providing immediate

and detailed feedback, while maintaining the level of challenge or difficulty of the task essentially

in balance with the person’s level of abilities.

The individual motivation produced by flow is readily extended to the collective

coordination supported by stigmergy. Stigmergy, like flow, rests on clearly perceivable challenges,

and multidimensional feedback on actions. To this, stigmergy adds a shared workspace, or

“medium”, in which all the work that is already done or still needs to be done is clearly laid out for

everyone to see. This makes it easy for each contributor to pick the remaining task that best fits her

level of ability. The fact that different contributions are presented and articulated in the same

workspace automatically promotes coordination, in the form of alignment on coherent objectives,

efficient division of labor, smooth workflow, and automatic aggregation of the results.

The real-life existence and effectiveness of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Nakamura &

Csikszentmihalyi, 2002) and stigmergy (Elliott, 2007; Heylighen, 2007; Parunak, 2006) have been

extensively documented. While their mechanisms are rich and subtle enough to deserve further

investigation, we already understand them well enough to apply them here and now. What remains

to be done is implementing the abstract principles into concrete systems. Practical guidance here

may be found by examining technologies that have proven their effectiveness in mobilizing action.

That is why we have surveyed a broad variety of such existing applications and their underlying

mechanisms.

The principles of flow are most readily recognized in computer games and the derived

“gamification” techniques, and in interfaces characterized by a compelling user experience. All

these technologies make use of salient, clearly formulated challenges and rich, immediate feedback,

while transparently extending the user’s abilities to achieve these challenges. The result is that

people feel stimulated to such a degree that they often find it difficult to stop using the system.

The principles of stigmergy are at the base of various “social technologies”, where people

can post an idea, photo or other contribution in a forum where others are enticed to react to it

(Elliott, 2007; Heylighen, 2007). In this way one contribution tends to build further on another one,

producing a virtuous cycle of advances eliciting further advances. This spontaneous coordination

mechanism is exploited by a variety of Internet-based communities, including open-source software

developers, question & answer sites, political activists trying to get people involved in democratic

movements, and even disaster relief organizations. The example of Wikipedia in particular

illustrates the tremendous power of stigmergic organization (Heylighen, 2007): in a mere few years

time a worldwide group of volunteers, who do not even know each other, have collectively

produced the largest encyclopedia that has ever existed—an achievement of a magnitude and

complexity difficult to imagine before the advent of the web.

The unsuspected effectiveness of mobilization systems based on flow and stigmergy signals

both great promises and great dangers. Work, democracy, education, research, health and well-

being are likely to be the first to benefit from a judicious application of these technologies, through

a generalized increase in engagement and productivity, and a decrease in stress and confusion. On

the other hand, cases of game addiction illustrate how some people would rather forego food than

be separated from their flow-producing computer systems, while mass mobilization technologies

have been used to produce riots and revolutions. Mobilization technologies can be exploited by

companies, groups or governments to manipulate people into doing things that are detrimental to

the common good.

The most critical question for the future, therefore, may be not so much how to create

efficient mobilization systems, but how to control them and for what purposes to use them. Here

too, stigmergy may come to our rescue, by supporting large-scale discussion of the issues (Iandoli

et al., 2009) and facilitating alignment on broadly supported goals, guidelines and regulations. A

worldwide alignment on the most important values, targets, and strategies may even create the

equivalent of a will for the emerging “global brain”—the collective intelligence formed by

humanity supported by its information and communication technologies. Such a broad consensus on

what to do next may well be the ultimate reward, as it would enable a coordinated attack on the

most pressing problems of our age: climate change, war, poverty, disease...

In conclusion, while much further work needs to be done in elaborating, implementing and

testing the mechanisms that we have surveyed in this paper, the intrinsic power of such

technologies appears immense. Whether that power would be used mostly for good or for bad, it

will be crucial to further study the features and implications of mobilization systems, so as to

become fully aware of the dangers as well as the promises, and to formulate appropriate strategies

to deal with these challenges.

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Virtual Communities and Patterns of Social Interactions in ‘Tech City’

Conference Paper

Jan 2015

The impact of social media and Web 2.0 on socioeconomic behaviour in the physical space of the built environment had recently become a matter of intense debate in social sciences and human geography. This paper examines the relationship between the configurations of urban space from the perspective of 'space syntax' theory by Hillier and Hanson (1984) and the configurations of social networks in Twitter, whilst focusing on the technology start-up cluster in 'Tech City' London. Where there has been arguments made for a strong correlation between twitter ties in businesses and physical distance, this research is focused on the borough scale aiming to outline a relationship between the configurations of streets and the virtual and socioeconomic attributes of start-up businesses. The paper reports a moderate relationship between indices of centrality in twitter network and its correspondent measure in street networks. In addition, the research yields global and temporal patterns of relationships with land uses and land values. The paper concludes by reflecting on how the configurations of twitter Tech-City community are present in the physical medium, where short and long links define the local and global part-whole relationship between Tech-City and other communities.

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Conference Paper

Feb 2021

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Thesis

Full-text available

May 2020

Mitchell Sutika Sipus

Current models of entrepreneurship celebrate rapid experimentation and the open sharing of ideas to inspire new innovations in business. These models draw upon a range of resources such as technical expertise, infrastructure, and capital. To provide these resources, public and private institutions have collaborated to build innovation ecosystems to supply entrepreneurs with ideal conditions for business creation, and by extension, to drive regional economic development. Yet this entrepreneurial model has also wreaked havoc on the world. The aggressive focus to design for immediate user needs in product design, with less consideration of future social consequences, has created vulnerabilities in products and companies for exploitation. Disinformation campaigns by nefarious actors have divided communities, undermined elections, and jeopardized global security. While the design literature demonstrates the value of design processes for complex problems in business and society, there is no current expertise in the field of design to inform new venture creation for preferred social outcomes or to combat the threat of disinformation. The companies and products produced by innovation ecosystems have in turn produced the global threat of disinformation. This research explores the role of design to create new ventures, to contend with disinformation, and to design products to afford more positive global consequences. I conducted practice-based research over six years, as a form of action research, and consolidated my work into four case studies. I described the conditions of the Pittsburgh innovation ecosystem, the factors that inform venture creation, explored lean methods, and built rapid prototypes to formulate a venture concept. I founded the company Symkala and developed material artifacts at every stage of business creation to navigate the surplus of entrepreneurial challenges such as recruitment, ideation, production, and customer acquisition. Symkala built a geographic information systems (GIS) software. Symkala offered a novel workflow for a GIS analyst to apply supervised machine learning techniques to poorly structured information for geographic data analysis. I then marketed this software to federal and non- government organizations throughout Washington DC. Insights from this work were then applied to redesign Geo4NonPro, a website intended to promote accurate information and citizen participation for global nuclear security via an interactive GIS interface. These case studies additionally informed a trajectory of practice transformation. A review of the literature and selected artifacts from the case studies, alongside reflection on action, establish insights on design for new venture creation within innovation ecosystems, design to counter disinformation, and product design for systems-level impact. I found that a robust innovation ecosystem does not directly culminate into a successful venture due to resource bias, and therefore a focus on customer research through material production can enable entrepreneurs to work more slowly and mindfully to achieve bold visions. To counter disinformation through products, firms need to prioritize information validity as a central business goal, forcing changes to the organizational structures and processes that guide product delivery. To more effectively channel systems-level insights into human-scale products, the design process must prioritize clarity in goal formation, product definition, and attention to social equities throughout production.

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New technologies, such as smart mobile communication and computing devices, GPS tracking, video surveillance, RFID, web activity logs, etc. offer unprecedented means for automatic sensing and interpretation of a variety of aspects related to human interactions in groups, social networks, organizations, collectivities, or entire societies. It results that it is now possible to design technical systems capable to harness and leverage the collective intelligence. This paper is a brief review of the literature dedicated to this topic, aiming to identify the main approaches used for designing such systems, and to place our own research in this field in a larger context. Besides that, a simple agent based simulation experiment attempts to provide an answer to the question: “Why is Romania different”, from the perspective of the (lack of) collective intelligence.

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Francis Heylighen

The offer network protocol: Mathematical foundations and a roadmap for the development of a global brain

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The world is confronted with a variety of interdependent problems, including scarcity, unsustainability, inequality, pollution and poor governance. Tackling such complex challenges requires coordinated action. The present paper proposes the development of a self-organizing system for coordination, called an “offer network”, that would use the distributed intelligence of the Internet to match the offers and needs of all human, technological and natural agents on the planet. This would maximize synergy and thus minimize waste and scarcity of resources. Implementing such coordination requires a protocol that formally defines agents, offers, needs, and the network of condition-action rules or reactions that interconnect them. Matching algorithms can then determine self-sustaining subnetworks in which each consumed resource (need) is also produced (offer). After sketching the elements of a mathematical foundation for offer networks, the paper proposes a roadmap for their practical implementation. This includes step-by-step integration with technologies such as the Semantic Web, ontologies, the Internet of Things, reputation and recommendation systems, reinforcement learning, governance through legal constraints and nudging, and ecosystem modeling. The resulting intelligent platform should be able to tackle nearly all practical and theoretical problems in a bottom-up, distributed manner, thus functioning like a Global Brain for humanity.

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Peer review is the standard process within academia for maintaining publication quality, but it is also widely employed in other settings, such as education and industry, for improving work quality and for generating actionable feedback to content authors. For example, in the software industry peer review of program source code—or peer code review—is a key technique for detecting bugs and maintaining coding standards. In a programming education context, although peer code review offers potential benefits to both code reviewers and code authors, individuals are typically less experienced, which presents a number of challenges. Some of these challenges are similar to those reported in the educational literature on peer review in other academic disciplines, but reviewing code presents unique difficulties. Better understanding these challenges and the conditions under which code review can be taught and implemented successfully in computer science courses is of value to the computing education community. In this work, we conduct a systematic review of the literature on peer code review in higher education to examine instructor motivations for conducting peer code review activities, how such activities have been implemented in practice, and the primary benefits and difficulties that have been reported. We initially identified 187 potential studies and analyzed 51 empirical studies pertinent to our goals. We report the most commonly cited benefits (e.g., the development of programming-related skills) and barriers (e.g., low student engagement), and we identify a wide variety of tools that have been used to facilitate the peer code review process. While we argue that more empirical work is needed to validate currently reported results related to learning outcomes, there is also a clear need to address the challenges around student motivation, which we believe could be an important avenue for future research.

Merge narrative and content to enhance individual self-directed learning

Presentation

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Jan 2019

Focused on designing an online course for a flipped classroom setting (Lage, Platt, & Treglia, 2000) for pre-service history teachers we decided to design an online lesson with different material under creative commons license. The overall topic was: “How to use videos in (further) learning settings?” Therefore, we created a learning path where students could learn individually (Anderson, 1995), focused on their interests, limited by the provided materials and different tasks selected by the authors. We framed the whole learning path in a narrative stream supplemented by a pedagogical agent (e.g. Johnson, Rickel, & Lester, 2000). For both we created videos. On the one hand we created narrative (Heylighen et al., 2013) animations to explain the motivation for learning the items and to motivate learners with gamification elements (Deterding et al., 2011). In the narrative videos we can see a teacher exploring educational video with its up and downs. Furthermore, the pedagogical agent (“acted” the first author) had different functions: Firstly, he guided the learners whereby the path, secondly, he built a bridge between the narrative and the content, thirdly he tried to trigger reflection and finally set a personal note for the students. We used different existing creative commons videos (e.g. Sandra Schön talking about open educational resources, Jürgen Handke about Educational Videos). We merged the three types of videos to one. First, we set the animation to get a bigger scope, afterwards the pedagogical agent and in the end the topic. Totally we produced five videos for five main topics (criteria for educational videos, licenses of videos (oer, cc), activity and participation in learning environments, collaboration and communication, reflection and outlook). Every main topic has its own social and collaborative task to fulfill. For example, students have to find OERs and post it in a collaborative webtool or reflect their predilection on how to create educational videos. Considering we tried to implement a learning environment, which merge different types of videos, story elements, content and organizational element to enhance individual learning.

An environment to support the design, implementation and evaluation of gamification in social systems

Conference Paper

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Gamification has become a popular strategy to increase the engagement and participation of users in social systems. Despite the popularity that now reigns, we identified that gamification can not be treated simply as award points and provide badgets for users. Care must be taken, since the choice of the game mechanics must consider the profile of the user as a player. If such considerations are not made properly, the desired goals by the developer cannot be obtained. In other words, one needs to understand the relationship between the developer's goals, the game mechanics and the profile of users (players). The lack of computational tools to support the developer to consider how these three aspects relate to and impact, led us to propose GameWork. It is a Service-oriented Architecture to support gamification in general, especially to help monitoring the system and the players behaviors with respect to the incentives provided. This article describes GameWork and an example of its implementation in a commercial social network.

How to Harvest Collective Wisdom for Complex Problems: An Introduction to the MIT Deliberatorium

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Full-text available

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Mark Klein

Humanity now finds itself faced with pressing and highly complex problems – such as climate change, the spread of disease, international and economic insecurity, and so on-that call upon us to bring together large numbers of experts and stakeholders to deliberate collectively on a global scale. Such large-scale deliberations are themselves complex processes, however, with emergent properties that often prevent us from adequately harnessing the community's collective wisdom. Collocated meetings, beside being expensive, are prone to such well-known effects as polarization, power dynamics, and groupthink. Social media (such as email, blogs, wikis, chat rooms, and web forums) enable more concurrent input but still typically generate more heat than light when applied to complex controversial topics. Large-scale argumentation systems represent a promising approach for addressing this important challenge, by virtue of providing a simple systematic structure that radically reduces redundancy and encourages clarity. This paper will describe the efforts we have made to explore this approach, giving an overview of the key underlying concepts, the ways we have translated these concepts into a working system (the MIT Deliberatorium), and the experiences we have had evaluating this system in a range of contexts. The Challenge Decision-making in large communities rarely fully harvests the collective wisdom of its members, even for very high-stakes problems where it can make the difference between disaster and success. It can be simply too expensive to bring the key players into one room, and too difficult to manage the interactions of large groups to get the best that the members have to offer. Only one person can talk at a time, loud voices can dominate a discussion, and emergent dynamics can lead such groups to either deadlock without a solution (polarization) or prematurely settle on a solution without sufficiently exploring the space of promising alternatives (groupthink) [1]. In recent years, social media technologies (e.g. email, web forums, chat rooms, blogs, wikis, and idea forums) have emerged that have the potential to address this important gap. Such tools have enabled diverse communities to weigh in on topics they care about at unprecedented scale, in turn leading to remarkably powerful emergent phenomena [2] [1] [3] [4] such as:

Consulting the oracle: Ten lessons from using the Delphi technique in nursing research

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2005

A Tale of Challenge, Adventure and Mystery: towards an agent-based unification of narrative and scientific models of behavior

Article

Full-text available

Francis Heylighen

The scientific worldview is based on laws, which are supposed to be certain, objective, and independent of time and context. The narrative worldview found in literature, myth and religion, is based on stories, which relate the events experienced by a subject in a particular context with an uncertain outcome. This paper argues that the concept of "agent", supported by the theories of evolution, cybernetics and complex adaptive systems, allows us to reconcile scientific and narrative perspectives. An agent follows a course of action through its environment with the aim of maximizing its fitness. Navigation along that course combines the strategies of regulation, exploitation and exploration, but needs to cope with often-unforeseen challenges. These can be positive (affordances, goals), negative (disturbances, anti-goals) or neutral (diversions). The resulting sequence of challenges and actions can be conceptualized as an adventure. Thus, the agent appears to play the role of the hero in a tale of challenge and mystery that is very similar to the "monomyth", the basic storyline that underlies all myths and fairy tales according to Joseph Campbell [1949]. This narrative dynamics is driven forward in particular by the alternation between prospect (the ability to foresee challenges) and mystery (the possibility of achieving an as yet absent prospect), two aspects of the environment that are particularly attractive to agents. This dynamics generalizes the scientific notion of a deterministic trajectory by introducing a variable "horizon of knowability": the agent is never fully certain of its further course, but can navigate depending on its degree of prospect.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity

Book

Jan 2002

David Allen

With first-chapter allusions to martial arts, "flow," "mind like water," and other concepts borrowed from the East (and usually mangled), you'd almost think this self-helper from David Allen should have been called Zen and the Art of Schedule Maintenance . Not quite. Yes, Getting Things Done offers a complete system for downloading all those free-floating gotta-do's clogging your brain into a sophisticated framework of files and action lists--all purportedly to free your mind to focus on whatever you're working on. However, it still operates from the decidedly Western notion that if we could just get really, really organized, we could turn ourselves into 24/7 productivity machines. (To wit, Allen, whom the New Economy bible Fast Company has dubbed "the personal productivity guru," suggests that instead of meditating on crouching tigers and hidden dragons while you wait for a plane, you should unsheathe that high-tech saber known as the cell phone and attack that list of calls you need to return.) As whole-life-organizing systems go, Allen's is pretty good, even fun and therapeutic. It starts with the exhortation to take every unaccounted-for scrap of paper in your workstation that you can't junk, The next step is to write down every unaccounted-for gotta-do cramming your head onto its own scrap of paper. Finally, throw the whole stew into a giant "in-basket" That's where the processing and prioritizing begin; in Allen's system, it get a little convoluted at times, rife as it is with fancy terms, subterms, and sub-subterms for even the simplest concepts. Thank goodness the spine of his system is captured on a straightforward, one-page flowchart that you can pin over your desk and repeatedly consult without having to refer back to the book. That alone is worth the purchase price. Also of value is Allen's ingenious Two-Minute Rule: if there's anything you absolutely must do that you can do right now in two minutes or less, then do it now, thus freeing up your time and mind tenfold over the long term. It's commonsense advice so obvious that most of us completely overlook it, much to our detriment; Allen excels at dispensing such wisdom in this useful, if somewhat belabored, self-improver aimed at everyone from CEOs to soccer moms (who we all know are more organized than most CEOs to start with). -- Timothy Murphy In today's world of exponentially increased communication and responsibility, yesterday's methods for staying on top just don't work. Veteran management consultant and trainer David Allen recognizes that "time management" is useless the minute your schedule is interrupted; "setting priorities" isn't relevant when your email is down; "procrastination solutions" won't help if your goals aren't clear. Allen's premise is simple: our ability to be productive is directly proportional to our ability to relax. Only when our minds are clear and our thoughts are organized can we achieve stress-free productivity and unleash our creative potential. He teaches us how to: Apply the "do it, delegate it, defer it, drop it" rule to get your in-box empty Reassess goals and stay focused in changing situations Overcome feelings of confusion, anxiety, and being overwhelmed Feel fine about what you're not doing From core principles to proven tricks, Getting Things Done has the potential to transform the way you work -- and the way you experience work. At any level of implementation, David Allen's entertaining and thought-provoking advice shows you how to pick up the pace without wearing yourself down. """The personal productivity guru"" (Fast Company) delivers powerful methods that vastly increase your efficiency and creative results-at work and in life In today's world, yesterday's methods just don't work. In Getting Things Done, veteran coach and management consultant David Allen shares the breakthrough methods for stress-free performance that he has introduced to tens of thousands of people across the country. Allen's premise is simple: our productivity is directly proportional to our ability to relax. Only when our minds are clear and our thoughts are organized can we achieve effective productivity and unleash our creative potential. In Getting Things Done Allen shows how to: Apply the ""do it, delegate it, defer it, drop it"" rule to get your in-box to empty Reassess goals and stay focused in changing situations Plan projects as well as get them unstuck Overcome feelings of confusion, anxiety, and being overwhelmed Feel fine about what you're not doing From core principles to proven tricks, Getting Things Done can transform the way you work, showing you how to pick up the pace without wearing yourself down."

Flow: the psychology of optimal experience

Book

Jan 2008

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The Extended Mind

Article

Jan 2012

Andy Clark

Where are the borders of mind and where does the rest of the world begin? There are two standard answers possible: Some philosophers argue that these borders are defined by our scull and skin. Everything outside the body is also outside the mind. The others argue that the meanings of our words "simply are not in our heads" and insist that this meaning externalism applies also to the mind. The authors are suggesting a third position, i.e. quite another form of externalism. Their so called active externalism implies an active involvement of the background in controlling the cognitive processes.

The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less

Article

Jan 2005

Barry Schwartz

Persuasive technology and moral responsibility: Toward an ethical framework for persuasive technologies

Article

Jan 2006

P.P. Verbeek

The Cognitive Mechanics of Economic Development and Institutional Change

Article

Feb 2004

Bertin Martens

This book seeks to explain long-term economic development and institutional change in terms of the cognitive features of human learning and communication processes. Martens links individual cognitive processes to macroeconomic growth theories, including economies of scale and scope, and to theories of institutional development based on asymmetric information in production processes and economies of scale in enforcement technology. With considerable flair, Bertin Martens has applied the hot new area of psychological and behavioural economics to notions of growth and development and has created a unique and impressive volume.

Reframing Public Space Through Digital Mobilization: Flash Mobs and Contemporary Urban Youth Culture

Article

Jan 2013
Space Cult

Virag Molnar

Flash mobs have spread, like wildfire, across the globe in recent years fuelling new uses of urban public space. The media has wondered if these events are simply pointless pranks, creative public performances, or mass social experiments in community building. Existing research emphasizes only the vital role of digital communications technology in the mobilization process. In contrast, this analysis shows through a broad range of examples from New York, London, Berlin, Budapest to Tokyo that these nascent forms of collective action are also important to examine because they provide insight into the intersection and interaction between new communications media and changing uses of physical urban space. It situates flash mobs in a historical context, constructs a basic typology of flash mob activity based on extensive Internet research, and theorizes it as a new form of sociability. It also explores how these examples of urban creativity have inspired commerce and politics to rediscover urban space, increasingly borrowing the organizational techniques of flash mobs in marketing campaigns and social protests.

Mobilization Systems: technologies for motivating and coordinating human action

Abstract

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