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Let's face it. After nearly fifty years of development and roughly twenty years of mass adoption, the Internet hasn't created many truly useful tools for groups. We may live in the age of "ridiculously easy group formation," but if you've spent any time as part of a group, you know that all the most popular internet tools --email, list-servs, blogs, chats, and wikis --basically suck at group coordination. None of these tools are built to make it easy for large groups to make decisions together.

It's not a coincidence, I think, that most of us rarely, or never, experience working in a group where everyone actually gets a meaningful chance to participate in the decisions that group makes. Or, to look at it from the converse, most of us belong to groups where we actually don't have that much of a say in what the group does. Our most popular technological tools (see sidebar, below) generally have the effect of making this situation worse.

This isn't to say that big groups never manage to make coherent decisions using the tools we have. Reddit.com is constantly spawning all kinds of collective actions, like online fundraisers for people who need expensive medical operations or flash-mobs around media moments. One impassioned Redditor's rant about the supposed death of net neutrality led to the formation of a bona-fide political action committee, as my colleague Nick Judd documented back in 2010 ("Are Net-Neutrality-Advocating Redditors About to Start a PAC?"). Groups make do with what they have and members put up with communication annoyances constantly (or, as many organizers know, they drift away because ongoing communications can be a drag).

online tools | Social software | tools for collaboration | wegov