I have commented previously on the hullabaloo across the sector about the passing of the baby boomers.

This was created in large part by Tom Tierney’s work suggesting there will be a shortage of leaders as all of us baby boomers go to the great love-in in the sky.

I don’t believe it actually; there are plenty of young people ready for us to move over and make room for them. But, I am returning to the topic here as it relates to the wikipedization (I just made up that word) of our society.

As older leaders struggle to make sense of the new self-organizing, social networking technology and the freedom (or chaos, depending upon your viewpoint) it brings to their work, younger leaders use it without thinking. It is the way they work.

So, perhaps one benefit of the passing of the torch from the boomers to younger generations will be that these new ways of organizing and self-organizing will find their fullest expression when they are employed by people who grew up with them.

Rollover Beethoven!

You might be interested in reading a new book called Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. It discusses the power of Web 2.0 as a tool for collaboration.

Here’s a blurb from the book’s publishers: “In the last few years, traditional collaboration—in a meeting room, a conference call, even a convention center—has been superseded by collaborations on an astronomical scale. Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the heaving growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics explains how to prosper in a world where new communications technologies are democratizing the creation of value. Anyone who wants to understand the major forces revolutionizing business today should consider Wikinomics their survival kit.”

Wow, even allowing for the publisher’s hype, this is heady stuff.

We are seeing our clients in the grassroots activism field turn more and more to self-organizing systems, using the Internet, to mobilize people across the country and around the world. It is no longer necessary to even “organize” in the traditional sense: that is, in-person demonstrations. You put out the word online and people spread it among themselves. This is hard for big, centralized organizations to manage, but figuring it out is a key challenge of the next decade.

At its essence, what this is all about is old-fashioned DIRECT democracy. Lately, representative democracy has seemed to be more a memory than a reality; think: the 2000 election, which dealt a near-fatal blow to our belief in the system.

But, there is hope: democracy is not dead. People are using technology to organize themselves, collaborate with like-minded people, and make their own decisions.