I just checked my Twitter feed, then my profile. I am following 25 people. In that small number I seem to be unusual. Among the 330 people following me many are also following hundreds if not thousands of other people. Does this make me feel a little less special? Yeah, but that’s not my point here.

I use Twitter for work, and my work is all about the social sector. So I assume my followers form a cross section of the sector. A typical follower of mine is following 500 people. The all-time Twitter-holic on my list is following me plus 37,695 others. The most followed individual in my orbit who is not a politician or an institution has 340,757 followers. This made me stop and think – how do you follow 37,000 people on Twitter? For that matter, how do you follow even a mere 500?

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In Convergence:  How Five Trends Will Reshape the Social Sector we described how demographic shifts, technological advances, networks that organize work in new ways, interest in civic engagement and volunteerism, and the blurring of sector boundaries would be changing the way that we come together to respond to and solve social problems.

If you have followed the emergence and spread of the Occupy Wall Street movement, you can see these trends at work – and it’s precisely the changes implied by the trends that have made this a difficult story for traditional media to cover.   How many times have you seen reports that this is a “leaderless movement?”  In a session on social change at the recent Independent Sector conference, a young woman expressed her frustration at this term, saying “The problem that people seem to have in understanding OWS is that it is, in fact, a leader-full movement.”  She makes a good point.   Those involved are sharing leadership, inviting others to engage in the movement, and they are using technology to communicate broadly and through open channels – but not necessarily the channels to which traditional media are accustomed (no one issues press releases announcing the next day’s events).

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