Tools for a Distributed Insurgency

What might be good tools to support a "global distributed insurgency"?

There are two scenarios to consider: a public insurgency and a private one. A public insurgency acts in the open and reveals its tactics, strategies, doubts and confusion to all, including the adversary. A public insurgency makes it easier to recruit supporters and activists, and if enough people get involved the insurgency could quickly develop momentum.

The big disadvantage of a public insurgency, of course, is that the information sharing is entirely one-sided: the insurgency reveals everything while the adversary reveals nothing. Thus, we know that open-source software violates 235 of Microsoft's patents, but not if any Microsoft software incorporates open-source code.

Public insurgencies can be started a blogger's call to action, and the blog can subsequently act as a rallying point for a movement. Here are two political examples: (a) conservatives trying to kick a Republican Congressman off the House Appropriations Committee, and (b) liberals trying to stop funding for the Iraq war.

While blogs could help initiate an insurgency, they cannot guide them very well. There is often only a single blogger, with the rest of the world confined to commenting on individual postings (or other people's comments). It quickly becomes very difficult, if not altogether impossible, to follow the various conversational threads that exist in the stream of comments.

Another option would be to combine a blog with a Wiki, as the folks at Digital Tipping Point did with their "Sue Me First" Wiki. Wiki pages are good tool for public insurgencies, since they are easily accessible, open and inviting by design, and can accomodate a variety of projects.

But what if you wanted to create a private insurgency, one where you tried to bring together a distributed group of supporters to work on multiple, concurrent activities within a larger strategic context?

You could still use a blog as a recruiting tool and as a public rallying point for your supporters. For the actual work of the insurgency, you could create a forum with restricted permissions where people could post messages that are organized around topics. The problem with forums is that they are little more than shared email folders, which means that many of the disadvantages of email carry over, and some are even magnified:

• There is no easy way to present the "big picture", at least in a living, malleable way. Visual representations are the most effective way of conveying strategy, which is why people tend to cluster around whiteboards during project discussions. You could, of course, create an image file depicting your strategy but there isn't any easy way for the rest of the team to modify and extend this picture.


• It is possible to share documents, but not in a flexible way: forums, team sites, etc. invariably impose a check-in/check-out mechanism that makes it difficult for people to easily modify different documents.


• Privacy becomes a bigger consideration: if you use a "free" hosted service, your team's content (messages, files) will get scanned by the hosting company in order to deliver targeted advertisements.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to Kerika… With Kerika you have the ability to share content in context, and to do so without spending a lot of money or compromising your privacy. If you set up a private server for your team, messages intended for offline team members are stored on your private server, rather than on Kerika's servers. This private server can be any computer that is reliably accessible by the rest of your team, which usually means having a fixed IP address. Now you have a "ring of trust" consisting of your personal laptop, your private server, and the computers of your team members.