Rick Falkvinge's Blog, page 26

EU President and, IT Staff Don’t Understand Democracy, Maths, Truth

Activism – Andrew "K`Tetch" Norton: The letter, dated March 28th but delivered April 8th, indicates that the President was aware, and approves of the means used. In short “we got a few hundred thousand emails on this topic, felt it might take down the system and so blocked it all. Plus it was all from less than a thousand email addresses.”

It’s not actually the case though, there’s a lot wrong with the contents of the letter. Firstly, he doesn’t get technology, but also have a big problem with maths, and participatory democracy.

But let’s break down the letter, eh?

Dear Mr Engstrom

Thank you for your e-mail and fax of 12 March in relation to blocking e-mails from citizens concerning the report on “Eliminating gender stereotypes”.

The IT department of the European Parliament noticed on 7 March an excessive number of emails towards EP e-mail boxes coming from external senders.

So here’s the first thing. The IT department gets to decide what an ‘excessive amount’ is. That amount is irrespective of major issues, but seems to be ‘big spike, kill it’. Giving some IT wonk control over whether an issue is ‘important enough’ to be able to contact your elected representatives is not a good thing.

An analysis by the IT department in relation to these external e-mails has shown the following

- The e-mails sent were in relation to the report on “Eliminating gender stereotypes”;

No, really? A filter that blocked emails sent to elected representatives on an issue was in response to emails on that issue. Never would have thought that!

- 708,683 messages were sent to the European Parliament (of which 457,325 were blocked after installing a filter and 251,358 delivered;

So, 708k emails (let’s say 709k and leave it at that round number) were sent, which is a ‘big deal’. There are 754 MEP’s. So, how does that break down? 940 emails per member. It’s not that big a flood (and it’s even smaller than that, as we’ll get to shortly). It’s a month’s worth of email for my primary account, but I also don’t hold an elected position, or have a staff to deal with it.

Also, note the cavalier attitude to blocking 64% of email sent to MEPs by constituents. As if it doesn’t really matter.

- the e-mails were received from 850 different addresses; on average this is more than 800 e-mails per address;

Well, as we’ve already noted, there’s 754 MEPs, so any email sent to all, would go to over 750. Unfortunately, the ‘average’ part is kind of ruined by the very next point.

- One single e-mail address was responsible for sending 106,771 e-mails to the European Parliament;

So, what’s 106,771 divided by the 754 MEPs? 141. 141 people used Rick’s emailer. It’s a good job it wasn’t a huge number of people then, eh?

Now, let’s take that one address out, how does the ‘over 800 average’ last then? Well, 601,912 divided by the 849 address left gives an average of… 709. Not even one to every MEP, and a good chunk from the average he made sound so important.

By the way, anyone have any guesses what that one email address was? Could the answer be found on, say, the much publicised page where the issue was brought up? Why yes it could.

In other words, it is therefore time to mail the European Parliament with our opinions.

You may remember how we did that in the anti-ACTA campaign. I have set up a mail alias that resolves to every Member of European Parliament (all some 750 of them); the mail alias is europarl-all-mar2013@falkvinge.net. Mail them right now, regardless of whether you are an EU citizen or not.

Or it could be the successor address after the blocking issue came up.

Further, you may want to use an alternative mail alias, europarl@piratenpartij.nl.

I think I’ve found the emails…

But, back to President Schulz, and his letter.

- The number of messages per minute shows that there are several levels of continuous sending of e-mails (500 e-mails per minute, 450 e-mails per minute, 400 e-mails per minute etc) which indicates an organised action using automatic means for sending mass e-mails to the European Parliament.

Yes. You are right. There was an organised action. That’s often how citizen pressure works, especially in tight timeframes. We tend to call it ‘activism’ or perhaps ‘campaigning’. You might have heard of it.

Also, all e-mail is sent using ‘automatic means’, you’re hardly logging directly in to the EP server, and typing it out directly on the server. ‘Automated means’ is also a pretty good way to describe multi-recipient emails. You don’t have to send emails out one-by-one, copying the body and putting a new recipient each time.

That’s also why you get blocks of 500, or 400 – mass mail tends to work in batches, it’s not exactly high priority traffic. If it takes 30 extra seconds to get to its destination, no-one cares. It’s not like a video stream, or a website.

I think someone in your IT department has set you up to look like an idiot, Mr Schulz (that’s BOFH’s for you)

- when analysing the servers from which the e-mails were sent, two main servers have been identified which are responsible for sending the vast majority of the e-mails to the European Parliament;

Yeah, we already mentioned them. Did you? No, because if you revealed that it was a Dutch political party, and a well-known political activist who is the founder of an entire political movement with elected members of the EP, then the perceived rational goes from ‘spam blocking’ to ‘political muzzling’.

Considering that the European Parliament receives on average 250,000 e-mails from external senders per day and that in addition 230,000 e-mails concerning the report on “Eliminating gender stereotypes” were received, this is a strong indication that the European Parliament is being targeted by mass e-mail.

First of all, the European Parliament collectively receive less than 250,000/day? That’s not a good sign. When you add in lobbying, automated lists and that there are thousands of email addresses in the EP (not just one per MEP, but all their staff etc) that’s a REALLY low number. Say 3 staff, plus the MEP, that’s 3000 email addresses, and 250k doesn’t sound a lot now. In fact the European parliament itself says there’s over 6600 people working at the European Parliament, so it works out to 37/day. I’ve had 42 emails between midnight at 2pm, and it’s been a quiet day.

Second, yes, we know it was targeted by mass email. That’s what a mass email protest looks like, when something a lot of people feel strongly about is revealed. 30 years ago, they would have written, and because of the way the postal services works, it would have been spread out over days as word took time to spread, and then people write, and the postal services delivers. Now the word can spread globally in minutes, and responses hit your inbox quicker than a pizza can be delivered. It’s the modern world, and if you can’t understand that, then you have no business being President.

In order to guarantee the functionality of the European Parliament’s e-mail system (which is one of the essential services offered to the European Parliament) it was decided to install a filter at 9:30 to reduce the number of external emails in relation to the report on “Eliminating gender stereotypes”

OOPS! Someone’s been caught out in a lie. See, we have this tweet from the European Parliament which says something a bit different.

Automatic filters were triggered on 7 March because of an enormous influx of mails sent to MEPs – nothing to do with content #mepblock

— European Parliament (@Europarl_EN) March 8, 2013

Except as we now know, it wasn’t automatic. It was deliberately put in place because of people contacting MEPs, according to Mr Schulz

Seriously, don’t say it’s an automatic filter when it’s actually a response to a campaign against a topic. That’s NOT GOOD. Secondly, the European Parliament is filtering based on responses to a certain topic, RELEVENT to pending legislation. That’s COMPLETELY different from “nothing to do with content”

And sure an email storm is going to affect email servers, if they’re badly set up. The reasoning is that there’s a certain level of e-mails and beyond that is too much’. Again, doesn’t really work that way. Any properly set up email system should have no problem with this volume of mail, which can’t be said for the MEPs. This is ably demonstrated by British MEP Charles Tannock who replied to the Eu Parliament tweet saying

.@europarl_en Appreciated as MEPs overwelmed with lobbying email on farming & internet freedom-price of free & instant acces to elected reps

— Charles Tannock (@CharlesTannock) March 8, 2013

That’s not a great thing for the ECR Foreign Affairs and Human Rights Coordinator to say. Perhaps if those emailing had taken him to dinner, like a PROPER lobbyist, he’d have been more receptive. Plus it flies in the face of the Article 8 of the European Declaration of Human Rights

1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.

2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

Clearly there is no respect for correspondence from the President or the IT department, and there has been interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right. Indeed, blocking out communications with elected representatives on a single topic is a clear and flagrant violation of Article 8.

After the filter was installed, the European Parliament received 250,000 additional e0mails by 16:00 of the same day. At noon on 8 March there were 500,000 e-mails and on 9 March 708,683 e-mails in total were received from external sources all in relation to the report on “Eliminating Gender stereotypes.

Again, undermining your position a bit here, Martin. Rick’s original piece was published 21:30 on March 6. After 12 hours, you had 250,000 emails in on the topic, which were let through before you installed a block. So until the block (roughly 10am March 7) was installed, you had 251,358 emails.

Next you say that after the filter, you had another 250,000 emails by 16:00 that day (the 7th), for a total of 501,000 emails.

Your next line says that by noon on the 8th, you had 500,000 emails. I’m assuming that’s blocked, because you were already over that, total, 20 hours earlier. So that’s 751,000 emails. Then you close by saying by the 9th, you’d had a total of 708,683 emails.

The problem is, you’ve already accounted for more than that at noon on the 8th.

The numbers DO NOT ADD UP as presented. The only way they would, is if those that were delivered circumvented the filter, and there were very few emails sent before the filter was implemented.

That and now you’ve explained the number wasn’t 709k emails in 24 hours, but really spread out between March 6 and March 9 (3 days) it seems even less of a threat, with less than the quantity of email you admit to finding ‘average’. Hardly a tsunami of email.

Out of the 708,683 e-mails, 457,325 were blocked (after installing a filter) and 251,358 were delivered. No e-mails have been deleted or cancelled, and all e-mails which have been blocked are in the “quarantine” part of the infrastructure.

Hmm, that’s nice. Not deleted or cancelled, but just held in indefinite storage, in a folder no-one can access. If you move emails to the ‘trash’ folder, or files to the Recycle bin’, you’ve not deleted them either, but just ‘put them in quarantine’.

Sure you’ve not actually deleted them, they still exist, but as far as the recipients are concerned, they have been de-facto deleted. I asked Christian Engstrom MEP about these emails, and if he’d been sent any that had passed ‘quarantine’ His reply?

No, they have not been delivered to MEPs .The IT department may have them somewhere, but since MEPs cannot access them directly, and are probably not even aware of their existence in most cases, that is no help. For all practical purposes, the emails were discarded without any notice given either the citizen sender or the MEP recipient

Yet another lie, effectively, from President Schulz.

In conclusion, considering the high number of e-mails received in a very short period of time the limited number of different email accounts (850) used to send the e-mails, the usage of automated means for producing the e-mails and the usage of mainly two servers to send the e-mails , the IT department considered that the European Parliement was the subject of an abnormal massive e-mail flow and that the intervention of the technical services is justified to install a filter to reduce the number of messages from external sources concerning the report on “Eliminating gender stereotypes” in ordre to ensure the functioning of the European Parliament e-mail service.

There are two possible translations for this paragraph.

Translation 1:

The IT department is poorly trained and has implemented an email service that is barely capable of handling the normal everyday load, since there are too many people skimming from the budget and going to pet-vendors. As such, any influx casued by an issue of concern to may will overwhelm the creaky mess unless CYA mode is engaged and filters implemented.

Translation 2:

I am a strong supporter of the issue many people were protesting about. I support the block, because I want the legislation to pass, and with the help of people in the IT department have devised an excuse that we feel will justify blocking correspondence between the citizens of the EU and the Members of the European Parliament. If only we’d have thought of this in time to save ACTA.

Neither one is very appealing, or bodes well for democracy, or the view many have for the EU’s legislative body.

Either way though, the message this letter gives is that you shouldn’t contact MEP’s if there’s a serious issue, but if you absolutely must, don’t use email. EU citizens contacting MEP’s about issues that are important for them is not what the e-mail system is for. Use two cups and a bit of string instead, it’ll work just as well.

What are your thoughts? Translation 1, 2 or is there a 3rd?

Letter from EU President to Christian Engstrom MEP

Icelandic Píratar On Final Approach To Election Victory

Pirate Parties: A new poll today places the Icelandic Pirate Party in parliament, with their election three weeks out. This follows a continuous and rapid ascent for the Icelandic Pirate Party. The poll will probably have the additional effect of putting the media spotlights on the party, further accelerating its growth.

The poll gives the Icelandic Píratar 5.6% of the votes, translating to four seats in the Icelandic Parliament. This growth is nothing short of phenomenal, even within the Pirate Party movement, and it would seem that the Icelandic pirates will be the first to put people in a regular, proportional, national-level parliament. (Sweden was first with the European Parliament, Germany was first with state-level parliament, and the Czech pirates were first with a senator.)

I predict that this will have the exact same effect as happened when the Swedish Pirate Party was first polling at parliamentary levels a month ahead of the European elections in 2009, and when the Berlin Pirate Party was first polling at parliamentary levels ahead of the Berlin state elections in 2011. Tons of media spotlights turn to focus on the newcomer darling, at which point support surges further. The Icelandic elections are on April 27.

Now, that doesn’t mean that it’s a done deal. Success is possible and even probable if all activists keep working like crazy between now and the election, and no monumental screw-up takes place. It’s only with sustained activism between now and the election that success looks probable.

The Icelandic Pirate Party is led by Birgitta Jónsdóttir, who is known for her work with WikiLeaks and the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative. She is currently serving as Member of Parliament in Iceland (elected for The Movement in 2009).

Also, remember that the Croatian Pirates are polling at 6.4% and may get a seat in the European Parliament in their April 14 elections! They are requesting last-minute donations (and other forms of assistance) to succeed with the last push and become the second country with pirates in the European Parliament, which would be another important milestone for the movement.

Why Bitcoin Is Poised To Change Society Much More Than The Internet Did

Swarm Economy: There is a bitcoin craze at the moment, with prices of bitcoin skyrocketing. Bitcoin is still far from ready for prime time, but as it matures, it will change society’s fundamental operations much more than the Internet did. The net, after all, only allowed people to talk and shop more efficiently. By comparison, bitcoin eradicates the government’s ability to operate.

Let’s begin by looking at what a bitcoin is. It is money. It is a new form of money that isn’t issued by a government. Governments don’t have a monopoly on coming up with things you can trade and barter with, and bitcoin is one such non-governmental barter instrument. The difference between bitcoin and all other such tokens of value that have been invented over the years is that nobody is in control of the money supply, and nobody is in control of the money flow. This means that nobody can start the printing presses to eradicate your savings, and nobody can seize or see your wealth or income. You can think of it as an open-source currency compared to proprietary, state-issued currencies.

There is no central bank. This is a revolutionary concept. People can trade cash at a distance without going through an intermediary. The first time you send the value of a cup of coffee to a friend in India on a Sunday, without any transaction fees, and they have the money instantly, without anybody but you knowing of the transaction, your jaw drops.

This would have been but a curiosity, if it weren’t for the ridiculously strong business case to cut banks and credit card processors out of the sales loop for corporations, which could roughly double the profits in retail sales. This means that there’s a very strong force for universal uptake of this new currency.

As nobody is in control of the money supply (it is set to grow predictably at a slowing rate until 2140), and demand increases with a limited supply, the price for each bitcoin increases. This is what we’re seeing now, as more and more people realize bitcoin’s business potential. Also, there is value in the concept that you don’t have to trust any single person to store or to transfer bitcoin – not your government, not your bank, not Western Union – is something completely new.

Erik Vorhees writes, “Bitcoin is thus the only currency and money system in the world which has no counter-party risk to hold and to transfer. This is absolutely revolutionary and you should read the preceding sentence again. [...] Never in the history of the world has an individual had this ability. It is unprecedented.”

So why does bitcoin have value? How is it, strictly speaking, money? People who ask this tend to be stuck in the idea that only states and governments can issue money, but that’s not the case. What we see as money has changed many times, and when Marco Polo came back to Europe from China in the 13th century, people were mocking him for bringing home banknotes. “This is not money”, they would say, and burn the Chinese banknotes. Money was coins. If you dismiss bitcoin just because you’re not used to seeing sequences of rare prime numbers as money, make sure you’re not scoffing at banknotes as people were in the 13th century. If people use it as money to trade, it’s money.

Jon Matonis has an excellent piece over at Forbes where he challenges the notion that money must be state-issued, and explains that a transactional currency can compete on its own merits and its own market.

It is important to realize that while the Internet has changed life in the IT industry tremendously, from a government standpoint, the net hasn’t changed much at all. If anything, it has reinforced existing structures: consumers spend their state-issued money more efficiently, credit is borrowed more and better from state-regulated banks which expands the money supply and keeps people happy, and it has created new industries that can fuel the economy. Oh, and it also lets citizens submit governmental forms more efficiently.

The only flip side to the net, from a government angle, would be that some people use the Internet to violate state-issued monopolies on entertainment distribution, which has been seen as a problem that needs to be dealt with swiftly and harshly, but other than that, the internet really isn’t much new from a government standpoint. Think about that the next time you see a politician who doesn’t appear to get the net: for them, if they’ve been in government too long, there is nothing much to get.

So we essentially have four different types of players that keep the economy going, and by extension, the government funded and operational. One, there is the government itself, which issues money and regulates banks. (For this exercise, I include the central bank in “government”.) Two, there are commercial banks which are in complete control of the money flow, in exchange for sharing that insight with the government and letting it siphon off as much as it likes to operate itself. Also, commercial banks expand the money supply when people ask for credit, so credit is good as the economy is measured today (“growth”). At the bottom of the food chain are, three, corporations which are tasked with using this system, running all its operations through these banks, and four, the ordinary citizen, who is supposed to be doing actual work and actually produce something that fuels the entire ecosystem.

What bitcoin does is cut the banks out of the loop, and by extension, the government’s ability to operate.

Those wars you have seen on TV? They are all fueled by this mechanism – the ability for banks to keep people happy in letting them spend imaginary money, while simultaneously giving the nation-state the ability to control as much of the money flow as it likes (and siphon as much as it likes off for itself).

Now, bitcoin isn’t going to drive its adoption just because it is impervious to state control and insight. Rather, its adoption is going to be driven by the strong business case for corporations to cut banks out of the loop – more specifically, cut bank profits out of their own profits.

The normal reaction for a government would be to use its entire arsenal of force against any phenomenon that threatens the government’s ability to function to this degree. But bitcoin is resilient to that. There is no central point to shut down. You can’t point a gun at a prime number and expect things to change. And we all know how effective governmental attempts to shut down peer-to-peer networks have been (even if it has been a low-priority issue so far that they haven’t really cared about).

A while back, I wrote that bitcoin is “The Napster of banking”. Perhaps there is a better analogy – perhaps it is the Skynet of banking. There is no central mainframe to shut down, and the intelligence in bitcoin is completely distributed with the single goal of obsoleting central banking.

In this regard, people at Business Insider who compare the bitcoin trade and its current price spike with the bubble around Beanie Babies in the early century come across as dangerously shortsighted and ignorant. Bitcoin is not a plush toy, it is not a commodity. It is an economic agreement, and as such, has value like any other contract that improves your business. This particular contract improves every business except banks.

So is bitcoin ready to take over the world? Far from it.

There are many problems with bitcoin today, but they are becoming less severe than the problems that plagued it one, two, and three years ago. In short, we’re seeing kinks being worked out, scratches being polished, and dents being straightened. But there are many reasons why bitcoin couldn’t take the place of state-issued money today, even if it is on a strong trajectory to do so in the next decade or decades.

The liquidity to state-issued money is one thing that strikes me immediately. In any economy, you need bridges between payment systems that are in use. Today, the vast majority of such bridging is handled by a Japanese bitcoin exchange known as MtGox. This is an unacceptable single point of failure in an ecosystem (proven by two hours of outage today). Further, lags of 10 minutes are common with MtGox’s trading engine (I’m seeing 400 seconds of lag right as I type this), which is just ridiculous when the financial world at large is dealing with micro- and nanosecond trading.

Bitcoin is getting there. But it’s not there yet. When it gets there, expect governments to panic and society to be reshaped into something where governments cannot rely on taxing income nor wealth for running their operations.

That is a bigger change to society’s fundamental structure than the ability to seek and share culture and knowledge we got with the net.

Swarmwise – The Tactical Manual To Changing The World. Chapter Three.

Swarm Management: If the last chapter was about the first six to eight days of the swarm’s lifecycle, this chapter is about the first six to eight weeks.

While the effective swarm consists almost entirely of loosely-knit activists, there is a core of people – a scaffolding for the swarm – that requires a more formal organization. It is important to construct this scaffolding carefully, paying attention to known facts about how people work in social groups. Without it, the swarm has no focal point around which it can… well, swarm.

Swarmwise chapters – one chapter per month

1. Understanding The Swarm

2. Launching Your Swarm

3. Getting Your Swarm Organized: Herding Cats (this chapter)

4. Control The Vision, But Never The Message (May 1)

5. Keep Everybody’s Eyes On Target, And Paint It Red Daily (Jun 1)

6. Screw Democracy, We’re On A Mission From God (July 1)

7. Surviving Growth Unlike Anything The MBAs Have Seen (Aug 1)

8. Using Social Dynamics To Their Potential (Sep 1)

9. Managing Oldmedia (Oct 1)

10. Beyond Success (Nov 1)

The actual book is expected to be available by June 1, 2013.

In building this scaffolding of go-to people, of the swarm’s officers, it is your responsibility to be aware of limits to group sizes that prevent further growth once reached, and break up the groups that reach these sizes into smaller subgroups when that happens.

You also need to be aware that any organization copies the methods and culture of its founder. This means that the swarm will do exactly as you do, regardless of persistent attempts to teach them good manners. The only way to have the swarm behave well is to behave well yourself. We’ll be returning to this observation later in this chapter.

THE THREE MAGIC GROUP SIZES

The few people upholding the scaffolding of the swarm will resemble a traditional hierarchical organization. However, it is important to understand that the role of this scaffolding is not directing and controlling the masses, as it would be in a corporation or other traditional organization. Rather, its role and value is in supporting the other 95% of the organization – the swarm – which makes its own decisions based on the values you communicate, and looks to the scaffolding only when assistance, support, or resources are needed.

Nevertheless, to build an efficient scaffolding, we must understand the human psyche as it comes to optimal group sizes and organization theory.

It can be easily observed in any organization that working groups larger than seven people fragment into two smaller groups. There are several theories as to why this happens, but the prevailing theory has to do with the amount of effort we need to spend upholding and caring for relationships within a working group. Let’s illustrate with an example.

In a group of two people, there is just one relationship that the group needs to care for.

In a group of three people, there are three relationships.

In a group of five, there are suddenly 4+3+2+1 = ten relationships. And if we up the group size to the critical seven people, there are twenty-one relationships between people that the group needs to maintain in order to function as a working group.

As we can see in this math, the social complexity of the group increases much faster than the group size. At some point, the group becomes inefficient, having to spend so much effort just on cohering the group that it gets very little or no actual work done.

When we add an eighth member to a group, the number of relations to maintain climb from 21 to 28. So while adding an eighth member to the group adds 14% work capacity to the group compared to seven people, it also requires the group to spend 33% more of their combined work capacity on the task of maintaining the group itself, on maintaining 28 relations instead of 21. At this point, or sometimes at a ninth member (36 relations), the group falls apart.

What we learn from this is that the scaffolding needs to be constructed so that no more than seven people work closely to one another in a given tight context.

We do this in the classical way, by constructing the scaffolding’s organization chart so that no person has more than six people working with him or her in a given context. This means that, for a given geography (like any state, country, city, et cetera) in the organization chart, that geography must subdivide into at most six smaller geographies which has other people responsible for those smaller geographies.

For now, we call this type of officer a geography leader for the swarm. They could be state leaders, city leaders, circuit leaders – any size of geography, but their duties will basically be the same.

(You will recall that we kickstarted the swarm by subdividing it by geography and letting geography leaders emerge through self-organization.)

Also, for every geography, we will probably have four function officers and one or two deputies in addition to the geography leader. (We’ll be returning to these terms and a sample organization chart later in this chapter.) This, again, makes a group of at most seven in total.

So the key message here is that no geography leader should have more than six people working directly with him or her in a given context. This means that we construct a number of organizational mini-pyramids from the top down in the scaffolding, each with (at most) seven people in it, where each geography leader is both at the bottom of one pyramid and at the top of another, the one immediately below, as shown here:

So the smallest of the three magic social group sizes is 7.

The largest is 150.

There is no relationship between these numbers. The number seven appears to come from a practical limit to the effort spent on maintaining a group, as previously explained. The more elusive number 150 appears to be a limit hardwired into our brains.

The number 150 appears in tons of places through human organizational history. It is our maximum tribe size. In a given context, we have the capacity to know this many people by name and have the loosest of bonds with them.

Anthropologists, looking at the size of our neocortex part of the brain and comparing it to those of other primates and their tribe sizes, tend to regard this number as a biological limit.

This limit is also known as Dunbar’s Number, or the Dunbar Limit, from British anthropologist Robin Dunbar who first wrote about it.

If you are working at a company which has less than 150 employees, odds are that you know them all by name – or at least, you have the capacity to do so. Beyond that size, you start referring to anonymous people by their function rather than referring to people you know by their name. You’ll go see ”somebody in Support”, rather than ”having a talk with Maria or Dave”.

The most successful companies, organizations, and cultures are keenly aware of this human limit. To take the Amish as one example, as their settlements approach 150 in size, they split the settlement into two. The company Gore and Associates – more known as the makers of the Gore-Tex fabric – never puts more than 150 employees in a single plant. There are many more examples.

The effect on your organization-building is the same as in every other successful organization: you need to know that groups above 150 people in size will lose the social bonding required for efficiency and, well, the fun.

However, you probably won’t have any formal group of this size. Rather, it is the informal groups that inevitably form that you need to pay attention to, and how they – once they hit this limit – can prevent further growth of the swarm.

In particular, you need to pay attention to the initial and horizontal team of people that will gather in a chat channel or similar, probably titled “chat channel about everything related to the swarm”. This organically-formed group will have a glass ceiling of 150 people in size, and unless you are aware of these mechanisms, that glass ceiling won’t be noticed. When this happens, further necessary growth of the swarm will be prevented, as more people can’t be socially integrated into that initial chat channel.

Therefore, it is your task to make sure that there are social subswarms everywhere that can attract and retain new people, and not just one centrally located chat channel. These subswarms, too, will have that social maximum size of 150.

Finally, the third magic group size is 30. This is a group which falls between our tight working group and those we know by name, but not much more: we are capable of knowing more than just their names in the group of 30, we know a couple of interests and curious facts about the others in this group, but we can’t work tightly with all of them. It can be thought of as an extended family.

You will probably have a couple of formal groups that are about 30 people in size, like the assembled group of all officers and leaders for a certain function or geography, but in general, you should strive for the seven-person group. When looking at how several of these groups cooperate on a daily basis, if you notice that some groups cooperate closer than others, you should be aware of the 30-person group size limit. For example, if the people coordinating all the aspects of the work in a particular city starts approaching 35 people, then that group is blocking further growth of the swarm and should be divided into two, allowing for more growth: divided into two groups handling the north and south parts of the city, for example.

After reviewing this, we also realize why we divided the swarm by geography in chapter two, and tried to have not more than 30 geographies. There’s you, who founded the swarm, and you communicate directly with the (at most) 30 geography leaders.

If you did this, then three to four weeks into the swarm’s lifecycle, it is suitable to insert a layer of officers between you and those 30, so that you communicate directly with five or six newly-inserted geography leaders, and they in turn communicate with five or six each of the original geography leaders.

So to summarize the important part of this: keep formal working groups in the scaffolding to about seven people. When several groups are working together, try to keep the size at or below 30. Finally, pay close attention to when informal swarm groups approach 150 people in size. When that happens, take steps to break them up in smaller subgroups.

(I first learned of the different dynamics of these three group sizes – 7, 30, and 150 – as part of my Army officer’s training in my early 20s. It is no coincidence that they correspond to squad, platoon, and company size, respectively. Since then, these group sizes have reappeared in almost every leadership training and management workshop, from one aspect or another. More importantly, all my experience with building swarms confirm their importance.)

SELF-ORGANIZATION

All this talk about leaders and formal structure sounds very… conventional, doesn’t it? We’re building this thing called a scaffolding, but it sounds very much like a traditional, hierarchical, boring organization. So what is new?

The new part is the entire swarm around the scaffolding, and the role that these officers – these geographical and functional leaders – must take in order to support it.

One key insight is that the responsibility of the swarm leaders is not so much managerial, as it is janitorial. Nobody answers to them, and their task is to make sure that the swarm has everything it needs to self-organize and work its miracles.

Remember, leadership in a swarm is received through inspiring others: standing up, doing without asking permission, and leading by example. In this task, the various officers and leaders have no organizational advantage over other people in the swarm: those who inspire others in a swarm, cause things to happen.

Put another way, the leaders and officers are not somebody’s boss just because they have some responsibility.

The first time you see people self-organize, it feels like magic. What you need to do is to communicate very clearly what you want to see happen and why. If people agree with you, they will make that happen, without you telling a single person what to do further. They will self-organize, and people interested in making it happen will gravitate by themselves to a subtask where they can help deliver the desired result. Each person will do this in their own way according to their own skill set, with no assignment or microsupervision necessary, causing the whole of the task to happen.

This is also a key mechanism in swarm organizations. You cannot and should not try to tell anybody in the swarm what to do; rather, your role is to set goals and ambitions, ambitions that don’t stop short of changing the entire world for the better.

We have seen something similar happen already, when the first onslaught of activists happened in chapter one, and several hundred people were waiting for instructions. You told them to self-organize by geography and choose leaders for the geographies. That was a form of self-organization, albeit a rudimentary one.

In a swarm, working groups will form by themselves left and right to accomplish subtasks of your overall vision, subtasks you haven’t even identified. This is part of how a swarm works and why it can be so effective.

So once the scaffolding of officers is in place, with its responsibility to support the swarm, groups and activities will form all over without any central planning – and importantly, without any central control.

Your passion for the swarm’s mission is going to be key in making this happen. You need to constantly show your passion for the end goal, and those who see and pick up on your passion will seek out things they can do to further it – all on their own.

Your role in this is to lead by example. People will copy you, in good weather and bad. Therefore, make sure you’re being seen in good weather. More on this later.

Another thing you will notice as the self-organization starts to happen, is that it doesn’t necessarily follow geographical boundaries. This is fundamentally good; you will have groups that form around accomplishing specific tasks that are geographically unbound, as well as groups that form around tasks that are bound to a specific area by nature. The task of producing a press center isn’t tied to a city, but the task of handing out flyers is. When people self-organize, this is taken care of by itself.

ORGANIZATION CHARTS AND ORGANIC GROWTH

There are three key concepts the swarm organization is optimized for: speed, trust, and scalability. When building the Swedish Pirate Party, this was a deliberate decision from the start, and it proved very successful.

We can optimize for speed by removing all conceivable bottlenecks. A swarm is typically starved of money, so it must compete on other grounds. Its reaction speed and reaction weight are more than enough to offset the lack of funds.

We can optimize for trust by keeping the swarm transparent and giving everybody a very far-reaching mandate to act on their own. We would establish this mandate by very clearly communicating that different people drive the swarm’s goals in different ways, and that we all trust one another to do what they believe is best, even if we don’t understand it ourselves. The three-activist rule, which we will discuss shortly, is a very efficient way to achieve this.

We can optimize for scalability by constructing the entire scaffolding at its finished size at the swarm’s get-go, providing space in the organization chart for geography leaders down to neighborhood level. However, we would leave upwards of 99% of the roles in the scaffolding empty for now – below the original 30 geography leaders, nothing has been appointed yet, despite us having another six or seven layers of empty boxes in the scaffolding’s organization chart. This means that these geography leaders can and will grow the organization downwards as activists volunteer to become new geography leaders at lower levels in the scaffolding. Then, those leaders will grow the organization in turn, and so on.

A swarm optimizes for speed, trust, and scalability.

The first time you notice that somebody you’ve never heard of has been appointed to formal responsibility, it feels like magic, and it shows that the scaling-out is working.

A swarm grows by people who are talking to people at the individual activist level. You don’t have the luxury of putting out ads, but your passion and desire to change the world for the better (along with a complete denial of what other people would call the impossibility of the task) makes people talk among one another. This is how your swarm grows: one conversation at a time, one person at a time.

This is how the Swedish Pirate Party grew to 50,000 members and 18,000 activists. One conversation at a time between passionate activists and potential new passionate activists.

In general, we can divide the people of the swarm into three groups by activity level: Officers, activists, and passive supporters. The officers are the people in the scaffolding, people who have taken on formal responsibility of upholding the swarm. Activists are the actual swarm, the people that make things happen on a huge scale. The passive supporters are people who agree with the goals as such, but haven’t taken any action beyond possibly signing up for a mailing list or membership. (The passive supporters may sound less useful to the swarm, but that’s not the case: they are the primary recruiting base for the next wave of activists. We’ll discuss this more in chapter eight, as we look at the Activation Ladder.)

So let’s take a look at what officers would typically be needed to support a swarm. In other words, let’s look at a template organization chart.

Let’s take a typical geography as an example. It could be a county, it could be a city, it could be a state, doesn’t matter. From the experience with the Swedish Pirate Party, we know that a particular geography works best when there is not just one geography leader, but a leader and a deputy that divide the work between them and who cover for one another. These people become go-to people for everything that happens in the area. The advantage of having two people is that people can drop out for a while from time to time. We can change jobs, we can fall madly in love, we can get sick, or lose interest in activism briefly for a myriad of other reasons. This is human, and always okay. If there are two people sharing the workload, the activity doesn’t stop when one drops out for a while. Most geographies had one deputy geography leader, some had two.

“If you feel you need to take a break from activism, that is always the right thing to do. It’s always better to get rested and come back, than to burn out and get bitter. There will always be something to do when you come back: you don’t have to worry about the world running out of evil while you’re away.” — Christian Engström, Member of European Parliament

Over and above this, drawing from experience if designing an activist swarm today, I would have four function leaders at every geography in addition to the overall leaders: one function leader each for PR/media, for activism, for swarmcare, and for web, information, and infrastructure. (These are roughly in order from most extroverted to most introverted.) All of these could – and maybe should – have their deputy in turn.

The person responsible for PR/media would be responsible for interfacing the swarm to legacy media at his or her particular geography. That includes sending press releases, making sure press kits with information are available, and other things related to serving oldmedia with information about the swarm and its activities. (We’ll be returning to exactly what this is in chapter nine.)

The activist leader would not lead activism as such, but rather, support it (as is the case with all of these roles). Whenever activists decide swarmwise that they want to stage a rally, hand out flyers, put up posters or do some other form of visible activism, this is the person responsible for the practical details such as PA equipment, permits, and other details on the ground to make things happen.

The person responsible for swarmcare would welcome new activists into the swarm, and continually measure the overall health of it. A typical task would be to call new activists just to make them feel welcome, and tell them when the next events – social as well as operational – take place. This is more than enough for one person to chew.

Finally, the information-and-web guy is the person who maintains the infrastructure of a blog or other web page that summarizes the relevant information of the swarm in this particular geography. (This person also communicates internally when events, such as rallies, happen. The swarm decides when and if they happen; it is the job of this person to communicate the consensus.)

Of course, your needs may vary. Consider this a template that you can use as a starting point. In any case, these boxes are all empty to begin with; organic growth is crucial.

People should not be appointed to these positions just because it’s fun to have a title; rather, the organization chart should lag slightly behind the observed reality. When somebody has already taken on the de-facto role of fixing all the practical stuff for rallies, for example, and everybody already knows that that person is the one to call to sync things up to get the PA – that’s when the org chart should be updated to reflect that. The person who should update the formal roles is the geography leader, who is responsible for keeping the swarm at optimal conditions in this particular geography.

One person should have one role in the scaffolding, with any kind of multi-role person being a temporary measure. In this, watch out for people who start advertising many titles in their signature or similar places – that’s a sign they’re more after the titles themselves than a single responsibility to do well.

Empty boxes in the scaffolding’s organization chart are not bad. They can and will fill up as time passes and groups fill up to the magic size limits, and need to break out into subswarms. Don’t unnecessarily appoint people to roles because you think empty boxes look bad: an occupied box will block somebody else from filling that role, and so, may be preventing the overall growth of the swarm if the person originally appointed to the box wasn’t really interested.

Do not be afraid of empty boxes in the organization chart.

So do not be afraid of empty boxes in the organization chart. They provide opportunity for somebody to step up to the plate informally, at which point the chart can be updated to reflect reality. It can help to think of the organization chart as the map rather than the terrain – when there’s a conflict between the two, the terrain wins every time. The organization chart is an estimate, at best, of what the organization actually looks like.

(This does not apply to military maps. When those have misprints, the military modifies the terrain to match the map, which happened at least once during my Army term.)

MEETINGS AS HEARTBEATS

In a typical office setting, people keep in touch about day-to-day operations in quite natural ways – by bumping into each other in the corridor, over coffee, but also in formal meetings. When working with a swarm, almost all of the cooperation happens over a distance – so you must find ways to compensate for the lack of eye contact and subtle body language that otherwise keeps a team jelled.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to have regular meetings over the phone or over a chat line where you just synchronize what’s going on and where people are with their respective work items (volunteered work items) to make that happen. The purpose isn’t for you to check up on what’s going on – the purpose is for everybody to know the state of the whole.

These meetings should be limited to 7 people if on the phone, or 30 people if in a chat channel. Otherwise, they can quickly turn into noise. You should have such regular heartbeat meetings once a week or once every other week with the people closest to you in the swarm’s scaffolding, and those people in turn should ideally have heartbeat meetings with their nearest crew, as well.

Some swarms or subswarms have preferred physical meetings. While such meetings provide for a lot higher bandwidth and opportunities to sync up, prevent conflicts and brainstorm ideas, their timing and location can also serve to lock out activists from engaging in the swarm – often inadvertently. For example, if you have a subswarm in a city that meets every Sunday afternoon, you can get lots of students engaged in the swarm – but the choice of Sunday afternoons will make sure that no working parents will ever show up to the meeting, as this is prime family time. Such factors need to be considered, and it is easy to be blind for limitations outside of your own demographic that prevent people in a certain stage of life from attending.

Once method I used to make it easier for people to attend the party management meetings when I was party leader was to limit the meeting to a strict time frame. We would start the meeting at 8pm on Tuesdays, and the meeting would end at 9pm, no matter whether everybody thought we were finished or not. That made sure that two things happened: it let people know that they could plan things with their family from 9pm in the Tuesday evening, and it forced people to take the important things first, as the meeting cutoff would happen whether they were done or not.

In short, the simple rule of having a hard meeting cutoff time made sure that people (including me) didn’t waste other people’s time.

MEETINGS GONE OVERBOARD

Speaking of wasting other people’s time, some activists will tend to take meetings a little too seriously. It is important that you maintain meetings as a necessary evil, because people who are eager to be part of the swarm can easily see meetings as the purpose of the swarm – they will tend to see meetings as work itself, rather than the short timeframe where you report and synchronize the actual work that you do between the meetings.

Bureaucracy and administration will very easily swell to become self-justifying, even in a swarm of activists. Do not let this happen. Keep reminding people that meetings are there for the purpose of synchronizing the work done to forward external purpose of the swarm, and that every minute spent with each other is a minute not spent changing the world.

In particular, activists in a subswarm dealing with oldmedia (newspapers, television, etc) can easily become self-absorbed in their own titles: “I attend the media meetings, therefore, I work with media, and thus, I am really cool”. We’ll return to that particular problem in chapter nine.

A CULTURE OF LEADERSHIP AND TRUST

As the swarm’s founder, you must be aware of human psychology of leadership. People will do as you do, exactly as you do, even if and when you are having one of the worst days of your life.

If you show yourself in a thoroughly wretchy mood to a swarm of 50,000 people, they will all emulate your behavior from that day, down to the most minute of details. This is not what you want.

So, ironically, one of the most important parts in founding and leading a swarm is to take good care of yourself. Sleep well, eat well, work out, allow yourself time and space to breathe. This is for the good of the swarm, and has the nice side effect of being good for you, too. If you feel aggressive, short-tempered and frustrated one day, you should probably refrain from all interacting with the swarm until that passes; if you don’t, those moods will become core organizational values.

If you’re not taking care of yourself, you’re not taking care of your swarm.

On the flip side of that coin, understanding, patience, collegiality, and passion are values that you want to show. Be aware of your own mood, and know that the swarm copies from you – whether you are behaving in ways that sets the swarm up for long-term success or catastrophic infighting, the swarm copies your behavior in more detail than you can notice consciously.

One value that you must absolutely communicate for the swarm to work is trust. You need to trust in people in the swarm to further the swarm’s goals, even if they choose a different way of doing so than you would have chosen, and even if you can’t see how it could possibly work.

You also need to communicate that everybody must trust each other in this regard. Leading by doing is necessary here, but not sufficient; you need to periodically repeat that one of the core values of the swarm is that we trust each other to work for the swarm in the ways that we can do so as individuals.

It turns out that one thing that makes swarms so outstanding in efficiency is their diversity. People come from all walks of life, and once they realize they have a full mandate to work for the swarm in the ways that they can, they will just do so.

In the Swedish Pirate Party, we had manifested this through a three-pirate rule, which can easily be translated into a three-activist rule for any swarm. It went like this: if three activists agree that something is good for the organization, they have a green light to act in the organization’s name. It’s not that they don’t need to ask permission – it goes stronger than that. Rather, they should never ask permission if three activists agree that something is good.

Asking permission, after all, is asking somebody else to take responsibility for your actions. But a swarm doesn’t work like that. Also, the person who would have given that permission would probably be in a worse situation to determine if this action would work in the context the original activists had in mind.

Of course, many balk at this. Letting activists run loose like this? Trusting them with your name and resources to this extent? I heard frequently that it would be a recipe for disaster.

In the five years I led the Swedish Pirate Party, peaking at 50,000 members in this time, this was not abused once. Not once.

It turns out, that when you look people in the eyes and say ”I trust you”, and give them the keys to the castle, many are so overwhelmed by the trust that they don’t hesitate a second to accept that mantle of responsibility.

It’s also important that this was only a mechanism for self-empowerment, and never a mechanism that allowed three activists to tell somebody else what to do or not do.

As a final note on trust, the part about trusting people to act for the best of the swarm is crucial. This means that there is never a blame game; if something goes wrong, the swarm deals with it after the fact, and never spends time worrying what may go wrong in advance.

If something doesn’t go as intended, the swarm learns from it and moves on. On the other hand, if something is wildly successful, it gets copied and remixed across the swarm to new variants to get even better. This happens organically, without you needing to interfere, as long as activists can publish their successes.

In the next chapter, we’ll take a closer look at how activists of the swarm interact with the outside world, learn from mistakes, and remix the successes to evolve and improve.

 

This is the third chapter of Swarmwise, a book arriving this summer. Did you like it? It’s going to be free to share (it, like this excerpt, is CC-BY-NC), but you can also buy it as a paper book.

 

EXCERPT FROM UPCOMING BOOK

This is a part of the upcoming book Swarmwise, due in the summer of 2013. It is an instruction manual for recruiting and leading tens of thousands of activists on a mission to change the world for the better, without having access to money, resources, or fame. The book is based on Falkvinge’s experiences in leading the Swedish Pirate Party into the European Parliament, starting from nothing, and covers all aspects of leading a swarm of activists into mainstream success.

MPAA Chairman Former Senator Chris Dodd Joins Pirate Party, Announces 2016 Presidential Bid

Pirate Parties – Zacqary Adam Green: On this day of April 1st, 2013, I’m pleased to announce that MPAA Chairman Former Senator Chris Dodd is now a member of the US Pirate Party, and we will be running him for President in 2016. Now, he’s not aware of this, and he’s finding it out right now just like the rest of you. But in a country where it’s legal for a former senator to be hired by the lobbying organization for one of his top 20 campaign contributors, it must be legal to draft people into political parties and presidential candidacies without their knowledge or consent.

MPAA Chairman Former Senator Chris Dodd — who by Official Pirate Unbreakable Law may never, ever be referred to simply as “MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd” — has long been a proponent of copyright maximalism, of draconian anti-piracy measures that violate privacy and break the Internet, and of demonizing everyone who has ever watched a movie at a friend’s house as a “thief.” During his career in public office, one of Dodd’s top campaign contributors has been General Electric, the parent company of MPAA member NBC Universal.

On this historic April 1st of 2013, Former Senator Dodd has had a change of heart. He is now a full-blown, bleeding-heart blackbeard, not only supporting a complete abolition of all copyright, patent, and trademark laws, but demanding that Hollywood refund the American people for every dime they spent on the filmography of director Michael Bay. “Transformers: Dark of the Moon was a national tragedy on par with slavery,” he said in a statement this morning. “It is our moral duty to begin paying reparations to each and every American citizen lured into cinemas by that piece of garbage.”

The former senator may deny this change of heart or these statements, but don’t believe him.

Dodd has also announced his choice of Althing member Birgitta Jónsdóttir as his vice presidential running mate. As an Icelandic-born non-US citizen, you’d think Birgitta would be ineligible for the US vice presidency. But in a country where it’s legal for a former senator to be hired by the lobbying organization for one of his top 20 campaign contributors, it must be legal to run and elect a vice presidential candidate who was not born in the US.

Unlike other third parties, the Pirate Party is in this presidential race to win it. Rick Falkvinge has announced that he will be pulling a full half of his Bitcoin savings out of his secret underground lair, and donating them to the campaign. Instead of using these Bitcoins for traditional campaign techniques like advertising, we’re just going to straight up give them to people in exchange for a vote for Dodd. Because in a country where it’s legal for a former senator to be hired by the lobbying organization for one of his top 20 campaign contributors, it must be legal to accept unlimited foreign donations and use them to literally bribe voters.

We’ve also recruited hacktivists who’ve been involved in Wikileaks, Anonymous, and LulzSec to assist with, um, “election monitoring.” I mean, hell, in a country where it’s legal for a former senator to be hired by the lobbying organization for one of his top 20 campaign contributors, it must be legal to hack into electronic voting machines around the country to tilt the outcome of the election in our favor.

This is some of the most exciting news that the Pirate Party has ever been able to announce. We believe that today — April 1st, 2013 — will be a day that goes down in the history books as the day that the Pirate Party truly became a force to be reckoned with in the United States. Remember that date: the first of April. Chances are, we’ll all be celebrating this date for years and years to come.

Death Of The Small Eurobusiness, In A Bank Screenshot

Transparency: With banks opening on Cyprus, many entrepreneurs realized they had been wrecked overnight by their government’s dishonesty. The so-called bank bailout was in reality a death sentence for many small businesses, who saw their operating capital confiscated to save the government’s face. This move will create an inevitable uncertainty throughout the Eurozone: who will dare put their operating capital in a bank in a troubled country, when politicians keep saying everything is fine – until one day, the money is just gone?

In a post this morning in the Bitcoin forums, user zeroday complains that 700,000 Euros were robbed by the European Commission. They’re not some Russian oligarch, the user writes, but a typical medium-size European IT business, and the result of this is that the entire Cypriot workforce will have to be laid off. The screenshot from the bank speaks a thousand words:

Bank screenshot from the Cyprus-based European IT company. The entire operating capital is practically gone overnight, confiscated to save the government’s face.

Thousands of other companies based in Cyprus are in the same situation, zeroday writes. This is not just problematic, but catastrophic on so many levels.

First, the ability for a troubled government to just go in and take money wherever it damn well pleases goes counter to pretty much every crucial principle of law – that laws need to be predictable, equal, proportional, and its rules known in advance. In this case, neither applied.

Second, the problem here isn’t so much that somebody who invests in a troubled bank goes bust with the bank. That wouldn’t be a problem in itself. The problem is that this happens despite governmental guarantees to the contrary. If governments published bank data openly so every small business in the Eurozone would be able to judge the solvency of their banking partner and make proper risk assessments, this would be proper, and it would be tough but just if a bank went insolvent and its accounts were closed to cover the losses.

But governments keep insisting that this is never going to happen, until it just did. Then, governments go back into denial mode that it will never happen again, with a “would I lie to you twice?” face plastered on, expecting to be believed.

This sends a very clear message to small Eurobusinesses across all of Europe: “governments cannot be trusted when guaranteeing your money in the bank, and you may be next if you keep trusting European governments”. In particular, I expect small businesses in Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Italy, and France to start relocating their operating capital out of the Eurozone, come the very first weekday after Easter.

Zeroday writes further,

We are moving to small Caribbean country where authorities have more respect for people’s assets. Also, we are thinking about using Bitcoin to pay wages and for payments between our partners.

I expect many, many small Eurozone business to do the exact same thing, after seeing this bank screenshot. Reading about it in the news is one thing. Seeing exactly what happened to this small entrepreneur is another, and realizing that this may be your bank screen tomorrow.

This was the death of the small Eurobusiness climate. At the same time, it was not just the end of the beginning of the Euro, but also the beginning of the endgame.

What we learn from this is that the transparency that would have been necessary at the Euro’s conception is still denied the public at large by banks and governments, and that this lack of transparency brings nothing good at all. Small Eurobusinesses are now dying and not coming back to the Euro, and for very good reason.

Why Expensify Endorsing Bitcoin Is A Really Big Deal: Social Virality

Swarm Economy: Yesterday, news broke that the Expensify service has enabled bitcoin payments. With the rapidly expanding number of businesses accepting bitcoin as payment method, one could think that this was merely another player in the pool of bitcoin’s expanding economy (which just broke the one-billion-USD barrier, by the way). But Expensify is something much more than that.

Let’s first discuss the concept of expense reports to understand Expensify’s important role in the subsurface payments ecosystem. On all companies I’ve worked for lately, you don’t ask the company to buy something you need for your work – it’s just too much paperwork, too much red tape to make it happen. Instead, you get a small budget for discretionary stuff you need to do your job, and you just buy stuff as you need it with your private credit card, send in the receipts to your employer, and get reimbursed on the next paycheck, which arrives before the credit card bill is due.

This system is pervasive and ubiquitous. Sending in receipts for payment like this is known as submitting an expense report. It’s still bureaucracy and red tape and it still sucks, but it sucks considerably less than asking for approval in advance.

Enter Expensify, a service that markets itself straightforwardly as “Expense reports that don’t suck”. I’ve been using Expensify through its development for the past couple of years and have also contributed my use case (frequent travel outside of internet coverage), which led them to implement important new features – meaning, they’re a responsive bunch, too.

I don’t know anybody who submits expense reports who doesn’t use Expensify.

They have reduced the hassle from spreadsheets and forms and manual calculations down to using your phone to shooting the receipt you get as you get it, then throwing it away, forgetting about the whole deal until it’s time to press the button marked “reimburse me”, at which point that happens. Expensify saves me and people similar to me – to use a technical term – a metric fuckton of paperwork and boredom.

What this means is that Expensify is deeply integrated into the existing payments workflow at many workplaces, mine included.

As of yesterday, Expensify added a new checkbox when summarizing photographed receipts and submitting them for reimbursement:

Image from Expensify.com (courtesy of Expensify).

This is a big deal because it means that the payment processing departments of corporations are going to get a lot of requests for bitcoin payment within their existing payment workflow. It’s going to be presented – and regarded – as just another payments method alongside SWIFT, bank wire, Paypal, cash, and bank check.

Up until today, bitcoin has spread by mutual agreement between payer and payee, and to some lesser extent, by the profit pressure generated in retail from the lack of credit card processing fees. But with Expensify adding it as a payment option in a lot of companies’ existing workflows, enabling people to request payment in bitcoin in addition to bank wire and paypal, there is unilateral social pressure within an existing payments structure for the payer to use Bitcoin. This is new. Plus, the fact that the payments structure in question is bloody everywhere – especially as it’s subsurface (below the corporate level), so it changes much quicker.

Expensify adding bitcoin to its workflow gives bitcoin social virality and social, directed pressure for corporate uptake.

I’m very much looking forward to see statistics from Expensify in bitcoin use, but I expect that bitcoin pressure won’t come from the reimbursement departments, but rather from workers who request reimbursement in bitcoin (as per the image above) – particularly when being paid internationally.

To quote a tweet from yesterday: I love the fact that a geek experiment in decentralized, anonymous payments is now worth one billion USD and has come to compete with national currencies.

Two More Pirate Parties On Cusp Of Electoral Success: Iceland, Croatia

Pirate Parties: Two more Pirate Parties are approaching electoral victory scenarios. Iceland’s Píratar is polling just below the parliamentary threshold for their elections one month out, and Croatia’s Piratska Stranka is polling at levels that may give it a seat in the European Parliament in three weeks. This is a very positive sign for the movement, as it is much harder for new countries to enter the political fray than it is to defend existing positions.

The Pirate Party movement is moving at glacial speed compared to normal internet communities, and yet with lightning speed compared to previous waves of political changes. In the UK, I learned that it took the Green Party movement 18 years (?) to get their first seat; meanwhile, it took our movement three and a half years until Christian Engström took office as Member of European Parliament, and yet from our perspective, that was insanely slow: after all, we are used to changing the world considerably in a weekend of intense coding.

On each success, we learn new things, just like we learn from each failed contestation for office. Every obstacle encountered is one we circumnavigate come next election, much to the disappointment of those who like to ridicule each of our non-successes (also known as our “learning by doing”).

One month ahead of the Berlin election success in the fall of 2011, I predicted (correctly) that even though the German Piratenpartei were polling at sub-parliamentary levels at the time, they would succeed since the media had discovered them as a credible newcomer.

The first shout-out for today goes to Pirate Party of Croatia, the Piratska Stranka, who are polling at 6.4% with elections on April 14. This is well above the psychological “wasted vote” barrier, and real parliamentary numbers. However, only twelve seats are up for grabs in the election – so come the election, six point four percent would be a coin toss whether they get one of the seats or not. It’s definitely doable, and I’d bet my money on success, but it’s far from a done deal at this point.

The more interesting thing is that those twelve seats are with the European Parliament, as part of Croatia’s accession to the European Union. Thus, the Croatian Pirate Party has a real shot at being the second Pirate Party represented in the European Parliament, which would be a huge boost to the movement’s influence (and to the Croatian Pirates).

The second shout-out goes to the Pirate Party of Iceland, the Píratar, founded by (among others) the Wikileaks activist and present Member of Parliament Birgitta Jónsdóttir. Their parliamentary election for the Icelandic parliament is on April 27, and they’re currently polling at 3.9%, with five per cent required for entry. This is one percent unit short of the barrier – but just like the German Piratenpartei started climbing one month ahead of the election once they caught the spotlights, the Icelandic Píratar can play the same scenario.

At present, only one Pirate Party has won seats at the national level: the Czech Pirate Party managed to put a Senator into office (which is a feat in itself). Having the Icelandic Píratar join the international community of election successes would be great for the movement as a whole.

As an international movement, the Pirate Parties are now present in 70 countries, contesting elections and making policy. As a movement who took its first baby steps in 2006, and had its first electoral victory in 2009, that is practically a wildfire spread of the ideas and organization. Still, the really hard thing for the movement is getting elected from more countries, generating more blueprints for success for the movement as a whole.

I’d be very happy to see Iceland and Croatia submitting such success blueprints in the coming month. While far from certain, it’s definitely within reach.

The Pirate Bay Is A Trailblazer In Technical Resilience

Infrastructure: The Pirate Bay is a site that has remained online for ten years come this summer, despite attempts from almost every Ancient-Power-That-Be to shut it down. It has often been said that The Pirate Bay hasn’t evolved much at all in the past five years; I disagree, it has adapted and overcome everything thrown in its path. There may soon come a time when we need to learn from its experiences in resilience just to safeguard freedom of speech.

The Pirate Bay went through a user-interface redesign some time late 2005 or early 2006, when it went multilingual, and has remained fairly constant since then. The only other site in the world’s top 100 that has remained similarly consistent could possibly be Wikipedia; for every other site, it’s a necessity to evolve, modernize, and meet new user demands.

It is not without irony that Hollywood’s nemesis number one in distribution technology hasn’t innovated in user experience in almost ten years, and still outcompetes the copyright industry hands down when it comes to who provides better service.

But I would argue that The Pirate Bay has been remarkably innovative, just not in the user experience field – a lot of other sites are blazing that trail. Rather, The Pirate Bay has been a trailblazer in resilience. After all, a number of bought-and-paid-for or just plain misguided legislatures and courts have tried to eradicate the site, and yet, it still stands untouched.

As the freedom-of-speech wars escalate, we will need to start taking cues from what The Pirate Bay has learned in the art of staying online, and that time may be approaching fast. This was never a war over the copyright monopoly; it was a war over the concept of the letter as such, over the right to communicate in private, over the right to publish and broadcast ideas that somebody else wouldn’t like the world to see or hear.

For this is what we see – the techniques originally used to attempt silencing The Pirate Bay have already come to be used against activists trying to highlight abuse of power, and corporations and others are trying the might-makes-right approach. You have the example with Greenpeace’s protest site being silenced in the exact same way by an oil company, just to take one example among many.

There is the idea among people with money and power that they have the right to control what other people can say about them. Unfortunately, they are starting to enforce that idea with what amounts to mafia tactics, using the threat of courtrooms as their battlefield, and using intimidation to squelch dissent. (The Pirate Bay themselves were victims of law in this very manner.)

As this war on freedom of speech escalates, we would do well to study the methods for staying online that The Pirate Bay has pioneered.

After Cyprus, New Tolls For The Euro

Reflections: After the attempted tolls on bank savings in Cyprus for saving the Euro, a new kind of tolls can be heard in the distance for the currency. The fundamental trust in the currency as a store of value has been broken, according to multiple signs across Europe. Even with the Cypriot parliament backpedaling frantically, the situation appears snowballing – there could be a bank run in two weeks.

When I was speaking at the first European Bitcoin conference in Prague, another speaker was a seasoned economist whose name I forget. He described how today’s bank system with so-called fractional reserve banking is essentially a crumbling Ponzi scheme. In summary, banks have the right to conjure up money out of thin air and lend that money to you against interest that they get to keep. (Yes, really, that’s actually how it works today.) As part of the Q&A, I asked him what the first sign of a collapse scenario materializing would be.

He responded that a first sign of collapse would be that people didn’t trust their holdings in the currency to retain their value, so they would actively seek to trade it off for other stores of value – other currencies or just about anything else. This was an answer that made sense in the light of the history of known hyperinflations and currency collapses.

In the past days with the Cypriot bailout measure, these first signs of a currency collapse scenario have materialized. People are now actively seeking to trade off their Euros, no longer trusting them as a store of value. When this has happened in the past to currencies, they have not survived.

This was visible on first on Cyprus, where people made a so-called run on the bank to get their money in cash to save it from the negotiated 6-10% “save-the-Euro” toll from all bank accounts, except the banks were closed, so it became a run on ATMs which predictably drained of cash in a heartbeat (and deliberately were not refilled).

A “run on the bank” means that people no longer trust the banks to hold their savings, so everybody tries to withdraw their money at the same time – something that no current bank survives, as the customers’ money isn’t in the bank vaults. This is a scenario that can develop in hours in any economy, when some people start withdrawing in a sign of distrust and more people follow suit to not be the one left standing when the music stops.

The tremors of the bank run – or the attempted bank run, thwarted only by a bank holiday – were felt far and wide across the entire Eurozone. People in several countries got the message loud and clear: it’s their savings, their retirement money, that may be next up for a shave.

One obvious alternative store of value is Bitcoin, which is gaining in popularity. Over the weekend, Bitcoin apps soared in popularity in Spain. That is no coincidence; Spain is one of the plummeting countries badly in need of a parachute.

Unsurprisingly, Bitcoin has not just soared in interest, but also in value the past days to meet increasing demand as people flee the Euro – it has climbed almost 50% in value since news broke of the Cypriot bank account toll a few days ago, topping 65 USD per bitcoin today, up from the 40s a week ago. (Those who hold their savings in bitcoin, which is unseizable, would not be affected by a bank account toll.)

Another such country is Italy, a country in a thorough financial mess. A few days ago, one German banking chief suggested that all Italian savings need a 15% one-time toll per the Cypriot model to save Italy’s economy. Guess what happens next.

So what brought us to this situation? Two things.

The first thing was the process of introducing the Euro, the common currency, which was an ivory tower project from the get-go. Europe’s political leaders had simply decided to create a prestige project of a common currency of the world’s largest economy, the European Union. In making this happen, any criticism that could suggest weaknesses in the idea were simply not allowed to percolate up to the decision-makers.

The second thing is the insane idea that bank profits are privatized and bank losses are socialized – meaning that bank owners get to pocket any profits, and taxpayers get to cover any losses that banks make. This is a recipe for disaster that needs to stop yesterday. There is simply no reason at all to treat banks differently from any other company. Yes, they keep the economy going – which is all the more reason to subject them to the rules of the economy, namely that when you risk money, you risk your own money and not the taxpayers’ money.

When banks started failing, governments unwisely stepped in and covered their losses. In this move, insolvent banks became insolvent governments while bank owners walked away. Tax payers have been footing the bill – and now, it appears to be the turn of the small savers.

The Euro is gone; bells are tolling its demise in the distant background. When the highest politicians in a Eurozone country told its people that the Euro is not trustable as a store of value, that was the point of no return. It won’t be here in a couple of years, at least not in its current form. The only conceivable way out I see that would allow the Eurocrats to keep some form of professional honor is to divide the Euro into two or more subcurrencies while it can still be done in some kind of order.

But such a move would require Eurocrats to admit that a failed policy could be caused by bad fundamentals, rather than insufficient effort (aka the “if it’s not working, you’re just not trying hard enough” mentality). Don’t hold your breath.