If you have been a university president, a political party leader, a team manager or in any institution, you know what Clay Shirky is talking about.
Here is my example of what challenges institutionalization entails and how technology is allowing us to revolutize institutionalization.
For almost the past three years, I have been living at the Cité Universitaire, a campus that is home to 6000 odd foreign students who come to Paris to pursue higher studies. There are 40 student residences, most of which represent a country..Mexico, US, Morocco, Japan, Norway, India..all the countries are symbolically represented on the campus.
At the beginning of each academic year, each house elects a students committee that is responsible for organising cultural, sportive and educational events in order to ensure a good time for the residents. Each committee has two secretaries for external affairs. This person represents his or her house at the Delegation of the Residents' Committee that reunites once every month in the presence of the General secretary of the campus in order to discuss important issues related to the life at the campus. If all the appointed Secretaries were to be present at all the monthly meetings, that would make for a group of 40X2 = 80 secretaries. 80 secretaries representating 6000 students. In mathematical terms, one person represents 75 people at the centre.
Now, out of these 80 representatives, 4 memebers are elected - two of which represent the students at the biannual Board of Directors meeting and the other two serve as deputies in case of absence of either of the members. As one of the elected members, I found myself at he centre of the institution. We did not really have infrastructure costs..meeting halls could be booked free of charge, internet was free, etc etc.. but we had, what I would call,mobilisation costs. The energy that we would put to mobilize team members to participate actively in projects initiated by the core group, was enormous. How would you convince 80 people who have been arbitararily elected to sit around a table to discuss things?I emphasize on the word - arbitarary because more often than not, the person who is elected finds himself at the seat by chance because there are not many people contesting anyways.
So, I asked myself - What if there was no delegation? What if each resident of the campus could participate in a virtual village to represent his proper self? You would say it would e a ciaos but technology is the answer. Everyone could tag his opinion on a subject and a holistic chart could be drawn to figure out what the majority thinks. A representative democracy?
What I could conclude during my tenure is that this system does not really work...to institutionalize things necessarily means excluding some of the best people, best inputs because you cannot take everybody in.what a pity!!