Internet facilitated tools and practices reached critical mass in the 2004 elections enabling ordinary people to participate in processes that had been closed to them by top-down political organizations.

Old-style political organizations had evolved, abetted by mass media like television, into groups controlled by insiders. The mass participation that peaked in the early part of the 20th century was replaced by an increasingly uninterested, disenfranchised mass and a smaller group of wealthy special interests.

TV took politics away from the grassroots; the Internet could give it back. The people receiving the intended messages could be involved in creating them.

There are varieties of emerging tools in the political ecology: large, top-down organizations like MoveOn.org co-exist with multilayered communities like DailyKos in which peer moderation and rankings lead to the emergence of trusted sources.

Established political parties are behaving like dinosaurs, viewing the new media as tools for more efficiently doing their old work: the Internet is just a new place for a more sophisticated kind of direct mail. They are missing the true significance of the emerging tools and processes. With this attitude, they are likely to become extinct.

Old style, top-down political organizations are afraid of losing control. They are threatened by the dis-intermediation (the removal of middlemen) enabled by the new tools and visible in other commercial domains on the net.

The growth of web based social networking tools and techniques similar to those used to facilitate open source development environments are leading to peer political networks with transparency and accountability.

The Internet currently offers an ecology of interacting and competing groups on both the left and right. These currently range from the traditional party based groups through newer, still top-down groups like MoveOn.org through multilayered communities with peer evaluation and the emergence of trusted users. An example of the latter, DailyKos, has become a very efficient collaboration engine for pooling money for candidates and for rapid fact-checking, news dissemination, and brainstorming.

This evolution is generational. As younger people accustomed to life on the net and the use of social networking tools reach maturity, the replacement of the old ways of doing things will become easier.

Open-source politics is a long way off because of the resistance of the political establishment. In “open source” software development communities, any participant can see, critique, and improve the underlying code. Peer review permits steady improvement. In open-source political groups, planning and implementation of policies would be transparent and open to critique and improvement, an inherent threat to entrenched ego-centric, top-down organizations. However, the old order may have no choice in the matter.

Because of the “digital divide” and the amount of time spent online, Internet facilitated political participation is still largely a white middle- and upper-class phenomenon. Messages tend to circulate through existing social networks. However, this may be generational: younger people are growing up with the tools and shaping them to their needs and desires.

The Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework developed by the Ostroms and their colleagues at Indiana University provides a foundation for studying a multitude of theories, models, and predictions of public choice behaviors in different systems of governance and organization.

Frameworks define the action arena to which it would be applied; the resulting patterns of interactions and outcomes, and the means of evaluating those outcomes.

A framework is a general language about how varying rules, physical and material conditions, and attributes of a community affect the structure of action arenas, the incentives for actors, and resulting outcomes.

Action arenas include an action situation and the actors in that situation.

An action situation includes:

• Participants
• Positions
• Outcomes
• Action-outcome linkages
• Control that participants exercise
• Information
• Cost and benefits of outcomes

Actors (individual or corporate) involve:

• Resources brought to the situation
• Values assigned to states of the world
• Methods for dealing with knowledge and information
• Selection processes for courses of action

Analysts can make strong predictions in tightly constrained situations of complete information: overuse of resources in an open commons where the actors do not share access to collective choice arenas.

Results are not as clear in situations where actors are embedded in communities with norms of fairness and conservation as well as the ability to communicate with each other.

Evaluation criteria can include a range of values for categories such as the following:

• Economic efficiency
• Fiscal equity among actors
• Redistributional equity (e.g., policies to care for poorer individuals
• Accountability
• Conformance to a general morality
• Adaptability to change

The IAD framework has been applied to various domains to make predictions of resulting behaviors in field settings. Examples of successful application include:

• Police services
• Urban public services in general
• Common-pool resources: these were studied in laboratory as well as field settings. The IAD framework was used to create a theory of behavior. Communication of participants affects behavior: if no communication was permitted, the results approximated that of non-cooperative game theory. Communication led to different, more positive, results.
• The IAD framework was used to develop extensive databases coding common-pool resources and diverse property regimes.

The commonsense view of social evolution as the product of choices made in the marketplace of cultural possibilities resulting in the continuous betterment of the human condition is flawed.

The rise of civilization, paradoxically, reduced the natural limits separating societies. In such a situation, Schmookler's Parable of the Tribes describes how, in a situation in which two or more actors desire to exploit a limited resource, power becomes important and a contaminant of the possibility of peaceful co-existence:

All of a group of tribes living within reach of each other choose peace. However, if all but one choose peace, there are four possibilities for the threatened neighbors:

• Destruction.
• Absorption and enslavement.
• Withdrawal to a less desirable place.
• Imitation of the aggressive behavior.

Technological innovation and “improvement,” far from making things inevitably better, can extend the reach of aggressors throughout the world.

Cultural homogenization and the diminishment of diversity happens both through benign, commonsense choice (i.e., innovations as improvements) as well as through compulsion by dominant aggressors.

Technology, history, and social impacts of technology are most often framed in terms of hardware, software, and finance, but communication technologies have the potential to change the way people think, communicate, and organize social groups. These impacts are sometimes framed by Moore's law (microprocessors and chips grow more powerful and less expensive over time), Metcalfe's law (the value of a technical network grows as the square of the number of nodes grows) and Reed's Law (when technical networks enable people to form social groups, the value of the network grows as two raised to the power of the number of nodes - much faster than just the rate of growth of technical networks). The group-formation enabled by the Internet makes it possible for people who don't know each other and who are located in different parts of the world to connect with each other in regard to shared interests - economic, social, cultural, and political. When communication technology enables people to organize collective action in these spheres, civilizations change. Now that the power of computing and communication has untethered from the desktop and leaped into billions of pockets, the forms of collective action are erupting in places and spheres of life where computation and communication had never reached before.

At the point where billions of people have access to personal communications and the instant information that the Internet provides, the aspects of cooperation and collective action discussed by Axelrod, Ostrom, and others comes into play - the capabilities of the emerging mobile mediasphere enable forms of collective action that were not possible before.

Moore's law means that the quantitative capabilities of chip-based devices grow so quickly that they translate into qualitative changes over periods of decades; today, billions of people carry devices that are thousands of times more powerful than the first personal computers, and cost a fraction of the price. At the same time, the users of these devices discover and exploit communication capabilities, social potential, political leverage, economic opportunities that were not dreamed of by those who designed, manufactured and sold the technologies. The technologies that make smart mobs possible are in the earliest stages of development, similar to the state of the personal computer in 1980 and the Internet in 1990. Yet the political demonstrations and electoral leverage that manifested in the Philippines, Korea, Spain, the USA and elsewhere - deposing governments and electing others - show the potentially disruptive power of smart mobs, even in their earliest stages.

At the same time, primitive ad-hoc computation collectives such as SETI@home and folding@home indicate new forms of computing emerging from the collective, voluntary efforts of millions of computer users. And GPS chips add the power of location-based services to the mix: people are mobilizing social networks and information in the immediate time and space.

Economically, the ability to gain profit by sharing with others, rather than only by competing - as manifested by Amazon, Google, eBay, open source software and other enterprises - is making a new kind of economic enterprise possible. Commerce is ancient, markets are as old as the crossroads, but capitalism is only about 500 years old, enabled by technologies such as joint stock ownership companies, shared liability insurance organizations, double entry bookkeeping. Now, the peer production methods exhibited by open source communities and other enterprises hint that humans have not stopped inventing new forms of economic collective action.

When the Italian government created regional governments in 1970, a multi-decade study of levels of citizen satisfaction with these new institutions revealed that regions with norms of trust and reciprocity derived from centuries of horizontal voluntary association were both economically and politically more successful than regions that lacked dense networks of civic association and relied on patron-client relationships rather than horizontal citizen associations: "Some regions of Italy, we discover, are blessed with vibrant networks and norms of civic engagement, while others are cursed with vertically structured politics, a social life of fragmentation and isolation, and a culture of distrust. These differences in civic life turn out to play a key role in explaining institutional success."

Machiavelli, writing in 16th century Florence, concluded that the success of free institutions depends on the "civic virtue" of citizens. This republican school of civic humanists was countered successfully by the liberal emphasis of Hobbes and Locke on individualism and individual rights. The U.S. constitution was designed to make democracy work with a factionalized, unvirtuous citizenry. More recently, American political philosophy has rediscovered civic humanism, harking back to John Winthrop's "city set upon a hill" sermon.

Civic communities are bound by horizontal relationships of reciprocity among citizens, not vertical relations of authority and dependency. "Fabrics of trust enable the civic community more easily to surmount what economists call 'opportunism,' in which shared interests are unrealized because each individual, acting in wary isolation, has an incentive to defect from collective action." Participation in civic organizations trains people in cooperation skills and strengthens a sense of shared responsibility. Citizens who belong to many different groups tend to moderate their attitudes as a result of their exposure to group interactions. These groups don't have to be political: choral societies and soccer clubs knit people together socially and culturally, but the bonds of trust and social networks serve as effective vectors for economic and political activity.

In regions that lack networks of civic engagement and widespread norms of trust and reciprocity, citizens have to resort to hierarchy and force to resolve conflict, but even hierarchical law enforcement organizations prove less effective with a mistrustful citizenry. "Light-touch" government in more civic regions works better because it is aided by willing cooperation and self-enforcement among citizens.

The Northern Italian cities – Genoa, Pisa, Venice, and later Florence – took off in the 11th and 12th centrues in part because the contract and extension of credit were new legal strategies for creating partnerships and raising capital: "In the new practices and organization of business activity, risks were minimized, whereas opportunities for cooperation and profit were enhanced."

As Europe emerged from feudalism, the bonds of personal dependence (lord-vassal) grew weaker in the northern regions, but in the south of Italy they became stronger. Northern populations learned to be citizens, southern populations remained subjects. "In the cities, a horizontal arrangement emerged, characterized by cooperation among equals." The guild, confraternity, university, and the commune – a guild of guilds – reflected the new ideals in new institutions.

Mutual aid societies flourished in pre-unification Italy (circa 1850),-- pragmatic institutions in which cooperation conveyed benefits upon contributing individuals in a changing society. Italian cooperatives grew out of the mutual aid societies.

"Networks facilitate flows of information about technological developments, about the creditworthiness of would-be entrepreneurs…. Innovation depends on 'continual informal interaction in cafes and bars and on the street.'"

Social networks allow trust to spread transitively. Trust increases through use and becomes depleted if not used. Social capital, unlike conventional capital, is a public good, not the property of any of the individuals who benefit from it, and must often be produced as a by-product of other social activities.

"Norms are inculcated by modeling and socialization (including civic education) and by sanctions." Norms that support social trust evolve because they lower transaction costs and facilitate cooperation, conferring benefits upon cooperators. Reciprocity is the most important norm, and can be balanced (or specific – the quid-pro-quo) or generalized (diffuse). Communities in which the norm of diffuse reciprocity is high can more efficiently restrain free-riding and more easily resolve collective action problems. Networks of civic engagement increase the potential cost to defectors who risk benefits from future transaction. The same networks foster norms of reciprocity that are reinforced by the networks of relationships in which reputation is both valued and discussed. The same social networks facilitate the flow of reputational information.

"The civic traditions of Northern Italy provide a historical repertoire of forms of collaboration that, having proved their worth in the past, are available to citizens for addressing new problems of collective acdtion. Mutual aid societies were built on the razed foundations of the old guilds, and cooperatives and mass political parties then drew on the experience of the mutual aid societies."

"Stocks of social capital (trust, norms, networks), tend to be self-reinforcing and cumulative. Virtuous circles result in social equilibria with high levels of cooperation, trust, reciprocity, civic engagement, and collective well being. These traits define the civic community. Conversely, the absence of these traits in the uncivic community is also self-reinforcing. Defection, distrust, shirking, exploitation, isolation, disorder, and stagnation intensify one another in a suffocating miasma of vicious circles. This argument suggests that there may be at least two broad equilibria toward which all societies that face problems of collective action (that is, all societies) tend to evolve and which, once attained, tend to be self-reinforcing."