Several thoughtful people have commented on an unusual element in the Iranian revolutionary movement, aka “The Green Path of Hope.”  Although there is a troika (Mousavi, Karroubi and Khatami) that inspires many of the movement’s participants, there seems to be a lack of top-down leadership.  Indeed, Mousavi has been at pains to say that the people are the true leaders, that he is not creating a political movement but a “social network,” and that the strength of the Green Path derives from the spontaneous and creative actions of millions of Iranians.

It sounds a lot like the thesis put forward in the recent book, The Starfish and the Spider, which argues that top-down organizations are less successful than those that give maximum freedom to their people.  If you decapitate a spider, it dies, but if you lop off an arm of a starfish, it regenerates.  In like manner, despite a massive crackdown from the Iranian regime–thousands of arrests (now termed “kidnappings” by Iranian Tweeters), scores of executions, mass rape and other forms of torture, show trials and stern intimidation from political and military leaders, judges and clerics, the Green Path moves on, with its next publicly announced challenge to the regime set for December 7th.  Meanwhile, demonstrations and strikes continue across the country. . . .

Conference convener and New School faculty Trebor Scholz wrote me today saying that “One of the highlights of this conference will definitely be Howard Rheingold’s session.” That session will be on Saturday morning. Howard will also be one of the panelists in the Closing Plenary Discussion at the end of that day. One of the member’s of Howard’s panel will be smartmobber Paul Hartzog. The full program can be downloaded here: Conference Program

As I commented in an earlier post about the conference, the topics on the program are cutting edge now, and would have been utterly mystifying a handful of years ago. What would someone in 1990 have suppose “digital labor” would be? Now it is the hot and deep topic for this very interesting conference.

Registration is required here: Conference Registration Attendance is free.

So it looks like we’re going to get a hurricane after all this season. Ida is expected to make landfall on the Gulf Coast near the Alabama/Florida border late Monday or early Tuesday. I’ve already started updating the feeds on the homepage to aggregate Ida-related information, but there are still some tasks to be done.

Most importantly, we need to update the wiki: http://hurricanewiki.org. We need volunteers to review the wiki section by section and make sure that there are resources collected for Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Much of this was done last year but it can’t hurt to be sure it’s up to date. If you plan to work on a section of the wiki, please let us know which one.

Next, we need to identify useful Twitter accounts so I can begin aggregating them using the new Twitter Lists feature. If you come across any useful Twitter accounts related to Ida - local news accounts, weather spotters, volunteers, local orgs, etc - please add them to the wiki here:

http://www.hurricanewiki.org/wiki/Twitter_Resources

I’ll work on putting together a Twitter list with all the accounts we pull together.

Lastly, if there are any other online volunteer duties you can tackle in the next 48 hours, please speak up now and spell out what you can do, and if you need other volunteers to accomplish it.

Next weekend I will be attending two conferences in New York City. One of them is WordCampNYC which is a major WordPress event. It has top guys from the tech and design crowds who have brought this open source software to global leadership. There will also be newbies and bloggers. Late registration is available for $45.

I will have another post here about the other conference tomorrow. We have Howard Rheingold coming to New York City for the event. It is possible the Empire State Building will be garbed in multicolored lights. We are working on that. . .

Note the little line of social bookmarking icons across the bottom of the post, shown full-size here:

How’s that for Web2.0 literacy?

(Hat-tip @mountainrunner)

This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey finds that Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People’s use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people’s full personal network – their strong and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with more diverse social networks.

Forty years ago today, a team led by Leonard Kleinrock typed the “Lo” of “Login” into a Stanford computer, which promptly crashed before the command could be entered. But because Kleinrock’s team was sending this message from a UCLA machine, he had just taken part in one of the great milestones in communication history.

The SEED story captures the flash of insight and quick decisions that set the whole thing off. It is interesting to me that the key network pattern was the core from the beginning moment. Is there anything else that is the essence of the online behemoth except what networks do? I don’t think so.

ZooBorns is a blog where you can look in on this critter smart mobbing. I recommend the blog as a tonic ingredient for your RSS reader. It is always a pleasant hop out of the word torrents about morass of our times to have a new zoo born like this Fennec Fox kit pop up on your screen.

Photo by In Cherl Kim (Lots of great pics at Kim’s site.)