What are the properties of technologies developed to support consensus building and collective action? How can technology provide a sense of critical mass? How are people mobilized to act?

How do these properties vary across cultures?

Ways to start researching this:
- inspirational interviews with people who organize lots of different kinds of emergent efforts
- readings in urban planning / space design, readings in crowd control (What design patterns does Irvine adhere to? Look at this as anti-goal.)
- readings in collective action
- ethnography in places where emergent efforts happen (Google, for example)

Relevance:
- software to support collective action
- software to help people identify and motivate each other to pursue causes they care about
- software for organizations like Google, where hierarchy is super flat and a lot of issues seem to get identified, prioritized, and strategized in an emergent way