My current commute reading is Clay Shirky’s new tome Cognitive Surplus. His Here Comes Everybody is probably the best book I’ve read on how the Internet is changing our culture, so I’m expecting big things from this read.

A section in chapter 1 stuck out enough for me to share here, as Clay looks at the lessons from Kenya’s Ushahidi site that tracked violence there in 2008:

Like all good stories, the story of Ushahidi holds several different lessons:

• People want to do something to make the world a better place
• They will help when they are invited to
• Access to cheap, flexible tools removes many of the barriers to try new things
• You don’t need fancy computers to harness cognitive surplus; simple phones are enough

But one of the most important lessons is this:

• Once you’ve figured out how to tap the surplus in a way that people care about, others can replicate your technique, over and over, around the world.