Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it's easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.

It used to be expensive to make things public and cheap to make them private. Now it's expensive to make things private and cheap to make them public.

The waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work.

The Shirky Principle declares that complex solutions, like a company, or an industry, can become so dedicated to the problem they are the solution to, that often they inadvertently perpetuate the problem.

Civic participants don't aim to make life better merely for members of the group. They want to improve even the lives of people who never participate.

Indeed, the best practical reason to think that social media can help bring political change is that both dissidents and governments think they can. All over the world, activists believe in the utility of these tools and take steps to use them accordingly. And the governments they contend with think social media tools are powerful, too, and are willing to harass, arrest, exile, or kill users in response.

What you need for a participatory system to work: "a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain."