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.

Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.

Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.

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

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. Though the hive is not part of any individual bee, it is part of the colony, both shaped by and shaping the lives of its inhabitants.

Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads.