Many-to-Many: Is Social Software Bad for the Dean Campaign? Can you use social software to organize people for action? That is the larger question behind what Shirky discusses in the context of the Dean experience in Iowa. During the five years I was doing faculty development and working with pairs of classes ("content producers" and "tech creators") I discovered that the online social organization was good for many aspects of collective work, however, it did not necessarily translate into action in the real world. My research indicates that you still need the human touch to translate many intentions into actions. For my part, this means using social software in teaching to make the work more interesting, create more effective "homework", and let everyone better manage their time and efforts made in the educational setting. But the F2F (face to face) aspect of the classroom was essential for any production to come about. To make the virtual community "real" it has to be grounded somewhere in human interaction. Getting back to the political experience, young people and anyone else that has never voted needs to be brought along from the "I would vote" stage to the "I am voting stage" in the real world. The Deaniacs needed to have more of an organization on the ground in Iowa that did more than ask for support--they needed to be like the ward heelers and go and bring the voters to the polls. Many 2 Many a group weblog about social software has more on this topic.