Monadnock Humane Society Seeks Quantum Jump In Its Ten Thousand Eyes Volunteer Membership Gary Lee - Keene, NH
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here is power in numbers, you’ve heard it before. Large sums of people banding together to do a deed not possible by the few. But it isn’t just a numbers game, any goal-oriented effort needs coordination in the form of a leader or a tool to funnel disparate group energy into a game-changing focus. I recently watched a Buzzfeed video on Facebook where a small crowd of people were trying to figure out how many of them —men and women mixed— it would take to lift a 2700 pound automobile completely off the ground. They started, comically, with just one person and added others after each failed attempt. At nineteen, two tires had remained touching the pavement and so they added four more bodies to the team. They failed again. Did they lack the muscle? Nope. Their effort was, simply, uncoordinated. One of the Buzzfeed team observed that
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they were not lifting at the same time, meaning not at exactly the same time. He instructed the lifters to listen more carefully to the 1,2,3 count and to focus their maximum effort specifically on the word “three” instead of on the beat that followed. They practiced their timing several times without lifting and then tried once more. This time all four tires lifted a couple of inches off the ground for several seconds. What made the difference in this example is what we can call collective power, the summing of each individual’s strength at the exact moment when it is needed, versus the distributed power of a fullstrength, yet offset, lift effort where the maximum force is never great enough for success. Here we see that the brute force of big numbers is important but so is a groups’ concerted effort. Social revolutions happen in this way. Whether they succeed or fail can be a matter of a groups’ power is that of the collective or the more distributed, hence dissipated, nature. The Volunteers At MHS, using the TTE website and database, we want to experiment with a related phenomenon in an effort to reunite lost pets and their families. There are two main components to this model: 1. The brute force of a “standing army” of volunteers numbering 5000 or more. 2. The organizing, collective power of the Internet, and the ubiquitous use of computing devices to immediately inform our volunteers of newly posted missing pets and rouse them in a call to action. Like lifting the car, we first need enough TTE Micro-Vols to provide the overall brute force of so many informed eyes looking out for lost animals and their quick action if it is needed. Timing is crucial because the length of time that a pet is wandering has an alarming effect on its ever being recovered. After only five days away from home, the chance on a cat being reunited is less than half what it was after the second day. A dog’s chance is a little better. Our volunteers agree to receive an email from us —no more than 1 in a single day— announcing all pets lost in the last twenty-four hours and their last known Fall 2020
