Many hands make light work. The well-known Chinese proverb is often true and has been given a contemporary twist with the advent of many-to-many communication tools that are ubiquitous today. A valuable overview of the current state of doing good as a large, distributed group has been written by Scott Hartley on the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog. Here’s a snippet:

In today’s inter-connected world some of the most innovative models for social innovation will become those that can modularize, “crowdsource,” and aggregate small tasks. Philanthropy was once one-to-many in direction and amplitude, but today facilitated means of communication and synthesis Online are enabling many-to-many philanthropic models to become widespread and increasingly powerful.

You can read the full entry here. Are we able to accomplish lasting change and real goodness through crowdsource approaches? Do they make us feel better without changing the far more powerful realities of our day-to-day existence and the systems that undergird our lifestyles?