Once a year Mark Hurst invites a group of fascinating thinkers and doers to present at the Gel conference in New York. Short for “Good Experience Live”, Gel is a conference, and community, exploring good experience in all its forms — in business, technology, art, society, and life. This year the event was hosted in a beautiful newly completed theater at TheTimesCenter, part of The New York Times Building & headquarters.

One of the amazing speakers presenting at Gel2008 was Clay Shirky the auther of: Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. Clay Shirky’s book is about what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures.

One of the stories told in Clay Shirky’s book is the story of woman named Ivanna who forgot her cell phone in a cab. The loss of the phone caused her great distress as she was getting married in 2-3 weeks from that day. Along with all her friends and families’ contact info, she also had all the caterers, band and wedding planners info on there too.

After a few days Ivanna and her friend Evan discovered that the phone had been taken by a young girl. The girl was using the phone to take pictures, not knowing that these pictures now also showed up on Ivanna’s new phone. Evan contacted the girl and asked for the phone back but she was not giving it back. So Evan created a webpage, titled StolenSideKick and starting blogging about their efforts to get it back. Soon people started emailing the blog to their friends. Suddenly millions were reading it, and Evan was receiving ten emails a minute from strangers who wanted to help find the phone. The media now picked up the story – a stolen phone isn’t news, but a million people looking for a phone is – and before long, all the attention had forced the NYPD to reluctantly get involved. They tracked down the sixteen-year-old girl who’d found the Sidekick, and Ivanna got her phone back.

This story reflects what Clay’s book is all about. Only a decade ago, it would have been virtually impossible for the average person – with no money, staff or resources – to make something huge like this happen. Today, almost anyone can.