We’ve all watched with amazement as a flock of birds changes direction as if choreographed, a school of fish scatters on command, or a line of ants marches to some hidden destination. It seems there must be a leader, a queen bee or the king of the ant hill, coordinating not just when and where to move, but which members of the group should get food, protect the community, or help with construction. It appears some unheard chatter must be spreading the word from on high to the masses, and that everyone would then go about following orders.

National Geographic reports in “Swarm Theory” by Peter Miller that the success of swarms is not based on a master plan coming from the leader of the pack. Rather, these complex systems are solved in utterly decentralized ways:

“No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all.”

Swarm intelligence is based on each individual following relatively simple rules and taking action based on local information. In doing so, groups can accomplish infinitely complex tasks well beyond the ability of any given individual — without leadership or any individual seeing the complete picture.

Most amazing is the ways bees decide where to relocate their hive. First, scout bees set out in different directions to find the best site for their new home. The scouts then return to the swarm and perform a waggle dance, which communicates both the direction of the recommended site and the scout’s enthusiasm for it. Bees from the hive then congregate around the site they prefer after seeing the different scouts’ waggle dances. Once a site attracts 15 bees, it is deemed the winner, and the bees from the chosen site spread the news to the rest of the community. Cornell University biologists studying this behavior were not surprised to see this democratic system resulting in the bees choosing the best of five possible sites for their new hive.

“The bees rules for decision-making – seek a diversity of opinions, encourage a free competition among ideas, and use an effective mechanism to narrow choices” is a lesson MixedInk takes to heart. While most group decisions and documents emerge from a group’s leadership, MixedInk uses a decentralized system to encourage all members to play a part.  Acting on local information or using specific skills, each person can add a unique perspective. These opinions are then aggregated, with the most popular collective opinion emerging through a democratic process – just like the bees use to find the best site for their hive. Through decentralization, a trust in local knowledge, and faith in the democratic process, MixedInk gives voice to the masses and harnesses the power of the swarm to create an output better than what any individual could have accomplished alone.

MixedInk is founded on the premise that citizens/consumers/members/employees want to tell the people in charge, and other members of their group, what they think. That’s why people vote, blog, comment, write letters to the editor, sign petitions, rate products, respond to surveys, etc.

And politicians and executives want to hear from us – or at least, they make a big show of saying so. The thing is, sometimes it seems like they want credit for giving us a voice without actually allowing us to be the final arbiters of what we can express.

On the political side, the next Democratic presidential debate on CNN is taking the innovative step of letting voters submit their questions to the candidates by uploading a video to YouTube. This seems like a move toward a more democratic primary process, and it certainly is an improvement on just having Brian Williams or Tim Russert (or their staffs) write the questions.

The problem is that ratings and comments have been disabled on the site where you view questions that have been submitted. So, we (the voters) can’t register our support for questions or tell how popular a question is. CNN gets to choose which questions to ask from among thousands, and they don’t have to choose the ones we like best. They’ll be able to find questions they would have asked anyway, more or less, only the questions will come out of the voters’ mouths.

On the corporate side, a recent survey found that 57% of senior marketers found user-generated media to be “very” or “somewhat” important – a sign that things are headed in the right direction. Yet only 22% said they were “very willing” to give their consumers more control. The pollster explained, “Despite the increased awareness of the power of consumers in a digital age on brands and sales, marketing executives are reluctant to loosen their grip on marketing content, unwilling to give too much control to these empowered consumers.” General Motors’ first foray into consumer-created advertising is a great example of what can go wrong for marketers.

But the answer is not for companies to institute top-down solutions. The marketing department should not simply choose which ads they think are best and which are inappropriate – as XLNTads, MasterCard and others would have marketers do. Instead, they could use better aggregation and voting mechanisms, limit participation to trusted contributors, disallow certain words, and/or enable trusted users to flag inappropriate material. And they need to be transparent about how any final content is selected.

We have no doubt that citizens and consumers will ultimately come out on top, as the more transparent, democratic efforts to collect content from users will attract more, higher quality contributions. But in the short term, in the absence of standards for soliciting bottom-up content, corporate and political marketers will do everything they can to create the illusion of incorporating our input.

A high school teacher named David Colarusso has created a new site called Community Counts, which provides the functionality missing from YouTube off-site, allowing viewers to vote on the debate question videos submitted via YouTube. The site has benefited from James Kotecki’s (and others’) promotional support and has already collected thousands of votes.  As bottom-up, innovative side-steps like this one gain increasing traffic and attention, hopefully corporate, media and political organizations will begin to understand that we won’t settle for partial control of our collective voice.

We have to keep the pressure on them, with efforts like Community Counts, to institute truly democratic systems for their users to express themselves. If they want to reap the benefits of our free labor and ideas and our commitment to their products and policies, they have to earn it.

You guessed it – that’s where MixedInk fits in