Group undertaking is like a ladder of activities, as Shirky describes it, which are improved by social tools such as Flickr (sharing), conversation (cooperation) and a government (collective action). Shirky continues to talk about group undertaking which he portrays as a 3 rung ladder that includes sharing, cooperation, and collective action. Hundreds of Thousands of people might have attended the Mermaid Parade, but thanks to Flickr's organization all the pictures from every person can be seen together. This is an example of how people or groups work together to lower complexity. The series of events goes like this: people attend the parade, people tag their pictures on Flickr and share them and others have the opportunity to see them. Shirky uses the example of Flickr and an event called the Mermaid Parade. This is where organization comes in to solve the vast problem of complexity within groups. Shirky goes on to write about how it is hard for everyone in a group to interact with each other as the groups grow larger, the nature of the group becomes too complex. As the group to see a movie grows, these factors become more complicated because there are more people to accommodate. To sum these examples up, the Birthday Paradox asks what are the chances of being in a small group of people where 2 people share the same birthday out of 365 possible birthday days? The movie example says that if 2 people go to see a movie they must decide what time to go, what genre to see and the location of the theatre. For examples he uses the Birthday Paradox, friends deciding to go and see a movie. The beginning of this chapter discusses how a group's complexity grows faster than the size of the group does. Like using simple sharing to anchor the creation of new groups' (25). New social tools relieve some of those burdens, allowing for new kinds of group-forming, Much of the shape of traditional institutions is a respose to those difficulties.

'Groups of people are complex, in ways that make those groups hard to form and hard to sustain Summary: Shirky's second chapter starts out with this thought:

Shirky here comes everybody