"I will refuse to register for an ID card and will donate £10 to a legal defence fund but only if 10000 other people will also make this same pledge." So writes Phil Booth on PledgeBank.

As I write, Mr Booth has attracted 10,003 people to his cause and the
UK’s nascent anti-ID card movement therefore has a fighting fund of
£100,000 ($175,000). I expect this to grow substantially in the coming
weeks.

PledgeBank is an interesting example of community power, in action. You visit the site and make a promise to do something if a certain number of
other people sign up to do the same thing.

Pledges can be small and mundane, like promising to sweep up outside your
house in Somerset, UK, if 20 other people in the county do the same.

While this may seem insignificant, little things like this can make a big difference, to quote The Tipping Point and who knows? This could be the start of a street clean-up virus spreading through Somerset and sweeping throughout the world.

But clearly, Pledges can be big issues of the day, such as the anti-ID
card protest. Digital technology  can be used to mobilise
opposition in a very powerful way, exactly as envisaged in Howard
Rheingold’s visionary book, SmartMobs.

As for Mr Bliar’s ID card concept, if he progresses with it, it’ll
become his Poll Tax (or more likely, his successor’s Poll Tax) which
caused rioting in the British Streets back in 1990. No matter what the
merits of the scheme (which for both Poll Tax and ID cards are pretty
dubious anyway), the people don’t want them.

And imagine how quickly Poll Tax could have been ended using the
technology available today, in the form of the net, to campaign and
co-ordinate opposition, and the mobile phone to organise on-the-ground
protests.

I think that we’re about to see a massive demonstration of community power flexing its new muscles.

Via Tom Hume.