Highly recommend Revolution 2.0, Wael Ghonim’s memoir of the events surrounding the 2011 Egyptian uprising and subsequent dismissal of president Hosni Mubarak.

Favorite quotes:

“The strategy for the Facebook page ultimately was to mobilize public support for the cause. This wasn’t going to be too different from using the ‘sales tunnel’ approach that I had learned at school. The first phase was to convince people to join the page and read its posts. The second was to convince them to start interacting with the content by ‘liking’ and ‘commenting’ on it. The third was to get them to participate in the page’s online campaigns and to contribute to its content themselves. The fourth and final phase would occur when people decided to take the activism onto the street. This was my ultimate aspiration.”

“The rapid pace of events drove home one of the key strategies I learned from the revolution: to achieve your vision, you need friends and communication channels more than you need plans. The world moves too fast for even the best-laid plans to hold up.”

“I took part in a great cause and I must pay the price, I reassured myself. It does not matter if you die at thirty or forty or even seventy – what matters is what you did with your life.”

Ghonim’s TED Talk:

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