This document discusses lessons for e-democracy from two case studies: WikiLeaks and the 2011 Queensland floods in Australia. It finds that both events saw rapid self-organization and participation on social media to share information and coordinate responses. Key lessons include keeping barriers to participation low, distributing across multiple platforms, allowing organic community structures to form, being useful to earn trust, and conceptualizing engagement as an ongoing series of focused events. Overall, the document argues these case studies demonstrate the potential for more distributed models of citizen participation online.