They fused their secular expertise in social networks with a discipline culled from religious movements and combined the energy of soccer fans with the sophistication of surgeons and psychiatrists. Breaking free from older veterans of the Arab political opposition, they relied on tactics of nonviolent resistance channeled from an American scholar through a Serbian youth brigade - but also on marketing tactics borrowed from Silicon Valley.
from A Tunisian-Egyptian Link That Shook Arab History: Two-Year Collaboration of Dissidents Was a Key to the Democracy Movement published in The New York Times on Monday, February 14, 2011