Many of you with more mathematical minds than I probably know about Reed's Law, but for those who don't, what I discovered today when I was reading an article on how the PR industry is trying to sell bio-technology is:
"Dr. David P. Reed, former vice president and chief scientist for Lotus Development Corporation, has developed the idea of Group Forming Networks to explain the enormous power of the internet to facilitate the formation of networked groups. These groups could include the numerous special interest groups, which are attacking the biotech industry. The Group Forming Law (or, Reed's Law) calculates the number of groups of two or more people which can be formed from a single group. For example, how many groups of two or more people can be formed with an initial group of three? According to Reed's Law is 2N-N-1. Substituting 3 for N the answer is 4. Not a very impressive number. However, the answer grows dramatically as N grows. For example, how many groups of two or more people can be formed in a classroom of 20 students? The answer? 1,048,555!!! In another context, that means 20 anti biotech activists can come together in more than a million combinations to attack the industry. Clearly, it's highly improbable those 20 will actually come together in that many combinations. Despite that, Reed's Law highlights the unbelievable power of the internet to create and support special interest groups." In another conext, do the math for you next OST meeting where you client is worried that "only" 12 people will show up. "Ah well," you can say. "That's only 4,083 possible groups that might form today for each session. Do you think we need more breakout spaces?" Full text of the articla is here: http://www.epublicrelations.org/Reedlaw.html Cheers, Chris --- CHRIS CORRIGAN Consultation - Facilitation Open Space Technology Bowen Island, BC, Canada http://www.chriscorrigan.com ch...@chriscorrigan.com * * ========================================================== osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu, Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
