From what I am able to tell, an important issue is community cohesiveness. Robin Dunbar said this [1]: > “Among primates, the cohesion of groups is maintained by social grooming; the > time devoted to social grooming is linearly related to group size among the > Old World monkeys and apes. To maintain the stability of the large groups > characteristic of humans by grooming alone would place intolerable demands on > time budgets.”
Dunbar predicts the optimal group size for humans at 147.8, most often quoted at 150. Some rough numbers I've heard suggest a bimodal distribution with two peaks, one at around 7 and one at around 150. Seven is thought to be a reasonable size for small discussions, whereas 150 seems to be a number that suggests just how many "friends" one can interact with at one time. What has been suggested, but which is really difficult to find in the literature, is that if you stray beyond such numbers, cohesion starts to break down. What would be "too large"? Perhaps there are two modes of "largeness", one centered around 7 -- note that the folks who gave you http://www.theworldcafe.org/ typically hold discussion tables to 4 people, and one centered around 150; it seems worth looking into the size of guilds in the MMORPG scene for further insight. We're not done yet. There's the ever popular Pareto 80/20 thing going on, where, it says here, 20% do 80% of the work. In recent discussions at the Unconference, I heard a different take: 90/9/1 where 90% are lurkers, 9 are more like "gutter snipes" that jump in from time to time, and 1% do all the work, which pays the bills. So, as a webmaster, you spend time making that 1% happy. Maybe that 1% is the 7 or maybe it's the 150. I don't know such things. What's more, I find it really difficult to form the right search query strings to validate the 90/9/1 concept, even though several well-seasoned web masters quoted it at the Unconference. An anecdote from the Unconference: the ticker forums on the finance portal of a large Web company was noticed to have evolved, for some stocks, a 1% crowd that basically turned ugly, crowded out questions by others, had nothing nice to say, etc. An effort was made to clean up the community by changing the rules; the lesson learnt was that one should reward quality of posts, not quantity. What happened was that the present 1% left, taking some unhappy lurkers with them, but--and this, I think is important--the 9% jumped in and the quality of discussion went up, and (drum roll, please), page hits went up as well. Page hits are the metric on which portals make money. So, you don't just take care of the 1%; you try to make sure it's the right 1% (whatever that means). I'd like to see further insights along these lines; they suggest the notion of Reputation and Trust as being crucial to the success of online epistemic communities. Cheers Jack [1] Dunbar, R. I. M. (1993). “Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (4): 681-735 L. Ludwig wrote: > Interesting question, Jack, > > One would certainly want to start by defining what 'too large' means. 'Too > large' for me to make sense? 'Too large' for anybody to make sense? 'Too > large' to reach a particular (shared, business, problem solving etc.) goal? > Or 'too large' to be processed / technically supported by certain means. > > :-) Lars > >> My last statement allows a segue into another subject; I'll just be >> crazy for a moment, violate sound forum practices and introduce the new >> subject without changing the subject line: the question of how large a >> sensemaking crowd is too large? >> >> Cheers, >> Jack >> _______________________________________________ swikig mailing list swikig@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/mailman/listinfo/swikig
