If you haven’t yet read Clay Shirky’s A Group is its own Worst Enemy, please do so. It’s a wonderful examination of the social aspects (and technological underpinnings) of the online group.
It’s got some wonderful and very true concepts about the strengths and challenges of running groups. I found myself nodding in agreement with most of it, because he was describing atechnique Laurie and I had settled on to manage our lists (even if we didn’t consciously recognize it before now).
Since I’m trying to figure out what I want to do in the details of building the new Hockeyfanz, this has given me some things to think about, and generated some thoughts I thought I’d throw out there. This is the first (it may be the last, it depends on if I find anything else worth saying…), and it’s based on a discussion on a virtual community discussion on , a place I hang out when I’m not busy writing blog entries…
> Finally, there’s “a way to spare the group from scale.”
> I’m not sure what he means here…
There are two aspects to this. On a macro level, it’s simply the size of the group. Too large, and any attempt to hold a conversation becomes unwieldy, and the dynamics of the group will create their own frictions (something we have seen here at times…). Also, there’s going to be a given percentage of any population that won’t get along, and some small percentage that is simply a problem (aka, trolls). if four out of 100 simply can’t get along, and you have one troll per 100, that’s manageable. But scale taht to 1000, and now you have 40 people yelling at each other, and 10 trolls. Even though the PERCENTAGE is the same, the result isn’t. As groups get larger, the percentage of noise has to be reduced, because the group won’t survive it otherwise. Groups don’t scale to larger sizes well.
One a macro level, think of the cocktail party. You might have 50 people at the party, but they clump off into small groups and each hold separate discussions, but mix around. if you had all 50 trying to be in the same discussion, you again have chaos.
So what Shirky’s getting at is that no matter how big a group gets, the natural inclination is to split off in small groups for a more intimate discussion, and the software has to encourage and allow that. probably encourage it.
So think in terms of that cocktail party, and virtually build ways for people to find a quiet corner of the place to talk. If you analyize most discussions here on eMinds (and most likely all bboards), most discussions actually consist of a very small group of people talking, and the rest of the bboard politely watching from the sides so the conversation and pretend they aren’t listening in — but as you walk through the board, you see different clumps of people getting together in different areas (some people are in all of them, which is the main advantage of the virtual cocktail room over the real one. But everyone has a slightly different set of places where they hang out, and smallers sets of those where they chat)
The other aspect is creating ways to allow people t duck out of the way of the noise, meaning hide from the trolls, and get away from the personality conflicts and fights. In a cocktail party, when Jerry and Fred start rehashing that lost poodle (oh, again? can’t they let it drop? evidnetly not…) for the 30th time, everyone groans and shifts to a different part of the room. How do you do it online?
So (IMHO) the ultimate aspect of scale is creating a system that, no matter how large it gets and how many people are contributing to it, it still seems small and (not private, but) intimiate to encourage discussion.
the more people feel like they’re speaking to a large crowd (or will be yelled at by one), the more inhibited they’ll be, unless you’re someone with titanium skin or no self-awareness of others… so systems need to build in a sense of intimacy and smallness and hide the size…
The reality is, every time we post to a topic here, some X number of people are going to read it. The equivalent of three people talking, 30 listening — that’s not a cocktail party, that’s a conference panel, and makes most people uncomfortable. So systems have to help people stop thinking about the ‘audience’, without ever making them think it’s not there, because otherwise, things get said that are usually regretted…
