Friday, August 22, 2008

Intimate Community

Valerie at posterous writes,
. . .the density of conversation falls off very fast as the system scales even a little bit. You have to have some way to let users hang onto the less is more pattern, in order to keep associated with one another. (end quote)
(How do I turn off italics? I tried ending the quote and of course using the italic toggle.)
In this quote, Valerie assumes community (or "group" in her usage) includes close relationships between members (in my last post I refer to this as "intimate" community). Most others in this class describe community as much more loosely woven. For them, scale is irrelevant and there is little mention of communication among more than a few members. We need to develop a vocabulary that distinguishes between varieties of community because I think all of them fall within the meaning of community in this course.




2 comments:

... said...

I go back to the 12 Principles of Collaboration. There are several characteristics / principles that are affected by scale or become important as the community scales - identity, reputation, communications... When the community is small, these are implicit. As the community grows these principles have to be addressed explicitly. You know the community is really big when governance and boundaries matter.

about the italics - blogger tend to keep too many formatting tags and it is hard to remove them without resorting to HTML.

***** said...

Hi peoples,

". . .the density of conversation falls off very fast as the system scales even a little bit. You have to have some way to let users hang onto the less is more pattern, in order to keep associated with one another."

That's good. Information overload is reduced greatly. Every great and large organization boils down to small groups of 10 or 15 people. That's about how many the average person can process.

Every large international organization that I have ever been a part of organized like that. You see that everywhere. The President's Cabinet is at that size. The Iraq Study Group was 10 people.

Also groups should never be any larger than what the average person can lead. That way the group does not need superhumans to function, since an average person can lead it.

To change the text formatting with the buttons, first hit the space key, then hit the formatting button, whether it is italics, bold or any other. If the cursor is up against the last letter of your text, it will automatically carry over the formatting of that text. Thus, hit the space bar first!