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kevinoempty
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07 Nov 16
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A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
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Let me offer a definition of social software, because it's a term that's still fairly amorphous. My definition is fairly simple: It's software that supports group interaction.
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Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table.
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So, again, weblogs are not necessarily social, although they can support social patterns.
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Groups are a run-time effect. You cannot specify in advance what the group will do, and so you can't substantiate in software everything you expect to have happen.
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W.R. Bion's research
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The best explanation I have found for the ways in which this pattern establishes itself, the group is its own worst enemy, comes from a book by W.R. Bion called "Experiences in Groups," written in the middle of the last century.
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To the question: Do you view groups of people as aggregations of individuals or as a cohesive group, his answer was: "Hopelessly committed to both."
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But Bion's thesis is that this effect is much, much deeper, and kicks in much, much sooner than many of us expect
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You're sitting at a party, you decide "I don't like this; I don't want to be here." And then you don't leave. That kind of social stickiness is what Bion is talking about.
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This effect is so steady it's sometimes called the paradox of groups. It's obvious that there are no groups without members. But what's less obvious is that there are no members without a group. Because what would you be a member of?
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The first is sex talk, what he called, in his mid-century prose, "A group met for pairing off."
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The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies
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The third pattern Bion identified: Religious veneration.
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what he finally came to, in analyzing this tension, is that group structure is necessary. Robert's Rules of Order are necessary. Constitutions are necessary. Norms, rituals, laws, the whole list of ways that we say, out of the universe of possible behaviors, we're going to draw a relatively small circle around the acceptable ones.
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group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself
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Now you could ask whether or not the founders' inability to defend themselves from this onslaught, from being overrun, was a technical or a social problem. Did the software not allow the problem to be solved?
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what then doesn't happen is other people don't read it
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lessons from Lucasfilms' Habitat, written in 1990, reads a lot like Rose Stone's description of Communitree from 1978.
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I can't tell you precisely why, but observationally there is a revolution in social software going on. The number of people writing tools to support or enhance group collaboration or communication is astonishing.
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And so we blew past that interesting scale of small groups. Larger than a dozen, smaller than a few hundred, where people can actually have these conversational forms that can't be supported when you're talking about tens of thousands or millions of users, at least in a single group.
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It's not that you couldn't have built a similar application a couple of years ago, but the cost would have been much higher. And when you lower costs, interesting new kinds of things happen.
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Why did we get Geocities and not weblogs? We didn't know what we were doing.
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Why was there an eight-year gap between a forms-capable browser and the Pepys diaries? I don't know. It just takes a while for people to get used to these ideas.
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Third, in David Weinberger's felicitous phrase, we can now start to have a Small Pieces Loosely Joined pattern
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So, suddenly you've got this meeting, which is going on in three separate modes at the same time, two in real-time and one annotated.
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This is a broadband conference call, but it isn't a giant thing. It's just three little pieces of software laid next to each other and held together with a little bit of social glue.
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ubiquity
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And "all" is a different kind of amount than "most." "All" lets you start taking things for granted.
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everyone who's offline is also online, at least from my point of view, that's a different kind of pattern.
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We had a wiki, set up by Socialtext, to capture a large and very dense amount of technical information on long-term digital preservation.
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"What is required to make a large, long-lived online group successful?" and I think I can now answer with some confidence: "It depends."
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The normal experience of social software is failure
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I'd say, if you are going to create a piece of social software designed to support large groups, you have to accept three things, and design for four things.
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1.) Of the things you have to accept, the first is that you cannot completely separate technical and social issues.
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2.) The second thing you have to accept: Members are different than users.
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Now, the software does not always allow the core group to express itself, which is why I say you have to accept this. Because if the software doesn't allow the core group to express itself, it will invent new ways of doing so.
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3.) The third thing you need to accept: The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations.
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So the core group needs ways to defend itself -- both in getting started and because of the effects I talked about earlier -- the core group needs to defend itself so that it can stay on its sophisticated goals and away from its basic instincts.
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a volunteer fire department, a group of people who care to an unusual degree about the success of the Wikipedia
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1.) If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in.
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It's pretty widely understood that anonymity doesn't work well in group settings, because "who said what when" is the minimum requirement for having a conversation.
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2.) Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing.
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3.) Three, you need barriers to participation.
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Now, this pulls against the cardinal virtue of ease of use. But ease of use is wrong. Ease of use is the wrong way to look at the situation, because you've got the Necker cube flipped in the wrong direction. The user of social software is the group, not the individual.
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4.) And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale.
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Sometimes you can do soft forking. Live Journal does the best soft forking of any software I've ever seen, where the concepts of "you" and "your group" are pretty much intertwingled. The average size of a Live Journal group is about a dozen people. And the median size is around five.
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And then my favorite pattern is from MetaFilter, which is: When we start seeing effects of scale, we shut off the new user page. "Someone mentions us in the press and how great we are? Bye!" That's a way of raising the bar, that's creating a threshold of participation. And anyone who bookmarks that page and says "You know, I really want to be in there; maybe I'll go back later," that's the kind of user MeFi wants to have.
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That's part of the problem that the John Hegel theory of community -- community leads to content, which leads to commerce -- never worked. Because lo and behold, no matter who came onto the Clairol chat boards, they sometimes wanted to talk about things that weren't Clairol products.
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Graham JDescriptions of patterns and techniques that occur when a group becomes large enough to ensure its own destruction.
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Groups are a run-time effect. You cannot specify in advance what the group will do, and so you can't substantiate in software everything you expect to have happen.
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Now, there's a large body of literature saying "We built this software, a group came and used it, and they began to exhibit behaviors that surprised us enormously, so we've gone and documented these behaviors." Over and over and over again this pattern comes up. (I hear Stewart [Brand, of the WELL] laughing.) The WELL is one of those places where this pattern came up over and over again.
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W.R. Bion's research, which I will talk about in a moment, research that I believe explains how and why a group is its own worst enemy.
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even if someone isn't really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies.
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The third pattern Bion identified: Religious veneration. The nomination and worship of a religious icon or a set of religious tenets. The religious pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that's beyond critique.
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you're interfering with the religious text.
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Bion has identified this possibility of groups sandbagging their sophisticated goals with these basic urges. And what he finally came to, in analyzing this tension, is that group structure is necessary. Robert's Rules of Order are necessary. Constitutions are necessary. Norms, rituals, laws, the whole list of ways that we say, out of the universe of possible behaviors, we're going to draw a relatively small circle around the acceptable ones.
He said the group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself. Group structure exists to keep a group on target, on track, on message, on charter, whatever. To keep a group focused on its own sophisticated goals and to keep a group from sliding into these basic patterns. Group structure defends the group from the action of its own members.
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What matters is, a group designed this and then was unable, in the context they'd set up, partly a technical and partly a social context, to save it from this attack from within. And attack from within is what matters.
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And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it's not just "We need to have some rules." It's also "We need to have some rules for making some rules." And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups.
Geoff Cohen has a great observation about this. He said "The likelihood that any unmoderated group will eventually get into a flame-war about whether or not to have a moderator approaches one as time increases." As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high.
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in David Weinberger's felicitous phrase, we can now start to have a Small Pieces Loosely Joined pattern.
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Bill Joy once said "My method is to look at something that seems like a good idea and assume it's true."
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The normal experience of social software is failure. If you go into Yahoo groups and you map out the subscriptions, it is, unsurprisingly, a power law. There's a small number of highly populated groups, a moderate number of moderately populated groups, and this long, flat tail of failure. And the failure is inevitably more than 50% of the total mailing lists in any category. So it's not like a cake recipe. There's nothing you can do to make it come out right every time.
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Of the things you have to accept, the first is that you cannot completely separate technical and social issues.
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the group is real. It will exhibit emergent effects. It can't be ignored, and it can't be programmed, which means you have an ongoing issue. And the best pattern, or at least the pattern that's worked the most often, is to put into the hands of the group itself the responsibility for defining what value is, and defending that value, rather than trying to ascribe those things in the software upfront.
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The second thing you have to accept: Members are different than users. A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole. And that becomes your core group, Art Kleiner's phrase for "the group within the group that matters most."
The core group on Communitree was undifferentiated from the group of random users that came in. They were separate in their own minds, because they knew what they wanted to do, but they couldn't defend themselves against the other users. But in all successful online communities that I've looked at, a core group arises that cares about and gardens effectively. Gardens the environment, to keep it growing, to keep it healthy.
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The third thing you need to accept: The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that's quite common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one person/one vote notion. But you can see examples of how bad an idea voting is when citizenship is the same as ability to log in.
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Imagine today if, in the United States, Internet users had to be polled before any anti-war group could be created. Or French users had to be polled before any pro-war group could be created. The people who want to have those discussions are the people who matter. And absolute citizenship, with the idea that if you can log in, you are a citizen, is a harmful pattern, because it is the tyranny of the majority.
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So the core group needs ways to defend itself -- both in getting started and because of the effects I talked about earlier -- the core group needs to defend itself so that it can stay on its sophisticated goals and away from its basic instincts.
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Wikipedia has a similar system today, with a volunteer fire department, a group of people who care to an unusual degree about the success of the Wikipedia. And they have enough leverage, because of the way wikis work, they can always roll back graffiti and so forth, that that thing has stayed up despite repeated attacks. So leveraging the core group is a really powerful system.
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Now, when I say these are three things you have to accept, I mean you have to accept them. Because if you don't accept them upfront, they'll happen to you anyway.
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All groups of any integrity have a constitution. The constitution is always partly formal and partly informal. At the very least, the formal part is what's substantiated in code -- "the software works this way."
The informal part is the sense of "how we do it around here." And no matter how is substantiated in code or written in charter, whatever, there will always be an informal part as well. You can't separate the two.
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Four Things to Design For
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1.) If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in.
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2.) Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. Have to design some way in which good works get recognized. The minimal way is, posts appear with identity. You can do more sophisticated things like having formal karma or "member since."
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3.) Three, you need barriers to participation.
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Now, this pulls against the cardinal virtue of ease of use. But ease of use is wrong. Ease of use is the wrong way to look at the situation, because you've got the Necker cube flipped in the wrong direction. The user of social software is the group, not the individual.
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I think we've all been to meetings where everyone had a really good time, we're all talking to one another and telling jokes and laughing, and it was a great meeting, except we got nothing done. Everyone was amusing themselves so much that the group's goal was defeated by the individual interventions.
The user of social software is the group, and ease of use should be for the group. If the ease of use is only calculated from the user's point of view, it will be difficult to defend the group from the "group is its own worst enemy" style attacks from within.
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4.) And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations
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In conversational contexts, Metcalfe's law is a drag.
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This is an inverse value to scale question. Think about your Rolodex. A thousand contacts, maybe 150 people you can call friends, 30 people you can call close friends, two or three people you'd donate a kidney to. The value is inverse to the size of the group. And you have to find some way to protect the group within the context of those effects.
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Now, those four things are of course necessary but not sufficient conditions. I propose them more as a platform for building the interesting differences off. There are lots and lots and lots of other effects that make different bits of software interesting enough that you would want to keep more than one kind of pattern around. But those are commonalities I'm seeing across a range of social software for large and long-lived groups.
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That's part of the problem that the John Hegel theory of community -- community leads to content, which leads to commerce -- never worked. Because lo and behold, no matter who came onto the Clairol chat boards, they sometimes wanted to talk about things that weren't Clairol products.
"But we paid for this! This is the Clairol site!" Doesn't matter. The users are there for one another. They may be there on hardware and software paid for by you, but the users are there for one another.
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09 Jan 13
Mike HarmonShirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy http://t.co/LbmY6tlt
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group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself. Group structure exists to keep a group on target, on track, on message, on charter, whatever. To keep a group focused on its own sophisticated goals and to keep a group from sliding into these basic patterns. Group structure defends the group from the action of its own members.
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Kevin Mental"4.) And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations."
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baerrachClay Shirky's writings about the Internet, including Economics and Culture, Media and Community, Open Source
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Tim MenschInteresting take on why a group needs rules.
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marilor montpellierLes structures de stabilité des groupes sur le Web @cshirky (2003!) http://t.co/QLqk1EQe merci @mathewi http://t.co/IYNvh0VY
– Bruno Boutot (boutotcom) http://twitter.com/boutotcom/status/114863717254045696 -
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Dennis Callahanit may be eight years old, but this speech from @cshirky on social software and the dynamics of groups is still gold: http://t.co/BAAMhuRA
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Fabio QuagliaA Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
community internet software group socialsoftware social delicious
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alison gow@OddEssay @alisongow Indeed. http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html (which I rediscovered t'other day) springs to mind
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Kate BrighamThis talk is in three parts. The best explanation I have found for the kinds of things that happen when groups of humans interact is psychological research that predates the Internet, so the first part is going to be about W.R. Bion's research, which I will talk about in a moment, research that I believe explains how and why a group is its own worst enemy.
The second part is: Why now? What's going on now that makes this worth thinking about? I think we're seeing a revolution in social software in the current environment that's really interesting.
And third, I want to identify some things, about half a dozen things, in fact, that I think are core to any software that supports larger, long-lived groups.clayshirky social community socialsoftware group behavior communication
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Alejandro TortoliniRT @BoraZ: An old but good essay by @CShirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy http://bit.ly/dlENXd
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dolors reigA Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy A speech at ETech, April, 2003 Published July 1, 2003 on the "Networks, Economics, and Culture" mailing list. Subscribe to the mailing list. This is a lightly edited version of the keynote I gave on Social Software at
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It's software that supports group interaction.
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The Internet supports lots of communications patterns, principally point-to-point and two-way, one-to-many outbound, and many-to-many two-way.
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So, again, weblogs are not necessarily social, although they can support social patterns.
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Groups are a run-time effect. You cannot specify in advance what the group will do, and so you can't substantiate in software everything you expect to have happen.
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Part One: How is a group its own worst enemy?
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Do you view groups of people as aggregations of individuals or as a cohesive group, his answer was: "Hopelessly committed to both."
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He said that humans are fundamentally individual, and also fundamentally social. Every one of us has a kind of rational decision-making mind where we can assess what's going on and make decisions and act on them. And we are all also able to enter viscerally into emotional bonds with other groups of people that transcend the intellectual aspects of the individual.
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Now, it's pretty easy to see how groups of people who have formal memberships, groups that have been labeled and named like "I am a member of such-and-such a guild in a massively multi-player online role-playing game," it's easy to see how you would have some kind of group cohesion there. But Bion's thesis is that this effect is much, much deeper, and kicks in much, much sooner than many of us expect. So I want to illustrate this with a story, and to illustrate the illustration, I'll use a story from your life.
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This effect is so steady it's sometimes called the paradox of groups. It's obvious that there are no groups without members. But what's less obvious is that there are no members without a group. Because what would you be a member of?
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You go on IRC and you scan the channel list, and you say "Oh, I know what that group is about, because I see the channel label." And you go into the group, you will also almost invariably find that it's about sex talk as well. Not necessarily overt. But that is always in scope in human conversations, according to Bion. That is one basic pattern that groups can always devolve into, away from the sophisticated purpose and towards one of these basic purposes.
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The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern.
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So even if someone isn't really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies.
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The third pattern Bion identified: Religious veneration. The nomination and worship of a religious icon or a set of religious tenets. The religious pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that's beyond critique.
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So these are human patterns that have shown up on the Internet, not because of the software, but because it's being used by humans.
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He said the group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself.
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Group structure exists to keep a group on target, on track, on message, on charter, whatever.
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To keep a group focused on its own sophisticated goals and to keep a group from sliding into these basic patterns. Group structure defends the group from the action of its own members.
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I can't tell you precisely why, but observationally there is a revolution in social software going on. The number of people writing tools to support or enhance group collaboration or communication is astonishing.
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So the first answer to Why Now? is simply "Because it's time." I can't tell you why it took as long for weblogs to happen as it did, except to say it had absolutely nothing to do with technology. We had every bit of technology we needed to do weblogs the day Mosaic launched the first forms-capable browser. Every single piece of it was right there. Instead, we got Geocities. Why did we get Geocities and not weblogs? We didn't know what we were doing.
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the things that people are now building are web-native.
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the first is that you cannot completely separate technical and social issues
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you cannot completely program social issues either. So you can't separate the two things, and you also can't specify all social issues in technology. The group is going to assert its rights somehow, and you're going to get this mix of social and technological effects.
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So the group is real. It will exhibit emergent effects. It can't be ignored, and it can't be programmed, which means you have an ongoing issue. And the best pattern, or at least the pattern that's worked the most often, is to put into the hands of the group itself the responsibility for defining what value is, and defending that value, rather than trying to ascribe those things in the software upfront.
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Members are different than users
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The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations.
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So the core group needs ways to defend itself -- both in getting started and because of the effects I talked about earlier -- the core group needs to defend itself so that it can stay on its sophisticated goals and away from its basic instincts.
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01 Mar 10
fnorizny ."I want to talk about what I now think is one of the core challenges for designing large-scale social software. Let me offer a definition of social software, because it's a term that's still fairly amorphous. My definition is fairly simple: It's software
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11 Jan 10
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Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table.
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Groups are a run-time effect. You cannot specify in advance what the group will do, and so you can't substantiate in software everything you expect to have happen.
-
The best explanation I have found for the ways in which this pattern establishes itself, the group is its own worst enemy, comes from a book by W.R. Bion called "Experiences in Groups,"
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Bion was a psychologist who was doing group therapy with groups of neurotics. (Drawing parallels between that and the Internet is left as an exercise for the reader.) The thing that Bion discovered was that the neurotics in his care were, as a group, conspiring to defeat therapy.
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To the question: Do you view groups of people as aggregations of individuals or as a cohesive group, his answer was: "Hopelessly committed to both."
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The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies.
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The third pattern Bion identified: Religious veneration. The nomination and worship of a religious icon or a set of religious tenets. The religious pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that's beyond critique. You can see this pattern on the Internet any day you like. Go onto a Tolkein newsgroup or discussion forum, and try saying "You know, The Two Towers is a little dull. I mean loooong. We didn't need that much description about the forest, because it's pretty much the same forest all the way."
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Bion has identified this possibility of groups sandbagging their sophisticated goals with these basic urges. And what he finally came to, in analyzing this tension, is that group structure is necessary. Robert's Rules of Order are necessary. Constitutions are necessary. Norms, rituals, laws, the whole list of ways that we say, out of the universe of possible behaviors, we're going to draw a relatively small circle around the acceptable ones.
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He said the group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself.
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learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something. Learning from experience is one up from remembering. That's not great. The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: "Don't go in that swamp. There are alligators in there."
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And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it's not just "We need to have some rules." It's also "We need to have some rules for making some rules." And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived
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The downside of going for size and scale above all else is that the dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration isn't supportable at any large scale. Less is different -- small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can't. And so we blew past that interesting scale of small groups. Larger than a dozen, smaller than a few hundred, where people can actually have these conversational forms that can't be supported when you're talking about tens of thousands or millions of users, at least in a single group.
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A weblog is web-native. It's the web all the way in. A wiki is a web-native way of hosting collaboration.
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RSS is a web-native way of doing syndication. So we're taking all of these tools and we're extending them in a way that lets us build new things really quickly.
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Third, in David Weinberger's felicitous phrase, we can now start to have a Small Pieces Loosely Joined pattern.
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And finally, and this is the thing that I think is the real freakout, is ubiquity. The web has been growing for a long, long time. And so some people had web access, and then lots of people had web access, and then most people had web access.
But something different is happening now. In many situations, all people have access to the network. And "all" is a different kind of amount than "most." "All" lets you start taking things for granted.
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There are, however, I think, about half a dozen things that are broadly true of all the groups I've looked at and all the online constitutions I've read for software that supports large and long-lived groups. And I'd break that list in half. I'd say, if you are going to create a piece of social software designed to support large groups, you have to accept three things, and design for four things.
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Three Things to Accept
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1.) Of the things you have to accept, the first is that you cannot completely separate technical and social issues.
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2.) The second thing you have to accept: Members are different than users. A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole. And that becomes your core group, Art Kleiner's phrase for "the group within the group that matters most."
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But in all successful online communities that I've looked at, a core group arises that cares about and gardens effectively.
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3.) The third thing you need to accept: The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that's quite common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one person/one vote notion. But you can see examples of how bad an idea voting is when citizenship is the same as ability to log in.
In the early Nineties, a proposal went out to create a Usenet news group for discussing Tibetan culture, called soc.culture.tibet. And it was voted down, in large part because a number of Chinese students who had Internet access voted it down, on the logic that Tibet wasn't a country; it was a region of China. And in their view, since Tibet wasn't a country, there oughtn't be any place to discuss its culture, because that was oxymoronic.
Now, everyone could see that this was the wrong answer. The people who wanted a place to discuss Tibetan culture should have it. That was the core group. But because the one person/one vote model on Usenet said "Anyone who's on Usenet gets to vote on any group," sufficiently contentious groups could simply be voted away.
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1.) If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in.
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It's pretty widely understood that anonymity doesn't work well in group settings, because "who said what when" is the minimum requirement for having a conversation. What's less well understood is that weak pseudonymity doesn't work well, either. Because I need to associate who's saying something to me now with previous conversations.
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2.) Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. Have to design some way in which good works get recognized. The minimal way is, posts appear with identity. You can do more sophisticated things like having formal karma or "member since."
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3.) Three, you need barriers to participation. This is one of the things that killed Usenet. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities.
Now, the segmentation can be total -- you're in or you're out, as with the music group I just listed. Or it can be partial -- anyone can read Slashdot, anonymous cowards can post, non-anonymous cowards can post with a higher rating. But to moderate, you really have to have been around for a while.
It has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to defend themselves.
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The user of social software is the group, not the individual.
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4.) And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe's law is a drag. The fact that the amount of two-way connections you have to support goes up with the square of the users means that 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.
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10 Jan 10
david stongShirky on social software. Brilliant. Why didn't I see this six years ago when he wrote it?
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21 Oct 09
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Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that supported point-to-point two-way. We had telephones, we had the telegraph. We were familiar with technological mediation of those kinds of conversations. Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that supported one-way outbound. I could put something on television or the radio, I could publish a newspaper. We had the printing press. So although the Internet does good things for those patterns, they're patterns we knew from before.
Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table. There was no technological mediation for group conversations. The closest we got was the conference call, which never really worked right
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Go onto a Tolkein newsgroup or discussion forum, and try saying "You know, The Two Towers is a little dull. I mean loooong. We didn't need that much description about the forest, because it's pretty much the same forest all the way."
Try having that discussion. On the door of the group it will say: "This is for discussing the works of Tolkein." Go in and try and have that discussion.
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The most charitable description of this repeated pattern is "learning from experience." But learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something. Learning from experience is one up from remembering. That's not great. The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: "Don't go in that swamp. There are alligators in there."
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There's a great document called "LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction," which is about the wizards of LambdaMOO, Pavel Curtis's Xerox PARC experiment in building a MUD world. And one day the wizards of LambdaMOO announced "We've gotten this system up and running, and all these interesting social effects are happening. Henceforth we wizards will only be involved in technological issues. We're not going to get involved in any of that social stuff."
And then, I think about 18 months later -- I don't remember the exact gap of time -- they come back. The wizards come back, extremely cranky. And they say: "What we have learned from you whining users is that we can't do what we said we would do. We cannot separate the technological aspects from the social aspects of running a virtual world.
"So we're back, and we're taking wizardly fiat back, and we're going to do things to run the system. We are effectively setting ourselves up as a government, because this place needs a government, because without us, the place was falling apart."
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12 Aug 09
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27 Jul 09
George Brett"I want to talk this morning about social software ...there's a surprise. I want to talk about a pattern I've seen over and over again in social software that supports large and long-lived groups. And that pattern is the pattern described in the title of
community social socialsoftware collaboration culture social-media socialmedia clay-shirky
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22 Jul 09
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13 Jul 09
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software that supports group interaction
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So email doesn't necessarily support social patterns, group patterns, although it can. Ditto a weblog.
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sex talk
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vilification of external enemies
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Religious veneration
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The likelihood that any unmoderated group will eventually get into a flame-war about whether or not to have a moderator approaches one as time increases."
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09 Jul 09
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08 Jul 09
Martin LindnerIn particular, I want to talk about what I now think is one of the core challenges for designing large-scale social software. Let me offer a definition of social software, because it's a term that's still fairly amorphous. My definition is fairly simple:
gld gld_gruppen socialsoftware_star5 socialnetworks rebootd_netzwerk delicious
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12 May 09
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He said that humans are fundamentally individual, and also fundamentally social.
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You're sitting at a party, you decide "I don't like this; I don't want to be here." And then you don't leave. That kind of social stickiness is what Bion is talking about.
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And then, another really remarkable thing happens. Twenty minutes later, one person stands up and gets their coat, and what happens? Suddenly everyone is getting their coats on, all at the same time. Which means that everyone had decided that the party was not for them, and no one had done anything about it, until finally this triggering event let the air out of the group, and everyone kind of felt okay about leaving.
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the paradox of groups
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The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies.
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I can't tell you precisely why, but observationally there is a revolution in social software going on. The number of people writing tools to support or enhance group collaboration or communication is astonishing.
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The downside of going for size and scale above all else is that the dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration isn't supportable at any large scale. Less is different -- small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can't. And so we blew past that interesting scale of small groups. Larger than a dozen, smaller than a few hundred, where people can actually have these conversational forms that can't be supported when you're talking about tens of thousands or millions of users, at least in a single group.
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1.) Of the things you have to accept, the first is that you cannot completely separate technical and social issues.
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2.) The second thing you have to accept: Members are different than users.
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A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole.
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And that becomes your core group, Art Kleiner's phrase for "the group within the group that matters most."
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3.) The third thing you need to accept: The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations.
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Four Things to Design For
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2.) Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. Have to design some way in which good works get recognized. The minimal way is, posts appear with identity. You can do more sophisticated things like having formal karma or "member since."
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4.) And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale.
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25 Mar 09
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24 Mar 09
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William FerriterAn amazing @cshirky bit on how digital groups form. Much, much valuable information included that describes the dynamics involved in digital groups and the kinds of steps that moderators can take to support group development.
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23 Mar 09
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12 Mar 09
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Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that supported point-to-point two-way. We had telephones, we had the telegraph. We were familiar with technological mediation of those kinds of conversations. Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that supported one-way outbound. I could put something on television or the radio, I could publish a newspaper. We had the printing press. So although the Internet does good things for those patterns, they're patterns we knew from before.
Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table.
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The closest we got was the conference call, which never really worked right -- "Hello? Do I push this button now? Oh, shoot, I just hung up." It's not easy to set up a conference call, but it's very easy to email five of your friends and say "Hey, where are we going for pizza?" So ridiculously easy group forming is really news.
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Groups are a run-time effect. You cannot specify in advance what the group will do
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We built this software, a group came and used it, and they began to exhibit behaviors that surprised us enormously, so we've gone and documented these behaviors
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11 Mar 09
Monique PriestleyClay Shirky's writings about the Internet, including Economics and Culture, Media and Community, Open Source
web2.0 web software social socialsoftware internet collaboration community psychology group
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06 Mar 09
Yola de Lusenetover hoe groepen zichzelf opblazen en organisatie en regels onmisbaar zijn
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17 Feb 09
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01 Feb 09
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20 Jan 09
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10 Jan 09
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02 Jan 09
S JonesIn-depth look at social dynamics of online groups w/ prescriptions for success
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01 Jan 09
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09 Dec 08
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17 Nov 08
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10 Oct 08
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04 Oct 08
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27 Sep 08
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25 Sep 08
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03 Sep 08
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This pattern has happened over and over and over again. Someone built the system, they assumed certain user behaviors. The users came on and exhibited different behaviors. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled.
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29 Aug 08
Olivier BiotAn excellent lecture about groups, communities, social behavior, do's and donots. A true "must read" for who is into this stuff.
socialnetworking groups community collaboration technology sociology society web2.0 web software
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