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There are many different ways to measure groups, and one is by counting its members. As I've discussed here, the number of members can have a huge impact on whether the communities are successful or not. Thus, as community organizers, social software engineers, game designers, or as sociologists interested in community dynamics, we must ultimately consider group thresholds and group nadirs; to understand how to create cohesive communities, rather than groups that fly apart.

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Life With Alacrity online communities social design communities 2008 thresholds community design group design enterprise 2.0 christopher allen groups

Multiple factors influence the success (or failure) or community. As we saw in my first article on community numbers, the first factor is the differing group thresholds of community sizes. In my second article, I show that personal limits on the number of people you can have intimacy and trust with is an important factor. In this article I show that larger groups are subject to the power law of participation inequality, causing a small fraction of a community to be subject to group thresholds. In all three articles I show how expending energy can allow you to change the numbers, but with limits.

I hope this discussion of community numbers will give you some tools to look at the communities you are in, or are trying to build, and to better understand how to make them more successful.

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Life With Alacrity online communities social design communities 2008 thresholds community design group design enterprise 2.0 christopher allen personal circles power laws

Whereas the group thresholds that I discussed in my last article define the limits placed on community group size, the personal limits described herein instead define the limits placed on how many people an individual can know with various degrees of intimacy.

Perhaps there are societies where these two things might be the same. A true survival community might contain everyone a person knows, and thus he could draw out all his personal circles across that community canvas. However, in our modern era they're much more likely to be distinct, with an individual interacting with the members of his circles of acquaintances through numerous different group communities.

With this bifurcation of personal and group community limits, we have to briefly stop and ask a few questions. How do they relate? What can personal limits tell us about efficient community creation? Does founding a group upon a personal circle make its growth easier or harder? Conversely, what type of communities lead naturally to the creation of intimate circles?
Herein I've simply outlined personal thresholds as a contrast to group thresholds. The exploration of how these limits interact is worthy of additional studies.

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Life With Alacrity online communities social design communities 2008 thresholds community design group design enterprise 2.0 christopher allen personal circles

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