A Group is its Own Worst Enemy
If you hang out in online communities long enough, you see certain behaviours happening again and again. Many of these behaviours have been documented over the last 40 years or so and are summarised nicely in the paper by Clay Shirkey of the same title.
There is a lovely example going on right now in a group I participate in - the SBS List. Recently, there has been a discussion about whether the group needs moderation and how it has become too noisy and a lot of people who are posting have no idea what they are talking about and so on. People are even blogging about it. Well, group: pay attention. You are behaving exactly as predicted. Go read that paper and be enlightened. I've distilled a few of the interesting nuggets in the rest of this article to whet your appetite, but to really understand the issues, you need to read the paper.
According to Mr. Shirkey, there are some common characteristics of online communities, for example:
- 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.
- (paraphrasing) Groups tend to devolve from their noble purpose into a variety of 'basic urges' that subvert the original purpose of the group. 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.
Shirky says there are three basic things that you have to accept about online communities (and if you don't accept them, they will just happen to you anyway):
- You cannot completely separate technical and social issues.
- 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. [The Core Group]. This group will arise and find a way to express itself, even if not explicitly built into the technological framework.
- 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. One person/one vote is a really bad idea if you want to get anything done.
Finally, Shirkey goes on to explore design requirements for online communities. These are the things that are absolute requirements for large, long-lived online communities to work well (or at all). Things that should be taken for granted. I am really condensing these statements heavily so read the paper for more detail. Here we go:
- There must be an identity system ("handles") that is somewhat persistent and has some cost associated with changing identities. Identity is the basic requirement for having a conversation and linking what is being said now to what was said in the past ("who said what, when").
- 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."
- You need barriers to participation. 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. 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.
- you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. 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.
Now, I have distilled out a few of the salient/controversial points but they will all make more sense if you go and read Mr. Shirkey's paper. Anyone who participates in, or plans to run an online community should definitely read it, If for no other reason that that it provides a useful platform from which to have the discussion about how a group should be run!
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out how well Yahoo groups fit Shirkey's design criteria and what needs to happen in any one particular community.