Updated: 01/04/2003; 7:37:22 AM.
Networks
What is the power and nature of networks? How do they give the creative their power back?
        

Friday, March 28, 2003

Magic number 150.

Social Capacity of 150 [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

In the Ecosystem of Networks, 150 is the defining limit of Social Capacity at the Social Network layer.  Steve Mallett  comments on the Rule of 150 and Communities, saying that recognizing this natural limit can enhance community design (this post is worth reading in full).

From Steve's post:

Consider another phenomenom we've all experienced. You join a community, whether it's an email list, website or other and it gains some popularity and so the members in the community grows into an unmanagable size. When I say manageable, I mean self-managing. And so you leave or become frustrated and you lament the 'good ole days' of what your community was.

Weblogs don't really suffer from this potential growth since everyone act as their own entity.

Steve also writes about ~150 blogs he reads. I read much less (11 people are my "regular read" roll and 30+ RSS feeds in my aggregator) and I don't feel comfortable increasing those numbers. Then, coming back to Ecosystem of Networks, it seems that my "comfortable blogging" range fits more creative network type...

This post also calls another association - KMSS02 discussion on defining communities of practice: "corporate KM guys" use this term to address a wide range of structures, from 10 expert group meeting face-to-face to 2000 members on-line community. Last year we were suspicious that "magic number 150" could be used to find out how differently those communities operate. I didn't hear of much research in this direction, but may be it's due to the small number of my RSS subscriptions :)

[Mathemagenic]

Surely 150 is the maximum number. The subsets that Ross talks about the 8 and the 30 are where we are most comfortable. My subsriptions have jumped since the war to over 80 and I find that I skim much more now. I will cut my world back as a result


5:02:07 PM    comment []

Social Capacity of 150.

In the Ecosystem of Networks, 150 is the defining limit of Social Capacity at the Social Network layer.  Steve Mallett  comments on the Rule of 150 and Communities, saying that recognizing this natural limit can enhance community design.

...The Tipping Point's take on 150:

Quoting Dunbar (pg 179): "The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us. Putting it another way, it's the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happend to bump into them at a bar."

There then goes on to be several examples of how social groups (religious and working) are a better unit if split whenever one group grows beyond that magic number of 150 members. To grasp the idea of 150 Gladwell suggest we think about our phone numbers. They are seven digits because seven digits is all we can handle:

Quoting Miller (pg. 176): "There seems to be some limitation built into us either by learning or by the design of our nervous systems, a limit that keeps our channel capacity in this general range"

At the time of reading Tipping Point I thought this was a pretty intriguing mystery, wondering why 150 in the case of groups of people? Or as Gladwell puts it as our 'Social Capacity".

I'm still reading through Emergence: The Connected Life of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, but I ran into the number 150 again when reading about human's natural tendency to imagine other people's mental states:

"That power (imagining other's mental states) came in the form of brain mass: more neurons to model the behavior of other brains, which themselved contained more neurons, for the same reason. It's a classic case of positive feedback, only it seems to have run into a ceiling of 150 people, according to the latest anthropological studies. We have a natural gift for building theories of other minds, so long as there aren't too many of them."

Steve goes further to observe the limits of Social Capacity in blogspace:

...I've found that bloggers are outpacing slashdot for innovative topics and conversation and I don't think it's the blogging mechanisms that achieve that as much as the natural selection of bloggers they connect with. The number of blogs that I read hovers around 150. Beyond that many start to contain the same voice as others and/or are equal replacements for ones in my list already and so don't add any value. I might swap some blogs out and others in as my interests change, but yep, 150 is about right....

This social channel capacity is something that online communities should strongly think about and play with to see what happens. I'm willing to bet that the conversations and relationships will be much richer and healthier for it.

P.S. Bloggers, go count Doc Searl's 'blogroll'. Give or take ten for link-rot and you'll find an interesting number.

[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

We are getting close - none of this insight is currently embedded in any formal way in how we design organizations. There is a big debate about bullying at school on PEI. Is not understanding this part of the cause when we have schools that have hundreds or even thousands in one unit? Why are bureaucracies so rule bound and so painful to work in? Is it that we organize beyond real social limits and hence have to micro-manage?

Hey Ross keep going on this


1:30:33 PM    comment []

It looks like AMR will go into bankruptcy protection soon as will most of the traditional airlines. I think that we are at the end of an era when we thought that there was no impediment to travel. The traditional setup just cannot cope. It is based on the industrial model of efficiency. The new world will be based on an ecosystem of effectiveness.

It is therefore likely that we will endure a considerable interim period where not only the cost of travel will rise, the hassle of security will rise and there will be fewer flights. What are our alternatives? Video for business? I suspect that video will become huge. The train - I have started to take the overnight train from Moncton to Montreal and have to say that it is very nice. The train between Toronto and Montreal is very convenient - downtown stations, club car, internet access, meals. Really a better way. But for many of you in the US there is not much of a train alternative. Driving - the distances are too big in most cases. Bus? oooh no.

I hope that the big airlines are not rescued however. This will mean that we preserve a failed model for longer. For me the ah ha is that what is killing the airlines is that most of them have built their business on the industrial model of efficiency and that this is too rigid a model to survive a lot of change such as we live through.

It will be better to let the dinosaurs go and see a new type of air ecosystem emerge. What might it be like? I see the possibility of local air jitneys. If you go to Bangkok or even Kiev, you will not see a traditional bus system but a much more chaotic insect type of world where masses of small operators run 15 seater vans which you hail like  a taxi. The system works very well for all. You get from a- b. It is cheap. There is always a van. The van operator make a good living. I can see this type of jitney of the air where I live on PEI. A shuttle running to Halifax and to Moncton where the trunk routes pick up. What does this mean for equipment? Paradoxically I see the market for smaller equipment being the key. The Southwest model suggests keeping with one model and not too big so you get good loads. The Jumbo model is based on the efficiency model which is the model which is dying.

The efficiency model is based on making a huge investment  up front in the process and then trying to fill your process. This model is being destroyed in every field. Wal-Mart's inventory system, Dells' manufacturing system, Southwest's system even eBay are all responsive system that adjust to the world rather that try and predict it and create efficiencies. This is another reason I think that MCD will die too. Ray Kroc added the Ford production line to the Mom and Pop hamburger joint and made a great business out of this for 45 years. It is now too rigid to cope.

What times we live in!


7:47:25 AM    comment []

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