Clay Shirky talks on group behavior and its impact on social software. It is a long and engaging. If you get past the first paragraph, you will go through it more than a couple of times. It uses a lot of study references, observations and underlying philosophies and maps it to the online social behavior. Go through it if you manage or want to create a community, or write a new social software.
Some points that I felt are not commonly seen in the recommendations or best practices, some are even non-libertarian:
- A group is its own worst enemy. We need constitution, policies, tools and ways to control this.
- You cannot completely separate technical and social issues.
- Members and users are different. Let the core group identify itself, and .
- Provide ways for building credibility for participants, for identifying good work.
- Have barriers to participation. Only the ones who really want to participate will cross the barriers.
- Scaling kills conversation and its density, spare the group from scaling.
None of these are about technology itself, they are more about the behavior and the need to understand it for building social software. A very good read, it will make you think.
