BASIC LISTCOLOGY

Introduction to Listcology
Energy and integrity of the matrix

COMMUNITY

Notes on community
The "in group"
Transboundary Lists
Alpha "males"
Community Member Roles and Types

THE BACKGROUND AND FUTURE OF EMAIL LISTS

The Background of Mailing Lists
Yahoo is Gaia. Alternatives to Yahoo.

TOPICS IN LISTCOLOGY

Email lists and perception
On rules
Cross posting
Moderation field reports
The use of applications to join
Private, semi-private, semi-public, and public lists

INTERNET PHILOSOPHY, GROUPS, AND SOCIAL SOFTWARE

Perspectives on Social Software
Groups: Oneness and me-ness in the bag?
Psychological Applications on the Internet
The internet: philosophical inquiry

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BASIC LISTCOLOGY

Introduction to Listcology
Jerry Katz

Energy and integrity of the matrix
Jerry Katz

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COMMUNITY

Having looked at the possibilities of list space and list energy, let's focus on the community, the dynamics of list life.

Notes on community
John Swafford

Benny asks about the "in group"

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Transboundary Lists
Jerry Katz

The Alpha 'Male'

Links to list topics pertaining to 'alpha wolves' etc
by Gene Poole

Here are some links obtained from Google.

They partain to commonly held (and often
hard-won) viewpoints about what constitues
good list behaviour... not only for participants,
but also for list owners and moderators.

In regard to this... I say: Just because something
is unstated (just because a behaviour is not being
pointed out, for example) does not mean that it
does not exist, or is being done. Often, it is very
difficult to point out a subtle pattern of sabotage,
or self-sabotage. It is often very difficult to find the
right words, to express something that you may
have strong feelings about. It is sometimes difficult
to say what you would say, without risking being
perceived as a drag, an idiot, a whiner, or a bully.


http://list-moderators.com/

http://www.onlinefacilitation.com/listsums/sum1facilmoder.htm

http://www.gweep.ca/~edmonds/usenet/ml-etiquette.html

http://livinginternet.com/?l/lu_etiq.htm

http://emailuniverse.com/list-etiquette/links/

http://list-resources.com/s/Etiquette/

The hope that lists will always be cheerful, productive,
run themselves, take no time to administer, etc, is what
has killed many more lists, than flame wars or other
factors generally perceived to be 'negative'.

Joyce responds to Gene

Thanks for the links. A question - have you in your readings
encountered the term 'alpha wolf' itself used in the context of list
behavior? That is what i was using for primary google search criteria
and kept coming up empty... Just curious... and as an extension of
that, i've been thinking of how people exhibit pack behavior on
lists, too... sometimes (often?) choosing *sides* of debate based on
loyalty to the alpha rather than to more intellectual reasoning.

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Gene responds to Joyce

Whenever people are involved, human behaviour
is enacted. But humans have 'hard-wired' primate
nervous and glandular systems 'beneath' the higher-
level human adaptations.

We can drop the wolf analogy and speak directly
of humans, who conform wonderfully (or horribly)
to primate social standards.

The alpha (male or female) commands obedience;
this relationship is not chosen, it is automatic; it is
how we are wired.

Of course, as individuals, we can choose to try to
transcend primate behaviours. But even if we do
succeed in that, we can count on others, who are
much less conscious of their 'hard-wired' primate
nervous system, to demand conformance to the
primate social way.

It is of particular interest to me, that whenever and
wherever humans congregate to discuss or practice
so-called 'spiritual' stuff, the whole alpha-dominance
and primate hierarchy thing immediately materializes.

No matter how well the social hierarchy is already
organized, and no matter how happy the participants
are, someone will arrive to challenge the 'top monkey'.
This is someone with 'better ideas' or who possesses
secret esoteric knowledge; or someone who tries to
bring down the top monkey, without a thought to the
issue of who will 'lead' afterwards.

So quickly does spiritual intention become political
maneuvering, that political strategies are now built
into spiritual/religious/social structures.

Timothy Leary did more to illuminate the reality of
the hard-wired primate nervous system than any
other public figure. Many of his books are on this
very topic.


Here is a link and text which tends to answer your
question:


http://www.fullcirc.com/community/memberroles.htm


From the above page:


Community Member Roles and Types

By Nancy White
Updated 1/12/01

from http://www.fullcirc.com/community/memberroles.htm


Every community and online group is different. The purposes vary, the
structures are different -- and the people are different. But there
are some common participation styles or patterns that have been
observed. These can be helpful when you are trying to understand
participation patterns in an online interaction space. Take note that
for each style, there are attributes that can be seen as both
positive and negative. That said, be careful of stereotyping people.

Core participants

There are usually as small group of people who quickly adapt to
online interaction and provide a large proportion of an online
group's activity. Some speculate that 10% of the membership make up
90% of the community activity. These individuals visit frequently and
post often. They are important members. Understanding and meeting
their needs will go a long way to making your community successful.
They can be a source of volunteer leadership (hosts, cybrarians,
greeters) and ideas for improving the community. Ask them what they
think, need and want to do. On the flip side, be careful that they do
not dominate and make it hard for less active folks to participate

Readers/Lurkers

Readers or Lurkers are the unseen forces that DO affect a community.
Community owners estimate that there are approximately 10 to 100
readers per active poster. They represent a combination of people new
to the community, those not yet comfortable in posting, people who
will only read and never post, and people who come in and then drift
away without engaging. This group represents a huge pool of potential
active members. Gentle efforts to pull them in with welcoming email,
offering of guides, greeters or mentors and other efforts are well
rewarded. The readers also play another very important role: audience
to the active posters, especially in larger, open, social
communities. For commercial communities that rely on page views to
drive advertising revenues, readers are indispensable.

Dominators

People who post frequently influence the pace of an online
interaction space and can, unknowingly and unintentionally, dominate
that space making it harder for others to participate. Most often,
dominators don't know they are dominating. Facilitators can gently
ask via email for the member to give others a little more time to
respond, while also acknowledging their important contribution, for
the line between core member and dominator is pretty fuzzy.
Dominators can often be given productive roles to take advantage of
their interest and time, such as volunteer hosts or content experts.

Linkers, weavers and pollinators

The bumblebees and butterflies! This group of people is very
important in larger communities where there may be a large selection
of conferences and topics from which to choose. These members tend to
participate across a range of interests, and in doing so, are in the
best position to let others know of interesting happenings across the
community. They make wonderful greeters and mentors, and often have
interest in bringing new resources to a community as cybrarians.
They keep spaces from getting dull or stale. On the other hand, they
can disrupt slower, deeper conversations with their "flitting" in and
out.

Flamers

Flamers live, as they say, to flame. Flaming is defined as sending
hostile, unprovoked messages . What is actually considered a flame
varies by community, but often there are people who enjoy challenging
other members just for the "fun of it." Name-calling, innuendo and
such are the tools of flamers. The interesting dynamic of flaming is
that to an extent, it draws community interest as a form of
entertainment. At the other end, it drives people away if it goes
over the line of community norms. Flamers can also be the source of
new ideas which, when applied within community norms, creating what
is known as "creative abrasion" and can be helpful in workgroups and
brainstorms.

Actors and Characters

Some people very successfully develop online personas with "bigger
than" life personalities and characteristics. They may be the online
version of the "Class Clown, " the humorist or one-line master, or
just have a unique way of communicating that stands out. These are
strong attractors of community attention, especially in social
communities. They can help lighten the atmosphere for a community,
helping balance tense situations and introduce ways for people to
reveal more about themselves in a potentially less threatening
manner. When they push too hard against community norms, they can be
perceived as negative influences for two main reasons: interrupting
"serious" threads or conversations, and for not knowing when to quit
based on group norms (usually unspoken norms.)

Energy Creatures

Perhaps the most famous archetype in online communities, the Energy
Creature is an individual who so irritates a community that they form
up around him or her to try and counteract the "creature's" energy.
They community may try shunning the energy creature, but often get
pulled into the vortex and become energy creatures themselves. At
their worst, energy creatures can destroy a conversation or
community. At their best, they are often caricatured mirrors of the
community, helping us recognize our own potentially negative
patterns. They can be catalysts for groups to break through to a
deeper level of communication. Sometimes they can even wake up a
sleeping group.

Rallying to "protect" a community from an Energy Creature evokes
another archetype, the Defender.

Defenders

Defenders sometimes defend an individual (sometimes to the point of
being perceived as a slavish defender) or groups. They can be
hypersensitive to the smallest slight or suggestion of attack,
perhaps because of previous experiences. They may also have highly
developed intuitive skills, which can be very productive for a
community and serve as an "early warning" signal of a changing
community dynamic.

Needlers

It only takes one line, repeated, inserted, and insinuated, over
time, to recognize a needler. They have a point to make and it
appears again, and again, and again. Often in the form of a cynical
"I told you so," Needlers know they are right and won't let you
forget it. Their point may be insightful or irrelevant, but the value
of the point is quickly lost on an audience who gets fatigued from
the repetition. This is different from a spammer because the point is
often "on point." But it can loose its power and context, regardless
of the quality. In some cases, this may be from a visionary who is
ahead of her/his time, who needles with the best interest of the
group in mind. Other times it is from a person who will not budge
from their stance. Needlers can also keep us "honest" by not letting
a group evade critical issues or behaviors. They can be bellwethers
of new ideas.

Newbies or NewBees

Sometimes called "clueless newbies," newbies (or New Bees, as I like
to call them) are members new to a community. They might also be new
to online interaction. When new folks jump into an online interaction
without checking it out, observing the interaction or learning the
community norms, they can be perceived as rude and clueless. In some
communities, newbies are treated to a baptism of fire by old hands as
a way of either being accepted or rejected from the group. Newbies
are also the source of new blood, ideas, interest and "pollination,"
thus the new-bee appellation. Newbies deserve our attention and
should be supported with information to help them become part of the
group.

PollyAnnas

Also known as the PC (politically correct) Police. PollyAnnas also
operate across a range of "acceptable" behavior, from being a source
of appreciation of community members, to the being "nice" at the
expense of being honest or "real." They see the bright side to most
anything, so they can be a positive influence. However, Pollyannas
drive some people so nuts they will leave a thread just to escape.
PollyAnnas avoid conflict and withdraw before clarity is reached
because they are averse to conflict.

Spammers

Spammers post the same thing over and over again. Often, it is
commercial material with little or no relevance to the community.
Sometimes members start spamming as a reaction to feeling that they
are not being "heard." Sometimes it is simply a matter of ignorance
of community norms and the general disapproval of spam by experienced
Internet users. Spammers should be contacted via email immediately
and asked to stop.

"Black and White" Folks

These are the people who present immutable positions. They appear to
be initially unwilling to see points of view beyond their own. They
push instead of probe. They are usually willing to take the blame for
their style (ownership) but shy away from the responsibility of the
impact of their style. They engage only on their own terms, but may
refuse to engage others who utilize the same tactics. Interaction
often escalates and winning is the goal. They also are keepers of
important information that the community may need, but not
particularly liked. They ask the tough questions, but may not like to
be asked them back in return.

"Shades of Grey" Folks

Sometimes characterized as wishy-washy, with no clear convictions,
and as members who shrink away from the tough issues. Often they
won't fully engage or justify their positions. On the other side,
they often can help neutralize a polarized situation and offer new,
combined viewpoints for a community. They tend to carry new
information into a group that has polarized on issues and can be a
breath of fresh air.

Untouchable Elders

We tend to thrust this archetype on others -- the expert, the guru --
and sometimes unconsciously create a different set of rules or norms
for the elder. Most often, the elder does not seek this recognition.
Elders may not held accountable to the same community norms or
scrutiny of the other members. Elders can dominate new members by a
few words, regardless of the value of the words of others around
them. Their wisdom is gold to a community, but their influence can
inadvertently muzzle the rest of the group who might feel
uncomfortable posting in such company.

Additional Resources

Mike Reed's Flame Warriors site is a don't miss. Not only does Mike
have a great glossary of online interaction terms, he has illustrated
an even wider range of online "types."

http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame1.html

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THE BACKGROUND AND FUTURE OF EMAIL LISTS

Yahoo is Gaia. Alternatives to Yahoo.
Gene Poole

We may as well look at how lists are made available. You mentioned majordomo. There's also ListServ. Those apparently now offer web versions, or a web archive interface.

ListServ looks very interesting actually, for scholarly or academic discussions. I did a search under 'consciousness' and what came up looked interesting. Someone should do a side project for NDS, looking for cool ListServs. The trick is finding the right keywords for the search engine. I didn't find a search engine for majordomo groups.

http://www.lsoft.com/lists/listref.html ListServe
http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/ Majordomo

Then there are the list hosting services that are more like yahoogroups:
http://www.smartgroups.com/index.cfm

http://www.coollist.com/

www.topica.com/

The nonduality, hard-core spirituality lists appear to be all on Yahoo. We started on Onelist, which was bought by eGroups, which was taken over by Yahoo.

It's interesting to look at the evolution of lists from strictly email based to those richly integrating the web. I don't know if the web versions of majordomo and listserv have relieved them of the stuffiness and sense of strict practicality that I feel seems to characterize them. My impression is that technically they're still a pain.

At the same time, we who are on the richly web integrated yahoogroups, might stay at our level even when the possibility for greater freedom is available someplace else.

Understanding where we are within the world of lists and where we could stay stuck and where we could go, is part of getting our list-shit together.

...

Wikiweb looks interesting. We should look at that and blogs, Live Journal,
discussion boards, along with old-fashioned listserv, USENET, and Yahoogroups, as part of looking at where we've been and where we're going in listland.

Joyce on Wiki webs

(Wiki) works only for *communities* - so it would take a group of people to build and make it work...like an offshoot of a yahoogroup perhaps?

In terms of listcology and the present yahoo removing and restricting of attachments, a yahoogroup could collectively create a wiki and everyone could add their attachments to that site, instead. Or so it seems. I've been watching one list building their wiki on seedwiki for the past couple weeks, wondering if there will be an impact on the list's level of activity.

SeedWiki: http://nonduality.com/hl1508.htm

More Wiki: http://wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki

Wim responds to Joyce on Wiki

I still wonder though if we could discuss lists on wiki's without focussing as easy as we can now on list idiosyncracies... unless of course it is the last resort... but that would mean that us ecologists have sounded the deathknell of lists... A Wiki though would have been the solution for "Our own web page." Does editing a wiki list allow anybody to delete anything as well? That could have been handy with the Linda remarks... but then I like the openness, and I think Linda is back... and the openness helped...

A list and Wiki on the side seems very good to me...

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TOPICS IN LISTCOLOGY

Email lists and perception
by Gene Poole

Gene Poole writes about how information, or media content, is received and manipulated: He says, We have a crux between conscious and deliberate thought and intention, and unconscious or automatic thought and surprising or unexpected conclusions.

It is a common strategy of the reader of lists to deploy 'filters' to make the content of read lists 'linear'; that is, that readers often (or always) adjust their perceptions to take into account what seems to be incomplete or fragmented information (postings).

One side-effect of such filters is the disappearance of information to be gleaned by accepting the nonlinear content of lists (including content of many lists, not just one list).

This effect is termed by social psychology to be a 'latent function' of the technology of lists (threading).

List ecology must take this effect into consideration, even if it is understood that each reader has deployed filters which are quite different than any other reader.

Meanings derived from reading of lists (threaded postings) are not only subject to ordinary misinterpretation, but also, to the effect of joining nonlinear information which has infiltrated the mind of the reader, information which has bypassed the filters (assumptions) of the reader. Such joined information may manifest in a manner that is either progressive or retrogressive, with effects which are experienced as pleasant (progressive) or unpleasant (retrogressive) by the reader.

Readers of lists (one or more lists) are subject to the effect denoted in the speech content of the below linked website.

http://www.x-tet.com/wordisvirus/
(broadband connection recommended)

This has directly to do with manipulation of media content, with unexpected effects on the 'consumer'.

Text in lists is media content.

On rules
Gene Poole

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Cross posting

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Moderation field reports
by Gene Poole

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Boundaries, barriers, moderation

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Example of an application for joining a list

APPLICATION FORM - THE WORLD HAIKU CLUB MAILING LISTS

COMPLETE this form and RETURN to the LISTOWNER ADDRESS:
WHChaikumultimedia-owner@yahoogroups.com
WITH COPY (Cc...)to: WHC.takiguchi@susumu.freeserve.co.uk
(Please copy a file for yourself for your own reference and future
subscriptions to other WHC mailing list fora)
The information you provide in respect of this application will be kept
confidential.

1) Date of Application:

2) List all the names of WHC mailing lists for which you now wish to
apply (e.g. WHCworkshop or WHCsenryu. If you are not familiar with them,
please go to WHC website and find out at: http://www.worldhaikuclub.org ):

3) Your First Name:

4) Your Surname (with title: Mr/Mrs/Ms/Dr etc.):

5) Your Haiku Pen Name which you normally use, if any:

6) Your Postal Address (incl. your full name again, country name,
tel., fax, and e-mail addresses):

7) Your e-mail address by which you wish to be registered for WHC
list(s):

8) Your Interest in Haiku and/or related forms (i.e., how it all
began, why you like it, what it means to you, history, societies, awards
received, publications etc.):

9) Do You Regard Yourself As a Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced? (Just
as a rough guide):

10) Your Specific Interests in Japan and/or in Things Japanese, if
applicable:

11) Your Personal Background (including education, occupations,
interests, skills, avocations):

12) One or two references from persons who know you and who are
responsible members of the WHC, or of other respectable haiku mailing lists
or organisations, if possible:

13) Apart from posting haiku and comments etc., would you like to help WHC
by playing a positive (formal) role in its website, mailing lists and/or the
magazine "World Haiku Review", or in any other way? If so, how?

14) Any other points you wish to make, which have not been covered above:

15) (Optional) If possible, please show up to 10 examples of your recent
haiku (or poems relevent to the genre of poetry forum at WHC to which you
are subscribing, i.e., senryu, tanka, etc., published or unpublished)

NOTE: If you have not registered at YahooGroups with an ID (Profile) and
Password, please do so now. This will allow you to use YahooGroups online
features. This is very important in order for you to be able to access to
your YahooGroups personal administration page ("MyGroups"
http://groups.yahoo.com/mygroups), which will allow you to change your
settings at any time for receipt of e-mail, e-mail address, etc. You can do
this at http://groups.yahoo.com/ ; click the link and follow the
instructions for registration. Save your ID/profile and password in your
files for future reference.

Please familiarize yourself with WHC's mailing list guidelines, which may
be read at the WHC Official website:
http://www.worldhaikuclub.org/pages/listguidelines.html

Also, find WHC's online magazine, World Haiku Review at:
http://www.worldhaikureview.org

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Private, semi-private, semi-public, and public lists

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Perspective on social software

Clay Shirky's Writings About the Internet Economics & Culture, Media & Community, Open
Sourceclay@shirky.com A 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. http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
This is a lightly edited version of the keynote I gave on Social Software at the O'Reilly
Emerging Technology conference in Santa Clara on April 24, 2003

Good morning, everybody. 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 this talk: "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy."

In 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: It's
software that supports group interaction. I also want to emphasize, although that's a
fairly simple definition, how radical that pattern is. The Internet supports lots of
communications patterns, principally point- to-point and two-way, one-to-many outbound,
and many-to-many two-way.

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 -- "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.

We've had social software for 40 years at most, dated from the Plato BBS system, and
we've only had 10 years or so of widespread availability, so we're just finding out what
works. We're still learning how to make these kinds of things.

Now, software that supports group interaction is a fundamentally unsatisfying definition
in many ways, because it doesn't point to a specific class of technology. If you look at
email, it obviously supports social patterns, but it can also support a broadcast
pattern. If I'm a spammer, I'm going to mail things out to a million people, but they're
not going to be talking to one another, and I'm not going to be talking to them -- spam
is email, but it isn't social. If I'm mailing you, and you're mailing me back, we're
having point-to-point and two-way conversation, but not one that creates group dynamics.

So email doesn't necessarily support social patterns, group patterns, although it can.
Ditto a weblog. If I'm Glenn Reynolds, and I'm publishing something with Comments Off and
reaching a million users a month, that's really broadcast. It's interesting that I can do
it as a single individual, but the pattern is closer to MSNBC than it is to a
conversation. If it's a cluster of half a dozen LiveJournal users, on the other hand,
talking about their lives with one another, that's social. So, again, weblogs are not
necessarily social, although they can support social patterns.

Nevertheless, I think that definition is the right one, because it recognizes the
fundamentally social nature of the problem. 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.

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.

This 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.

Part One: How is a group its own worst enemy?

So, Part One. 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.

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.

There was no overt communication or coordination. But he could see that whenever he would
try to do anything that was meant to have an effect, the group would somehow quash it.
And he was driving himself crazy, in the colloquial sense of the term, trying to figure
out whether or not he should be looking at the situation as: Are these individuals taking
action on their own? Or is this a coordinated group?

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He could never resolve the question, and so he decided that the unresolvability of the
question was the answer. 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."

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.

In fact, Bion was so convinced that this was the right answer that the image he put on
the front cover of his book was a Necker cube, one of those cubes that you can look at
and make resolve in one of two ways, but you can never see both views of the cube at the
same time. So groups can be analyzed both as collections of individuals and having this
kind of emotive group experience.

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.
Because even if I don't know you, I know what I'm about to describe has happened to you.

You are at a party, and you get bored. You say "This isn't doing it for me anymore. I'd
rather be someplace else. I'd rather be home asleep. The people I wanted to talk to
aren't here." Whatever. The party fails to meet some threshold of interest. And then a
really remarkable thing happens: You don't leave. You make a decision "I don't like
this." If you were in a bookstore and you said "I'm done," you'd walk out. If you were in
a coffee shop and said "This is boring," you'd walk out.

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.

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.

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?

So there's this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough
individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening,
and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected. And at
that moment, even if it's subconscious, you start getting group effects. And the effects
that we've seen come up over and over and over again in online communities.

Now, Bion decided that what he was watching with the neurotics was the group defending
itself against his attempts to make the group do what they said they were supposed to do.
The group was convened to get better, this group of people was in therapy to get better.
But they were defeating that. And he said, there are some very specific patterns that
they're entering into to defeat the ostensible purpose of the group meeting together. And
he detailed three patterns.

The first is sex talk, what he called, in his mid-century prose, "A group met for pairing
off." And what that means is, the group conceives of its purpose as the hosting of
flirtatious or salacious talk or emotions passing between pairs of members.

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.

The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of
external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who was around the Open Source
movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the
desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a
conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding from
their ears, they would get so mad.

If you want to make it better, there's a list of things to do. It's Open Source, right?
Just fix it. "No, no, Microsoft and Bill Gates grrrrr ...", the froth would start coming
out. The external enemy -- nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy.

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.

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."

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.

Now, in some places people say "Yes, but it needed to, because it had to convey the sense
of lassitude," or whatever. But in most places you'll simply be flamed to high heaven,
because you're interfering with the religious text.

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. 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.

In the Seventies -- this is a pattern that's shown up on the network over and over again
-- in the Seventies, a BBS called Communitree launched, one of the very early dial-up
BBSes. This was launched when people didn't own computers, institutions owned computers.

Communitree was founded on the principles of open access and free dialogue. "Communitree"
-- the name just says "California in the Seventies." And the notion was, effectively,
throw off structure and new and beautiful patterns will arise.

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And, indeed, as anyone who has put discussion software into groups that were previously
disconnected has seen, that does happen. Incredible things happen. The early days of
Echo, the early days of usenet, the early days of Lucasfilms Habitat, over and over
again, you see all this incredible upwelling of people who suddenly are connected in ways
they weren't before.

And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge. In this case, one of the difficulties was
occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that got hold of some modems was a
high school. And who, in 1978, was hanging out in the room with the computer and the
modems in it, but the boys of that high school. And the boys weren't terribly interested
in sophisticated adult conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were
interested in salacious talk. They were interested in running amok and posting
four-letter words and nyah-nyah-nyah, all over the bulletin board.

And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students.
The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness.
They couldn't defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on
free speech had too much freedom. They had no way of saying "No, that's not the kind of
free speech we meant."

But that was a requirement. In order to defend themselves against being overrun, that was
something that they needed to have that they didn't have, and as a result, they simply
shut the site down.

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? Or was it the social configuration of the group that
founded it, where they simply couldn't stomach the idea of adding censorship to protect
their system. But in a way, it doesn't matter, because technical and social issues are
deeply intertwined. There's no way to completely separate them.

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. Communitree wasn't shut down by people trying to
crash or syn-flood the server. It was shut down by people logging in and posting, which
is what the system was designed to allow. The technological pattern of normal use and
attack were identical at the machine level, so there was no way to specify
technologically what should and shouldn't happen. Some of the users wanted the system to
continue to exist and to provide a forum for discussion. And other of the users, the high
school boys, either didn't care or were actively inimical. And the system provided no way
for the former group to defend itself from the latter.

Now, this story has been written many times. It's actually frustrating to see how many
times it's been written. You'd hope that at some point that someone would write it down,
and they often do, but what then doesn't happen is other people don't read it.

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."

Learning from experience about the alligators is lousy, compared to learning from
reading, say. There hasn't been, unfortunately, in this arena, a lot of learning from
reading. And so, lessons from Lucasfilms' Habitat, written in 1990, reads a lot like Rose
Stone's description of Communitree from 1978.

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.

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."

People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political
scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but
when you're dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an
incredibly different practice. In the political realm, we would call these kinds of
crises a constitutional crisis. It's what happens when the tension between the individual
and the group, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals and groups, gets so
serious that something has to be done.

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.

Part Two: Why now?

If these things I'm saying have happened so often before, have been happening and been
documented and we've got psychological literature that predates the Internet, what's
going on now that makes this important?

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.

The web turned us all into size queens for six or eight years there. It was loosely
coupled, it was stateless, it scaled like crazy, and everything became about How big can
you get? "How many users does Yahoo have? How many customers does Amazon have? How many
readers does MSNBC have?" And the answer could be "Really a lot!" But it could only be
really a lot if you didn't require MSNBC to be answering those readers, and you didn't
require those readers to be talking to one another.

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.

We've had things like mailing lists and BBSes for a long time, and more recently we've
had IM, we've had these various patterns. And now, all of a sudden, these things are
popping up. We've gotten weblogs and wikis, and I think, even more importantly, we're
getting platform stuff. We're getting RSS. We're getting shared Flash objects. We're
getting ways to quickly build on top of some infrastructure we can take for granted, that
lets us try new things very rapidly.

I was talking to Stewart Butterfield about the chat application they're trying here. I
said "Hey, how's that going?" He said: "Well, we only had the idea for it two weeks ago.
So this is the launch." When you can go from "Hey, I've got an idea" to "Let's launch
this in front of a few hundred serious geeks and see how it works," that suggests that
there's a platform there that is letting people do some really interesting things really
quickly. 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.

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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One was a bad idea, the other turns out to be a really good idea. It took a long time to
figure out that people talking to one another, instead of simply uploading badly-scanned
photos of their cats, would be a useful pattern.

We got the weblog pattern in around '96 with Drudge. We got weblog platforms starting in
'98. The thing really was taking off in 2000. By last year, everyone realized: Omigod,
this thing is going mainstream, and it's going to change everything.

The vertigo moment for me was when Phil Gyford launched the Pepys weblog, Samuel Pepys'
diaries of the 1660's turned into a weblog form, with a new post every day from Pepys'
diary. What that said to me was: Phil was asserting, and I now believe, that weblogs will
be around for at least 10 years, because that's how long Pepys kept a diary. And that was
this moment of projecting into the future: This is now infrastructure we can take for
granted.

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.

So, first of all, this is a revolution in part because it is a revolution. We've
internalized the ideas and people are now working with them. Second, the things that
people are now building are web- native.

When you got social software on the web in the mid-Nineties, a lot of it was: "This is
the Giant Lotus Dreadnought, now with New Lightweight Web Interface!" It never felt like
the web. It felt like this hulking thing with a little, you know, "Here's some icons.
Don't look behind the curtain."

A weblog is web-native. It's the web all the way in. A wiki is a web- native way of
hosting collaboration. It's lightweight, it's loosely coupled, it's easy to extend, it's
easy to break down. And it's not just the surface, like oh, you can just do things in a
form. It assumes http is transport. It assumes markup in the coding. 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.

Third, in David Weinberger's felicitous phrase, we can now start to have a Small Pieces
Loosely Joined pattern. It's really worthwhile to look into what Joi Ito is doing with
the Emergent Democracy movement, even if you're not interested in the themes of emerging
democracy. This started because a conversation was going on, and Ito said "I am
frustrated. I'm sitting here in Japan, and I know all of these people are having these
conversations in real-time with one another. I want to have a group conversation, too.
I'll start a conference call.

"But since conference calls are so lousy on their own, I'm going to bring up a chat
window at the same time." And then, in the first meeting, I think it was Pete Kaminski
said "Well, I've also opened up a wiki, and here's the URL." And he posted it in the chat
window. And people can start annotating things. People can start adding bookmarks; here
are the lists.

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. So you can have the conference call going
on, and you know how conference calls are. Either one or two people dominate it, or
everyone's like "Oh, can I -- no, but --", everyone interrupting and cutting each other
off.

It's very difficult to coordinate a conference call, because people can't see one
another, which makes it hard to manage the interrupt logic. In Joi's conference call, the
interrupt logic got moved to the chat room. People would type "Hand," and the moderator
of the conference call will then type "You're speaking next," in the chat. So the
conference call flowed incredibly smoothly.

Meanwhile, in the chat, people are annotating what people are saying. "Oh, that reminds
me of So-and-so's work." Or "You should look at this URL...you should look at that ISBN
number." In a conference call, to read out a URL, you have to spell it out -- "No, no,
no, it's w w w dot net dash..." In a chat window, you get it and you can click on it
right there. You can say, in the conference call or the chat: "Go over to the wiki and
look at this."

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. This is an incredibly powerful pattern. It's different from: Let's take the Lotus
juggernaut and add a web front-end.

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.

Now, the Internet isn't everywhere in the world. It isn't even everywhere in the
developed world. But for some groups of people -- students, people in high-tech offices,
knowledge workers -- everyone they work with is online. Everyone they're friends with is
online. Everyone in their family is online.

And this pattern of ubiquity lets you start taking this for granted. Bill Joy once said
"My method is to look at something that seems like a good idea and assume it's true."
We're starting to see software that simply assumes that all offline groups will have an
online component, no matter what.

It is now possible for every grouping, from a Girl Scout troop on up, to have an online
component, and for it to be lightweight and easy to manage. And that's a different kind
of thing than the old pattern of "online community." I have this image of two hula hoops,
the old two-hula hoop world, where my real life is over here, and my online life is over
there, and there wasn't much overlap between them. If the hula hoops are swung together,
and everyone who's offline is also online, at least from my point of view, that's a
different kind of pattern.

There's a second kind of ubiquity, which is the kind we're enjoying here thanks to Wifi.
If you assume whenever a group of people are gathered together, that they can be both
face to face and online at the same time, you can start to do different kinds of things.
I now don't run a meeting without either having a chat room or a wiki up and running.
Three weeks ago I ran a meeting for the Library of Congress. We had a wiki, set up by
Socialtext, to capture a large and very dense amount of technical information on
long-term digital preservation.

The people who organized the meeting had never used a wiki before, and now the Library of
Congress is talking as if they always had a wiki for their meetings, and are assuming
it's going to be at the next meeting as well -- the wiki went from novel to normal in a
couple of days.

It really quickly becomes an assumption that a group can do things like "Oh, I took my
PowerPoint slides, I showed them, and then I dumped them into the wiki. So now you can
get at them." It becomes a sort of shared repository for group memory. This is new. These
kinds of ubiquity, both everyone is online, and everyone who's in a room can be online
together at the same time, can lead to new patterns.

Part Three: What can we take for granted?

If these assumptions are right, one that a group is its own worst enemy, and two, we're
seeing this explosion of social software, what should we do? Is there anything we can say
with any certainty about building social software, at least for large and long-lived
groups?

I think there is. A little over 10 years ago, I quit my day job, because Usenet was so
interesting, I thought: This is really going to be big. And I actually wrote a book about
net culture at the time: Usenet, the Well, Echo, IRC and so forth. It launched in April
of '95, just as that world was being washed away by the web. But it was my original
interest, so I've been looking at this problem in one way or another for 10 years, and
I've been looking at it pretty hard for the a year and a half or so.

So there's this question "What is required to make a large, long- lived online group
successful?" and I think I can now answer with some confidence: "It depends." I'm hoping
to flesh that answer out a little bit in the next ten years.

But I can at least say some of the things it depends on. The Calvinists had a doctrine of
natural grace and supernatural grace. Natural grace was "You have to do all the right
things in the world to get to heaven..." and supernatural grace was "...and God has to
anoint you." And you never knew if you had supernatural grace or not. This was their way
of getting around the fact that the Book of Revelations put an upper limit on the number
of people who were going to heaven.

Social software is like that. You can find the same piece of code running in many, many
environments. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. So there is something
supernatural about groups being a run-time experience.

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.

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

1.) Of the things you have to accept, the first is that you cannot completely separate
technical and social issues. There are two attractive patterns. One says, we'll handle
technology over `here, we'll do social issues there. We'll have separate mailing lists
with separate discussion groups, or we'll have one track here and one track there. This
doesn't work. It's never been stated more clearly than in the pair of documents called
"LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction." I can do no better than to point you to those
documents.

But recently we've had this experience where there was a social software discussion list,
and someone said "I know, let's set up a second mailing list for technical issues." And
no one moved from the first list, because no one could fork the conversation between
social and technical issues, because the conversation can't be forked.

The other pattern that's very, very attractive -- anybody who looks at this stuff has the
same epiphany, which is: "Omigod, this software is determining what people do!" And that
is true, up to a point. But 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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

On alt.folklore.urban , the discussion group about urban folklore on Usenet, there was a
group of people who hung out there and got to be friends. And they came to care about the
existence of AFU, to the point where, because Usenet made no distinction between members
in good standing and drive-by users, they set up a mailing list called The Old Hats. The
mailing list was for meta-discussion, discussion about AFU, so they could coordinate
efforts formally if they were going to troll someone or flame someone or ignore someone,
on the mailing list.

Addendum, July 2, 2003: A longtime a.f.u participant says that the Old Hat list was
created to allow the Silicon Valley-dwelling members to plan a barbecue, so that they
could add a face-to-face dimension to their virtual interaction. The use of the list as a
backstage area for discussing the public newsgroup arose after the fact.

Then, as Usenet kept growing, many newcomers came along and seemed to like the
environment, because it was well-run. In order to defend themselves from the scaling
issues that come from of adding a lot of new members to the Old Hats list, they said
"We're starting a second list, called the Young Hats."

So they created this three-tier system, not dissimilar to the tiers of anonymous cowards,
logged-in users, and people with high karma on Slashdot. But because Usenet didn't let
them do it in the software, they brought in other pieces of software, these mailing
lists, that they needed to build the structure. So you don't get the program users, the
members in good standing will find one another and be recognized to one another.

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.

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.

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.

The 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.

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. And then
you'll end up writing one of those documents that says "Oh, we launched this and we tried
it, and then the users came along and did all these weird things. And now we're
documenting it so future ages won't make this mistake." Even though you didn't read the
thing that was written in 1978.

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.

Four Things to Design For

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.

Now, I say "handles," because I don't want to say "identity," because identity has
suddenly become one of those ideas where, when you pull on the little thread you want,
this big bag of stuff comes along with it. Identity is such a hot-button issue now, but
for the lightweight stuff required for social software, its really just a handle that
matters.

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.

The world's best reputation management system is right here, in the brain. And actually,
it's right here, in the back, in the emotional part of the brain. Almost all the work
being done on reputation systems today is either trivial or useless or both, because
reputations aren't linearizable, and they're not portable.

There are people who cheat on their spouse but not at cards, and vice versa, and both and
neither. Reputation is not necessarily portable from one situation to another, and it's
not easily expressed.

eBay has done us all an enormous disservice, because eBay works in non-iterated atomic
transactions, which are the opposite of social situations. eBay's reputation system works
incredibly well, because it starts with a linearizable transaction -- "How much money for
how many Smurfs?" -- and turns that into a metric that's equally linear.

That doesn't work well in social situations. If you want a good reputation system, just
let me remember who you are. And if you do me a favor, I'll remember it. And I won't
store it in the front of my brain, I'll store it here, in the back. I'll just get a good
feeling next time I get email from you; I won't even remember why. And if you do me a
disservice and I get email from you, my temples will start to throb, and I won't even
remember why. If you give users a way of remembering one another, reputation will happen,
and that requires nothing more than simple and somewhat persistent handles.

Users have to be able to identify themselves and there has to be a penalty for switching
handles. The penalty for switching doesn't have to be total. But if I change my handle on
the system, I have to lose some kind of reputation or some kind of context. This keeps
the system functioning.

Now, this pulls against the sense that we've had since the early psychological writings
about the Internet. "Oh, on the Internet we're all going to be changing identities and
genders like we change our socks."

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And you see things like the Kaycee Nicole story, where a woman in Kansas pretended to be
a high school student, and then because the invented high school student's friends got so
emotionally involved, she then tried to kill the Kaycee Nicole persona off. "Oh, she's
got cancer and she's dying and it's all very tragic." And of course, everyone wanted to
fly to meet her. So then she sort of panicked and vanished. And a bunch of places on the
Internet, particularly the MetaFilter community, rose up to find out what was going on,
and uncovered the hoax. It was sort of a distributed detective movement.

Now a number of people point to this and say "See, I told you about that identity thing!"
But the Kaycee Nicole story is this: changing your identity is really weird. And when the
community understands that you've been doing it and you're faking, that is seen as a huge
and violent transgression. And they will expend an astonishing amount of energy to find
you and punish you. So identity is much less slippery than the early literature would
lead us to believe.

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."

I'm on the fence about whether or not this is a design or accepting. Because in a way I
think members in good standing will rise. But more and more of the systems I'm seeing
launching these days are having some kind of additional accretion so you can tell how
much involvement members have with the system.

There's an interesting pattern I'm seeing among the music-sharing group that operates
between Tokyo and Hong Kong. They operate on a mailing list, which they set up for
themselves. But when they're trading music, what they're doing is, they're FedExing one
another 180-gig hard-drives. So you're getting .wav files and not MP3s, and you're
getting them in bulk.

Now, you can imagine that such a system might be a target for organizations that would
frown on this activity. So when you join that group, your user name is appended with the
user name of the person who is your sponsor. You can't get in without your name being
linked to someone else. You can see immediately the reputational effects going on there,
just from linking two handles.

So in that system, you become a member in good standing when your sponsor link goes away
and you're there on your own report. If, on the other hand, you defect, not only are you
booted, but your sponsor is booted. There are lots and lots of lightweight ways to accept
and work with the idea of member in good standing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But each user is a little bit connected to other such clusters, through their friends,
and so while the clusters are real, they're not completely bounded -- there's a soft
overlap which means that though most users participate in small groups, most of the half-
million LiveJournal users are connected to one another through some short chain.

IRC channels and mailing lists are self-moderating with scale, because as the signal to
noise ratio gets worse, people start to drop off, until it gets better, so people join,
and so it gets worse. You get these sort of oscillating patterns. But it's
self-correcting.

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.

You have to find some way to protect your own users from scale. This doesn't mean the
scale of the whole system can't grow. But you can't try to make the system large by
taking individual conversations and blowing them up like a balloon; human interaction,
many to many interaction, doesn't blow up like a balloon. It either dissipates, or turns
into broadcast, or collapses. So plan for dealing with scale in advance, because it's
going to happen anyway.

Conclusion

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.

In addition, you can do all sorts of things with explicit clustering, whether it's guilds
in massively multi-player games, or communities on Live Journal or what have you. You can
do things with conversational artifacts, where the group participation leaves behind some
record. The Wikipedia right now, the group collaborated online encyclopedia is the most
interesting conversational artifact I know of, where product is a result of process.
Rather than "We're specifically going to get together and create this presentation" it's
just "What's left is a record of what we said."

There are all these things, and of course they differ platform to platform. But there is
this, I believe, common core of things that will happen whether you plan for them or not,
and things you should plan for, that I think are invariant across large communal
software.

Writing social software is hard. And, as I said, the act of writing social software is
more like the work of an economist or a political scientist. And the act of hosting
social software, the relationship of someone who hosts it is more like a relationship of
landlords to tenants than owners to boxes in a warehouse.

The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will
behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you'll hear about it
very quickly.

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.

The patterns here, I am suggesting, both the things to accept and the things to design
for, are givens. Assume these as a kind of social platform, and then you can start going
out and building on top of that the interesting stuff that I think is going to be the
real result of this period of experimentation with social software.

Thank you very much.

Published June 30, 2003 on the "Networks, Economics, and Culture" mailing list. Subscribe
to the mailing list.

http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

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Groups: Oneness and me-ness in the bag?

http://www.sicap.it/merciai/papers/cano.htm

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Psychological Applications on the Internet:
A Discipline on the Threshold of a New Millennium

Azy Barak, PhD
Department of Psychology and Department of Education
University of Haifa
Abstract

"The rapid developments in computers and information technology in the past decade has had their impact on psychology, which has moved in this context from local computer applications to network applications that take advantage of the Internet. The current article critically reviews various psychological applications in use on the Internet, with special emphasis given to their promises and advantages as well as to their shortcomings and problems. Specifically, ten types of psychological Internet applications are reviewed: information resources on psychological concepts and issues; self-help guides; psychological testing and assessment; help in deciding to undergo therapy; information about specific psychological services; single-session psychological advice through e-mail or e-bulletin boards; ongoing personal counseling and therapy through e-mail; real-time counseling through chat, web telephony, and videoconferencing; synchronous and asynchronous support groups, discussion groups, and group counseling; and psychological and social research. Following a discussion of ethical and related concerns, a call is voiced for intensive research and international brainstorming. 

The emergence of information technology in the past decade, its widespread use at a reasonable price throughout the world, and the relative success in "user friendly computers" that allow more people to use computers are significantly reflected in the field of psychology. The technological advances initially affected local and individual operations in classes, laboratories, and clinics (e.g., teaching aids, storage of information, editing of documents, local experimentation); this quickly changed to include group and community activities through the introduction of computer networks. The formation of the Internet-a global computer network that connects ever-growing numbers of local networks and computers-has indeed created a "global village," where people communicate and interact on-line with ease.
Computer-mediated communication, using utilities such as electronic mail (e-mail), open virtual discussion groups (e.g., newsgroups), forums (which usually refer to specified or restricted groups), real-time text correspondence (e.g., chat rooms), voice exchange (telephony), and face-to-face video communications (videoconferencing), has now become routine and a normal part of everyday operations for business, education, and pleasure alike. The evolution and success of multimedia-aided commerce, telemedicine, distance education, newspapers, and play, all using rapidly developing communication technologies that reach out to many individuals, families, and communities, have created an ever-growing, self-reinforcing "magic circle" (Garton, Haythornthwaite, & Wellman, 1997; Jones, 1995; Morris & Ogan, 1996).

Psychology (and related professions) joined this trend modestly toward the end of the 1980s (see Zgodzinski, 1996, for a brief historical review) as a normal extension of the previous use of local computers for multiple functions (Ishak & Burt, 1998). Apart from e-mailing among professionals, psychological applications using the Internet, especially the World Wide Web (WWW), have appeared only relatively recently. Psychology is now discovering the great opportunities inherent in this medium, such as the use of the Net for approaching people more easily to initiate social change (Sampson, 1998), consulting with youngsters and adults (Casey, 1995), providing school counseling (Gray, 1997; Hartman, 1998), training and promoting team decision-making (Kruger, Cohen, Marca, & Matthews, 1996), sexuality education (Barak & Safir, 1997; Cooper, 1998), and generally contributing to mental health care by means of consultation and supervision (Smith, 1998; Stamm, 1998).

The purpose of the present article is to critically review the literature on different psychological applications used on the Internet and to point out their strengths and weaknesses. At the present time, research is very limited in both the number and scope of studies. Consequently, this review is descriptive and practical-oriented in nature. It is hoped that additional reviews will soon complement this one to present a more scientific evaluation of these state-of-the-art psychological endeavors. " 

http://www.construct.haifa.ac.il/~azy/app-r.htm

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The internet: philosophical inquiry

http://www.philosophersmag.com/article.php?id=725

"Regular readers of this column will have noticed that I make frequent reference to Gordon Graham's book, The Internet: a philosophical inquiry. I originally reviewed this book in the Winter 2000 issue of TPM. I liked it, but thought that he didn't know quite enough about his subject matter for it to be a really good book. I stand by that judgement, but in retrospect think that I underestimated the significance of at least one of his arguments, namely, his analysis of "pure confluences of interest".

Graham's argument is that the internet is a medium which enables people to seek out exclusively kindred spirits and to avoid ever being exposed to views which are contrary to their own. He claims, for example, that:

"the self-made philosopher with a grand but completely vacuous 'theory of everything' will sooner or later find a coterie of people whose knowledge and critical acumen is even less, but who are willing to be impressed." (p. 99)

He thinks that this is a bad thing, because it encourages moral fragmentation, a descent into a kind of moral anarchy.

My objection to this argument was that it rested on a misunderstanding of the internet. The internet, I claimed, is a critical and self-reflexive community, and I noted that whilst it is possible to find self-proclaimed philosophers on the net, it is also the case that when they venture onto public forums they tend to be chased away mercilessly. I now think that this objection is mostly wrong.

At first thought, it seems obvious that the internet is an aggressively argumentative place. If you have a look at the various newsgroups, for example, you'll find that peace only rarely breaks out. And even the myriad special interest discussion forums which have sprung up in the last few years are characterised as much by dissent as by agreement. However, what I failed to recognise when I originally reviewed Graham's book is that the simple fact of dissent is not enough to guarantee that people's preconceptions and prejudices are properly challenged. The reason why has to do with the nature of group dynamics, and particularly with a kind of virtual world "groupthink".

The term "groupthink" was coined by psychologist Irving Janis to describe how decision-making in groups can be distorted by various pressures to conform. He argued that groupthink is characterised by a deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment. Specifically, groupthink can result in: shared stereotyping; a denigration of non-members of the group; intolerance of dissent; moral certitude; a reluctance to examine preconceptions; and a resistance to new and countervailing ideas.

Janis was interested in the specific question of how groupthink can result in bad policy decisions, as in the case, for example, of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. However, it is quite possible to see a kind of groupthink at work in internet communities. For obvious reasons, this is most evident in those communities dominated by people who share pre-existing religious, moral or political beliefs. In such communities, one does find dissent and argument, but it tends to be circumscribed in two important ways.

First, amongst the most active members of the group, whilst there might be disagreements over matters of detail, there is normally very little disagreement about fundamental beliefs. For example, if you visit the discussion board of the extreme right-wing UK political party, the National Front, you'll find that whilst there are arguments about how the repatriation of non-white people should be achieved, there is no disagreement that repatriation is a good thing.

Second, on those comparatively rare occasions that somebody does question the more fundamental beliefs of the community, it provides an opportunity for its core members to reaffirm their commitment to the group by means of their condemnation of the interloper. Moreover, it is in their responses to this kind of challenge that group members will most often manifest the characteristic signs of groupthink.

It is primarily for these two reasons that the ubiquity of argument on the internet is no guarantee that people's preconceptions and prejudices will be properly challenged. Does this matter? On occasions it probably will. For example, consider the case of the "Heaven's Gate" cult. Thirty-nine of its members committed suicide seemingly because they believed that the Hale-Bopp comet was a sign that it was time for them to "leave" the Earth to be transported by means of a spacecraft to another world. The interesting point about this cult was that its isolation was facilitated by the internet. It was financed by a web design business, which meant that members had no need of contact with anyone but other members. Indeed, as Martin Rees points out in Our Final Century, the core beliefs of the cult were continually reinforced by selective transcontinental electronic contact with other adherents of the cult.

Of course, this is an extreme case, one that might not ever be repeated. Nevertheless, there is something slightly disturbing about the idea that the internet allows people to filter the kinds of inputs which they receive so that they largely avoid material which challenges their worldview. Although the internet is trumpeted as a great force for bringing people closer together, it might yet turn out that in many aspects it tends to encourage moral fragmentation and group polarisation."  

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