[Air-l] Community "Critical Mass"?

[Hugemusic]

Sorry, guys but I just don't agree.

Sure, there's no hard and fast number that will indicate a critical mass for 
all, but there has to be some statistical indicator of probable 
sustainability - we're just not exploring the relationships deeply enough 
yet.

How about the number of participants as a function of the universe of 
possible participants?  Could it be that in a universe of, say, 200 nerds, 
if you get 20 nerds (10%) together on a discussion list to talk Monty 
Python, they will form a critical mass that will expand the population to a 
maximum of 85% of the universe over a lifecycle of, say, the number of weeks 
that there are hours of Monty Python footage (including "Live at the 
Holywood Bowl") before they run out of lines to quote and the list dies?

Or something ...  ;-)

The mathematics is probably a complex relationship of population, vigour, 
topicality, and lifecycle (and more factors) but to just shrug and say 
"mathematics won't help" reveals a lack of mathematic knowledge and/or 
imagination. I'm pretty sure you'd find something useful in the literature 
on (dare I say it) market research, in which marketers are considering the 
probable success of a new brand in a particular marketplace - and numbers 
are everything to those guys!  Andy's absolutely right about the value of 
knowing this ...

What needs to happen here (if it hasn't already) is a statistical (and 
qualitative) examination of what we know about communities that have come 
and gone ... and the factors that led to that evolution and devolution. 
There are quite a few about these days - mostly conveniently archived on 
some server somewhere. Hindsight *is* everything. The biggest problem might 
be that we don't know enough about how many (and why) people *didn't* join 
up or join in ....

Anyway, in my book there's no such thing as "no way of knowing", there's 
just a shortage of imagination in examining the data ... someone's just 
gotta start somewhere.

Cheers,
Hughie


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Andy Roberts" <aroberts at gmail.com>
To: <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
Sent: Friday, December 22, 2006 12:19 AM
Subject: Re: [Air-l] Community "Critical Mass"?


> On 21/12/06, Jeremy Hunsinger <jhuns at vt.edu> wrote:
>> I've been interested in this question in the passed and I came to the
>> conclusion that it is an ecological question and can't be determined
>> outside of the specific circumstances of the individual community.
>> There are IRC communities with 5 members that are self-sustaining,
>> and there are communities of 100000 that have faded away, like six
>> degrees.  I suspect you will get a variety of other responses though.
>
> Whilst it's undoubtedly true that there isn't going to be any magic
> number which points to critical mass for different communities, that
> shouldn't put you off from holding the concept of critical mass to be
> an extremely useful one, and finding ways to research the subject in
> different ecologies.
>
> The value lies in finding ways to detect when critical mass is not
> quite obtained, or just starting to dip below if on the way down,
> because these are the circumstaces under which an intervention is most
> useful. Mathematics won't help, and hindsight always makes the
> situation much clearer.
>
> -- 
> Andy Roberts
>
> http://distributedresearch.net/blog/
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