[Air-l] gini coefficients for measuring participation?
Karim R. Lakhani
lakhani at MIT.EDU
Thu Dec 4 03:35:26 PST 2003
The Gini coefficient is a nice way to summarize the overall
participation in the online community. However, I would caution you to
draw conclusions about egalitarianism/elitism based on just the number
itself.
In my work, I have seen extremely high Gini numbers (very few people
contributing most of the messages to the list) - and it may not be
neccessarily "bad." Two things to consider:
- what is your underlying theory about this group and how they operate.
one may think that equal participation is a "good" thing. but the group
may have been structured to provide "expert" help and thus you would see
high GINI numbers. so you need to really think about what the group
is for - interview some key and peripheral members and then build a
theory about GINI.
- there are also practicalities to consider. a low GINI number in a
list serv may mean that there is just a ton of noise. imagine being on
a list where every one wanted to chime in and give their $0.02. it
would get pretty noisy, pretty fast. and maybe not very effective.
since all of us are on this list - it may be fun to figure out our Gini
number!!! list admins?
K
--
===============================================
Karim R. Lakhani
MIT Sloan School of Management
&
The Boston Consulting Group, Strategy Practice Initiative
e-mail: karim.lakhani at sloan.mit.edu | lakhani.karim at bcg.com
voice: 617-851-1224
fax: 617-344-0403
http://spoudaiospaizen.net/
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