Why? Because it answers the question that was asked. As you rightly point out, there's a lot of questions math won't answer, and you use other approaches for that, but to answer a question about "critical mass" you need a formula - albeit one that has many extraneous factors, some of which will be qualitative and informed by answering other questions using other methods. I have no problem with using other methods and approaches to answer other questions, but this one fits the bill and should not be dismissed ... math *can* help answer the question of critical mass. Cheers, Hughie ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mary-Helen Ward" <mhward@usyd.edu.au> To: <>; "Hugemusic" <hmusic@ozemail.com.au> Sent: Friday, December 22, 2006 12:30 PM Subject: Re: [Air-l] Community "Critical Mass"?
But why? Why reduce people's words, thoughts and emotional responses to mathematical coding? Why not use qualitative methods to capture/ represent/investigate the interactions? I understand that it's still a reduction; a distillation from the original, but it speaks in clear ways too.
Theory can be developed from life using many methods; maths is only one of them. Maybe when we talk about the 'body of knowledge' we need to think about its blood and guts (the messy stuff) and well as bones and ligaments.
M-H
On 22/12/2006, at 1:15 PM, Hugemusic wrote:
Yes, well, these issues are perplexing, but not insurmountable.
I'm sure the early scientists who wondered why trees burn but (some) rocks don't thought they had a similar problem on their hands ...
Maths can help with anything that can be quantified - strength of relationships, passion of the content, capacity for "leakage" of involvement (the extent to which participants have a choice of fora) even "importance to our lives" can be quantified ... it's a matter of coming up with imaginative and reproduceable metrics, crunching the numbers and seeing whether anything useful emerges.
<snip>
The numbers can tell all sorts of stories if we begin to explore them - we're just blinded by the size of the task and the lack of obvious metrics.
Incidentally, a quick peruse of the groups in Myspace shows a similar pattern to the one you observe in Yahoo! groups and as has been reported concerning blog activity. Very Long Tail, all of them ... but wait - that's a mathematical relationship!
Cheers, Hughie
----- Original Message ----- From: "Mary-Helen Ward" <mhward@usyd.edu.au> To: <>; "Hugemusic" <hmusic@ozemail.com.au> Sent: Friday, December 22, 2006 11:01 AM Subject: Re: [Air-l] Community "Critical Mass"?
I realise that email lists seem a bit 'old hat', but I think that there is a lot to be learned from them about how communities form, fail or are sustained online.
I've been a member of one online community (email list only) for ten years. It's shrunk a bit over the years - some members have died and some have lost interest - but it's still going and we still have a few postings most weeks. We are down to 29 members, but we all agree on the list's importance to our lives. I don't see any way that maths could help predict this kind of success. Many of the members aren't able to get out much; some are enormously busy working lives. We are a mad mix of people who just happen to get on and value each other's presence. Just like any friendship group really, except that we are on three continents.
Another quite different international community that I have been in for about 8 years is extremely successful in another way. It has a much more mixed, lively and mobile membership; presently just under 200 with a core of about 50 regular posters. It also has a website with photographs of members and their projects (it is craft-based), lists of members' webpages and blogs etc, which is maintained regularly. Again, the list is very important to the people who subscribe to it.
Neither of these groups is based at Yahoo, but a scan of the email groups that are based at there will show how many never get off the ground, but there are a few that do and remain hugely successfully, with many regular postings, pretty much indefinitely. I wonder if they have anything in common?
M-H
On 22/12/2006, at 11:22 AM, Hugemusic wrote:
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.
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