Hello Everybody, I've got a (hopefully) quick question: is anyone familiar with research into when an online community attains a "critical mass" and becomes self-sustaining? In terms of community, I'm thinking of online communities such as wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace, etc. that specifically require participatory involvement. In terms of "critical mass" I'm thinking of audience size / reach, ratio of "posters" to lurkers, etc. Does anyone know of research into this area? Any and all help would be greatly appreciated. All the best, Chris Modzelewski -- Chris Modzelewski Emerging Analysis Corporation
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.
On 21/12/06, Jeremy Hunsinger <jhuns@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/
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@gmail.com> To: <air-l@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@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/ _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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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.
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. I read this morning (http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/technology/s/231/231348_technolo...) about some people at Edinburgh who say they can replace DJs with a digital agent to construct playlists tailored to your taste. I'd love to see the maths behind that. No doubt it's a little primitive, but I also read yesterday (http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2006/12/20/the-man-from-goog...) that Google can predict, based on seach data, the gross takings of a movie with 82% accuracy - six weeks before its release! And no doubt they'll get more accurate with refinement. 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.
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.
_______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http:// listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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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.
_______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http:// listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
On Dec 21, 2006, at 10:06 PM, Hugemusic wrote:
Why? Because it answers the question that was asked.
actually... no, it doesn't. what it answers is the abstraction or representation of that question that you can create into quantifiable terms... that is rarely if ever the question asked. sometimes it is very close though.
Fair enough. I was waiting for someone to run the postmodern interference on this play. So, are we interested in answering the question *as best we can* or do we just wanna swap digitised abstractions of inter-personal mediated communications about why the question can't be addressed because it's not really the question, just a digitised abstraction of the question? Or perhaps the question is not really the *right* question ... or abstraction of what would be the right question if it wasn't an abstraction ... because the problem the question seeks to address is only an abstraction of the problem about which we're asking an abstracted question ... Spare me! Cheers, Hughie ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jeremy Hunsinger" <jhuns@vt.edu> To: <air-l@listserv.aoir.org>; "Hugemusic" <hmusic@ozemail.com.au> Sent: Friday, December 22, 2006 1:12 PM Subject: Re: [Air-l] Community "Critical Mass"?
On Dec 21, 2006, at 10:06 PM, Hugemusic wrote:
Why? Because it answers the question that was asked.
actually... no, it doesn't. what it answers is the abstraction or representation of that question that you can create into quantifiable terms... that is rarely if ever the question asked. sometimes it is very close though.
Sorry, forgot to add smileys to that last post .... :-) :-) Cheers, Hughie ----- Original Message ----- From: "Hugemusic" <hmusic@ozemail.com.au> To: <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Sent: Friday, December 22, 2006 1:26 PM Subject: Re: [Air-l] Community "Critical Mass"?
Fair enough. I was waiting for someone to run the postmodern interference on this play.
So, are we interested in answering the question *as best we can* or do we just wanna swap digitised abstractions of inter-personal mediated communications about why the question can't be addressed because it's not really the question, just a digitised abstraction of the question?
Or perhaps the question is not really the *right* question ... or abstraction of what would be the right question if it wasn't an abstraction ... because the problem the question seeks to address is only an abstraction of the problem about which we're asking an abstracted question ...
Spare me!
Cheers, Hughie
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jeremy Hunsinger" <jhuns@vt.edu> To: <air-l@listserv.aoir.org>; "Hugemusic" <hmusic@ozemail.com.au> Sent: Friday, December 22, 2006 1:12 PM Subject: Re: [Air-l] Community "Critical Mass"?
On Dec 21, 2006, at 10:06 PM, Hugemusic wrote:
Why? Because it answers the question that was asked.
actually... no, it doesn't. what it answers is the abstraction or representation of that question that you can create into quantifiable terms... that is rarely if ever the question asked. sometimes it is very close though.
_______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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That is not the postmodern interference, that is either the post- positivist, pragmatist, or interpretevist. There are many ways of appreciating the problems of measurement in social research. Abstraction is one of the parts of operationalization of a theory in order to be measured.
actually... no, it doesn't. what it answers is the abstraction or
representation of that question that you can create into quantifiable terms...
This suggests (whether or not you intend it to) that there is some sort of question that could be asked in terms not biased by the tools that are anticipated to be employed to answer. There are no "pure questions." Those who prefer to work with qualitative methods are likely to generate questions that are tractable qualitatively, those who prefer quantitative methods are likely to think of questions for which quantification makes good sense, and those who tend to prefer analytical methods (I'm using the term in tension with "empirical methods") are likely to ask questions that lend themselves to analytical processes. This isn't just a "where you stand depends on where you sit" sort of argument; I think it's worth recognizing the weaknesses in any approach, and particularly the dangers of endorsing methodological orthodoxy. It's valuable recognizing that methodological heterodoxy (or "triangulation" or what-have-you) is more than just a way to keep multiple scholarly audiences happy; it's a way of detecting and counterbalancing leaky questions and answers no matter your approach. Alex -- // // This email is // [ ] assumed public and may be blogged / forwarded. // [X] assumed to be private, please ask before redistributing. // // Alexander C. Halavais // Social Architect // http://alex.halavais.net //
I agree with Alex, i was not suggesting that there is anything perfect about any methodological perspective, they each have issues and are useful. I will say that most analytical methods are empirical though. Granted some are not, some analytical methods just analyze abstractions. In any case, I think the closest work in popular sociology on critical mass, might be Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point On Dec 21, 2006, at 10:45 PM, Alex Halavais wrote: Jeremy Hunsinger School of Library and Information Science Pratt Institute () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.aoir.org The Association of Internet Researchers http://www.stswiki.org/ stswiki http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/ LI-the journal http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/ Transdisciplinary Studies:the book series
Mary-Helen, I am one of those rare birds thoroughly trained in both qualitative and quantitative Research Methodology. I started out with degrees in philosophy and literature and was drawn into the Department of Educational Psychology, Counseling and Special Education by an interest in Transpersonal Psychology. I was told once admitted that I would have to take at least four courses in Statistics and Research Methodology to become a doctor and was a damn fool if I did not take every course offered by the department in number crunching. Qualitative Research Methodology was not mentioned during this conversation or, at the time, in the catalog of courses. The folks over in Psychology looked down on the folks over in the education school but granted us the left-handed compliment of being better statisticians than they were and better trained in Psychology than the average math nerd. I had never taken Algebra. I took business math with Coach Vickers in high school and then majored in Philosophy at a small, liberal arts college which cross-listed logic courses as both PHIL and MATH. So, you can imagine how splendidly self-confident I felt as I stood in Dr. Donald Arys office explaining to him that I would be taking his Educational Statistics 1 next term because I really had no choice. I had dropped by to apologize in advance for the ineptitude I was sure I would display and, perhaps, to convince him that I was, when allowed to speak English rather than being forced to express myself through numbers, at least slightly brighter than a turnip. I enjoyed Dr. Arys course tremendously and took every course offered by the department in number crunching for the pure joy of it. I realized at some point that much number crunching is done for the pure joy of it and developed a bit of a habit in that direction myself. I spent so long finishing the degree I started while doing another simultaneously that I passed comps and became officially ABD the same term the departments first semiotican was hired. I did a quantitative dissertation but probably would not have if the semiotican had burst upon the scene a year earlier. Upon graduation, I began teaching Psychology for a community college. My greatest success came teaching Psychology 2317 (Basic Statistics) both online and in the traditional classroom. I never got a single math nerd in that class in all the times I taught it. My classes closed shortly after opening every term after the first, filling up quickly with would-be nurses told by the State of Texas that 3 hours of statistics were required for licensure. These nurses genuinely loved my Education School approach to teaching statistics, an approach that involved dealing with statistics at the level of concept rather than getting bogged down with all those elaborate formulas and tricky computations. You can get away with that if you have them buy SPSS ($80.00) instead of a text-book. Anyway, I now teach English rather than Psychology. I miss my nurses but enjoy working with my composition students even more. I was always a story-teller. My fascination with statistics was an attempt on my part to embrace my opposite. That fascination began during a time in my life when I felt that I was drowning in an ocean of competing stories and desperately needed to feel something solid beneath my feet, something that was there before anyone started interpreting and which refused to be interpreted away. Will that do as a definition of reality? Patterns in numbers that were just numbers standing in abstract relationship without anything being defined except within the web of those relationships felt like solid ground to me. Later, I faced the awful fact that these patterns only come to mean when you turn them into a story by saying that 17i is the length of Jessicas nose which is why Roger and Jessica eloped to Vegas. The truth is out there, as Fox Moulder used to say, but can only be lived in here in the form of a story that must go beyond the information given in order to become a fit place for human beings to live, love and occasionally try to jump out of the story like cat nipped kitties chasing their own lovely tails. I hope I have made all this perfectly clear. My students tell me that my learned discourse holds together at least as well as jazz and that they do profit in some vague way by exposure. Then again, I tell them that their essays will make fascinating reading if they just capture themselves in a net of words. I try to be kind and, perhaps, they do also in return. T. Michael --- Mary-Helen Ward <mhward@usyd.edu.au> wrote:
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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Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
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Before this thread snowballs into a discussion of methodology, two cultures or Truth: I'm not a "quant person", but it seems to me that if we are to find a measure of critical mass, that will not be the number of members, but a quantification of the communication between them. The number of messages they post, etc. --anders -- Anders Fagerjord, dr. art. Associate professor, Department of Media and Communcation, Unversity of Oslo P.O. Box 1093 Blindern N-0317 OSLO Norway http://www.media.uio.no http://fagerjord.no
In my thought, to look only on the numbers is a fault. We did many studies about online communities (mailing list, chat)with very different numbers of participants. Every community had a distinct structure with a centre-periphery structure. What we found is, that communication will break down if the centre becomes inactive. So it is not a question of a pure mass, it is a question about the intern structure of the community. Best wishes Christian Two publications to this topic: Christian Stegbauer, 2001, Grenzen virtueller Gemeinschaft. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag Christian Stegbauer & Alexander Rausch, 2006, Strukturalistische Internetforschung. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. Anders Fagerjord schrieb:
Before this thread snowballs into a discussion of methodology, two cultures or Truth:
I'm not a "quant person", but it seems to me that if we are to find a measure of critical mass, that will not be the number of members, but a quantification of the communication between them. The number of messages they post, etc.
--anders
-- Anders Fagerjord, dr. art. Associate professor,
Department of Media and Communcation, Unversity of Oslo P.O. Box 1093 Blindern N-0317 OSLO Norway
http://www.media.uio.no http://fagerjord.no
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-- ************************************************* PD Dr. Christian Stegbauer Goethe-Universität Frankfurt Fachbereich Gesellschaftswissenschaften Institut für Gesellschafts- und Politikanalyse 60054 Frankfurt Tel.Uni: 069 798-23543 Tel.priv: 069 55 43 92 e-mail: stegbauer@soz.uni-frankfurt.de Magazin: kommunikation@gesellschaft Journal für alte und neue Medien aus soziologischer, kulturanthropologischer und kommunikationswissenschaftlicher Perspektive www.kommunikation-gesellschaft.de noch druckfrisch: Stegbauer, Christian / Rausch, Alexander Strukturalistische Internetforschung. 2006. Ca. 240 S. Wiesbaden, VS-Verlag,* ISBN: 3-531-15110-X und ab 11.06 Stegbauer, Christian Geschmackssache? Eine kleine Soziologie für Genießer. 2006. Ca. 200 Seiten.ISBN 3-939519-16-2. Hamburg: Merus Mailingliste zur sozialen Netzwerkanalyse SNA-De https://dlist.server.uni-frankfurt.de/mailman/listinfo/sna-de *************************************************
participants (9)
-
Alex Halavais -
Anders Fagerjord -
Andy Roberts -
Chris Modzelewski -
Dr. Christian Stegbauer -
Dr. T. Michael Roberts -
Hugemusic -
Jeremy Hunsinger -
Mary-Helen Ward