MeatballWiki

Edit History Raw

CommunitiesThatScale

Why the hell do you want CommunitiesThatScale? Aren't you happy to have a couple of friends? Do you want millions?

Yes, of course:

  • a community of millions: it's worth multimillions of dollars. Possibly billions.
  • and there is a thrill at the idea of millions of AdoringFans..

Please consider the list-subentries (like UniversalProduct or EvilMonopoly) not as required or sufficient, but as phenomenological observations, as remarkable patterns. Add your observations or patterns to make them discussable.

So why not do like (examples):

  • FlickR
    • UniversalProduct: photo storage and sharing
    • EvilMonopoly: none, but excessive costs of normal webspace when used for photo storage
    • ProsumerCapacity: any private photo shooter and professionals that want to create a showcase
    • ..
  • YouTube
    • UniversalProduct: video storage and sharing
    • EvilMonopoly: none, but excessive costs of normal webspace when used for video storage, lack of quality, very expensive streaming servers
    • ProsumerCapacity: any private video shooter and professionals that want to create a showcase
    • ..
  • ... (add more communities)

What made them successful?

  • They produce something that can be used - in principle - by everyone, let's call it a UniversalProduct. It helps if this is free, at least for a while.
  • They fill a real need. They often address an existing scarcity or bad market situation (expensive products or services).
  • There must be a ProsumerCapacity, the ability of the consumers to be also producers, at least to a certain extent.

How can such successes be reproduced?

  • Only in a different context, not by immitation.
  • You need a new unique and simple concept. Do a job, don't save the world.
  • The less social interactions necessary, the better.

What will help? What may be needed beside the concept?

  • Team expertise. you need specific knowledge in the field of application, a competent team (if you are a genius this can boil down to one person, but usually its two or more) that is able to produce a prototype and start its operation and marketing.
  • Resources. Professional backing by a company or investor (as it was with e. g. WikiPedia). You will need time and money. Time is money. It helps if you are economically independent.
  • Public. Some existing community to quickly address a large number of users (e. g. the university background of FaceBook)
  • Sympathy. Robin-Hood-situation against the EvilMonopoly (GnuLinux against Microsoft, WikiPedia against expensive encyclopedia). It helps if you are white, male, young, urban, English or American.
  • Luck. you must be in the right place at the right time. You must be the first. You must be in a situation, where others can't or won't steal your idea and overtake you easily.
  • Coolness. There is always something incalculable with a big success, it can't be enforced. It helps if you do it in a relaxed way, for fun, to create a living system, without staring at the billions or the fame you imagine to get.

What is on the way:

  • ...

Open fields:

  • music storage and sharing (for original musicians)
  • free journalism
    • UniversalProduct: free journalistic articles, tagged to region and topic
    • EvilMonopoly: large media corporations, often politically one-sided
    • ...
  • ...

Diskussion

NathanielThurston: I have no need or desire for millions of AdoringFans, and it seems self-evident that nobody can have millions of friends.

The reason I am interested in scaling healthy community processes to societies is quite simple: I think that solving this problem is necessary and sufficient for fostering the sort of "generous solidarity" that is required to for positive change in the global village; and that without substantial changes to the global village, planning on the scale of the lifetime of my children is impossible.

A second reason: I see a trend toward the recognition that self-aware communities are desirable things, and if this trend continues, I could easily imagine the same sort demand for membership in Meatball that already exists for wikipedia and the original wikis; and I would rather have better options than adopting bureacracy, limiting membership, fishbowling, or the other options we know of today.

HelmutLeitner: Nathaniel, do I understand you correctly, that you feel insecure about the future, especially on a global scale? And to feel more secure, you would need people to be more generous?

Do you think that the GlobalVillage needs a kind of GlobalMen, that embody certain virtues or values?

Do you think that the solution is technical, a kind of trust metrics, that will somehow produce this generousity? And to have a large positive effect, large communities are needed?

By the way, which wikis do you have in mind when you talk about "the original wikis"?

And why do you think that demand for Meatball membership (whatever that is) could become large?

NathanielThurston: My feelings about the future are complex, and I struggle to summarize them honestly and accurately. To begin with, I don't think that my efforts for change are necessary for the change to occur; rather, I perceive a wide array of similar changes, of which I am one among millions. It would be more accurate to say that I don't feel confident about the future, that it would be possible for the global situation to collapse in a number of degenerate ways, and also possible for it to pull through nicely. What does seem obvious is that things cannot possible proceed along the same course they've been following.

To tell the truth, I no longer remember the identity of the wikis I had in mind. I am recalling the various experiences I've read here over the past several months, about wiki growth. WikiWiki springs to mind. The demand for Meatball membership would be for similar lines: people want to "join in" with efforts which are recognized to have been successful and worthwhile. I think that the only thing stopping such a demand at present is the lack of widespread recognition of what you've done here.

I would separate generosity into two parts.

  1. Healthy communities foster generosity ("apparent altrusim") within the community. Trust metrics would be out of place in a small community (prefer SoftSecurity)
  2. My hope for the liquidity of trust is to foster generosity between people and organizations who are only indirectly connected, e.g., between me and a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend.

I may have made a mistake in the problem statement, which I think is contributing to a misunderstanding. I do not advocate large communities; instead, I would advocate thinking of societies by extending the same principles we use when thinking about communities. Meatball, for example, might change over time from an online community (where each person interacts with, and has a professional or personal relationship with, each other person) to an online society (where most people have no direct interaction)

HelmutLeitner: Nathaniel, I think a lot of wikizens will agree to see wikis as kind of laboratories for democracy. They are great for experimentation: action is quick, and everything gets protocolled. They down-side is, that there are many places where experiments happen and the interest is not extraordinary to put experiences in a common pot, to learn. The negative experiences are often hidden, because only few want to expose their errors. The positive experiences are often hidden, because they are seen as valuable know-how to build on in a competitive environment. There is probably a lack of generosity in this regard.

When you talk about trust and generosity, I still feel I do not quite understand what you mean. If you say that you would like to "trust a friend of a friend" it sounds to me, as if you would have no trust in a person you do not know. And that you need trust ... yes, for what? For communication? For collaboration? Isn't that what generosity can also about: to be generous with your InitialTrust. One can interact (communicate, collaborate) starting with small steps that become larger and larger, and if successful, then TrustFromExperience can build very quickly. Theory for that could be taken from TitForTat or from PatternTheory.

When I hear you say "Healthy communities foster generosity within the community" than alarm bells ring in my head. This sounds near to right-wing GroupThink, "healthy" but negative to everything that is "unhealthy", and hostile to those people outside of the group. I can't imagine that you think in that direction, because it would be contrary to everything you said before. I think that "healthy" is a pretty dangerous word outside the realm of health.

NathanielThurston: Helmut, I see what you mean about "within the community". Healthy communities foster generosity, period.

I like the term "health" for a community, and I do think that "health" (or whatever you want to call it) can be evaluated at least as accurately for a community as it can for an individual. More generally, I find the analogy between the individual and the community to be a powerful source of insight. I will agree that there are dangers associated with this power.

My personal difficulty with trust is not in showing trust, for I feel that I extend trust easily; in particular, I feel that I have shown a great deal of trust toward the Meatball community. Nor do I feel that I often go wrong when I extend trust, for I don't get any sense that I've been particularly "hard done by". Rather, my difficulty lies with being trusted, and here I guess that much of the difficulty lies with my status as an "outsider" -- I don't "fit in" with any group of people (including here, as I do not meet Sunir's criteria for being respected in this community). Also, I have, and have expressed, unusual ideas, and that fact alone is enough to make the task of earning trust difficult.

HelmutLeitner: Nathaniel, does this mean you would like to have a trust system, so that you can refer to your "trust status", that possibly reflects more objectively that you can or should be trusted?

Maybe you do not see, to what large extent Meatball actually is a community of outsiders. Sunir is an outsider, he :-) is "the Obama of the wiki world". A lot of other people, including me, are typical outsiders. That's why we are relatively open to outsiders. Maybe you distrust communities, because of bad experiences, in the sense of EveryoneIsaSuccessor. Maybe your expectations don't fit to the situation, what can develop in a specific time spam. Maybe ...

Anyway, I see you and trust you as a member of the Meatball community.

NathanielThurston: Helmut, my only real need is for trust is for the purpose of gainful employment, for I would describe my financial situation as "stabilized", but not secure. I think I've painted myself into a corner -- people who lead hierarchical for-profit communities (e.g., corporations) seem to fear (with some justification) my "rocking the boat". I really don't know if anything can be done about the situation, other than to carry on as I have been, supporting my family on short-term grants and contract work from the mathematics and computer science communities.

I would find a trust system to be immensely helpful, but I would want one that reflects objectively the ways in which I can -- and should not -- be trusted. For example, I am a natural planner, but I have had a tendency to execute poorly on plans, especially when I feel that those plans are poorly constructed. AaronPoeze wrote an [honest recommendation] for me when I tried (unsuccessfully) to start the new ideas community; perhaps that gives a better idea of what I mean.

Trust as a single-dimensional construct doesn't work well: It divides the population into two groups: sociopaths (a tiny minority), and everyone else. I have made a practice of trusting people to act in their own perceived self-interest, using WikiPedia:abductive_reasoning to guess what that perception is from circumstantial evidence. It seems to work well for me.

HelmutLeitner: Nathaniel, what I know for sure is, that being a Meatball member won't translate into money or job opportunities. You could see it as a repository and laboratory for ideas, a place to learn. The advantage of being a member, compared to being a reader, is that one can connect better to the topics. It's like diving into the water instead of looking at it from the beach. But even jumping into the water won't bring you fish.

NathanielThurston: Helmut, what I hope to gain here is via exploring more about the subject of trust. Already I have benefited, for I discovered first what would have been required with a particular potential employer I had in mind; and second that this particular employer was a sort of a "cult of money", hostile toward people who do not share their passion.

SunirShah: Scaling Meatball is a red herring. Meatball is unscalable.

Scalable "communities" aren't really communities, but more like media or spaces where existing communities move in to inhabit and then find connections between each other via the spaces or media.

Key points:

  • The medium begins by reflecting CommunityOnline more than OnlineCommunity
  • The medium is made up of several possibly non-interacting communities
  • The medium can EnlargeSpace to accommodate the various communities
  • The medium encourages new relationships and communities to form out of the CommunityOnline.

For instance, FaceBook began by providing a method to organize the existing communities of classes at universities and colleges. Later, they added workplaces. Finally, with enough critical mass, they allowed new groups to form based on interests of already existing members.

For instance, UseNet began by providing newsgroups around well known categorizations of fields of interest. These mental groupings existed before the medium, even if the communities did not in a strict sense. Later, as the value of the medium proved itself, UseNet expanded to create newsgroups that were local to UseNet (e.g. alt.barney.die.die.die, or alt.religion.kibology)

For what it's worth, it's practically a Law of Media that all media start by mimicking the old media before becoming their own thing, and the phenomena of supporting CommunityOnline before OnlineCommunity is an extension of that.

Discussion moved to ScalingMeatball

See also: CommunityMayNotScale