Social Capacity of 150 [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]
In the Ecosystem of Networks, 150 is the defining limit of Social Capacity at the Social Network layer. Steve Mallett comments on the Rule of 150 and Communities, saying that recognizing this natural limit can enhance community design (this post is worth reading in full).
From Steve’s post:
Consider another phenomenom we’ve all experienced. You join a community, whether it’s an email list, website or other and it gains some popularity and so the members in the community grows into an unmanagable size. When I say manageable, I mean self-managing. And so you leave or become frustrated and you lament the ‘good ole days’ of what your community was.
Weblogs don’t really suffer from this potential growth since everyone act as their own entity.
Steve also writes about ~150 blogs he reads. I read much less (11 people are my “regular read” roll and 30+ RSS feeds in my aggregator) and I don’t feel comfortable increasing those numbers. Then, coming back to Ecosystem of Networks, it seems that my “comfortable blogging” range fits more creative network type…
This post also calls another association – KMSS02 discussion on defining communities of practice: “corporate KM guys” use this term to address a wide range of structures, from 10 expert group meeting face-to-face to 2000 members on-line community. Last year we were suspicious that “magic number 150″ could be used to find out how differently those communities operate. I didn’t hear of much research in this direction, but may be it’s due to the small number of my RSS subscriptions :)
Tags: communitiesArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/03/28.html#a508; comments are here.
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