Shirky's rules of group behaviour

As outlined in The Group is it’s Worst Enemy.

Things to assume:

  1. You cannot completely separate technical and social issues.
  2. Members are different than users. The core group.
  3. The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations.

Things to code for:

  1. If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in.
  2. Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. Have to design some way in which good works get recognized. The minimal way is, posts appear with identity. You can do more sophisticated things like having formal karma or “member since.”
  3. Three, you need barriers to participation. This is one of the things that killed Usenet. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities.
  4. You have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe’s law is a drag. […] You have to have some way to let users hang onto the less is more pattern, in order to keep associated with one another.

A non-rule choice snippet:

All groups of any integrity have a constitution. The constitution is always partly formal and partly informal. At the very least, the formal part is what’s substantiated in code – “the software works this way.”

The informal part is the sense of “how we do it around here.” And no matter how is substantiated in code or written in charter, whatever, there will always be an informal part as well. You can’t separate the two.

And:

Users have to be able to identify themselves and there has to be a penalty for switching handles. The penalty for switching doesn’t have to be total. But if I change my handle on the system, I have to lose some kind of reputation or some kind of context. This keeps the system functioning.