I went to a concert in Aberdeen last night – part of the Burnsong Songhouse Tour 2008. It was a collection of musicians playing songs they wrote when they were brought together, as an experiment, for 5 days in the countryside of Dumfires and Galloway. And it as all inspired by long-dead Scottish poet Robert Burns. I thought maybe something interesting might come of the mix, but the songs they produced were okay, and nothing really notable. When I left the venue my memory was of 7 people on stage, 5 of whom were bellowing into their microphones trying to be heard over instruments and eachother.
This set me thinking about numbers and collaboration in the social web. We’re told (eg. Larry Weber, Seth Godin and Clay Shirky), that online communities can achieve important things, create synergies and make change happen. But what’s the relationship between the size of these communities and their effectiveness? Is it the case that more members equals greater effectiveness? We might think so, but how true is that?
Online communities form for various reasons:
* To learn
* To share information
* To effect change
But depending on the objective, I can see a situation where the quality of the member is more important than the quantity, for example in the person’s activism (their willingness to take part in online discussion, lobby government etc) as part of a political protest group. But there will doubtless be examples out there of communities which look impressive because of membership stats, but which are less than effective in achieving their goal.
There’s more in this post than I have time for today and I’ll return to it in coming weeks, but the proliferation of online communities in the form of social networking sites, wikis and aggregation networks is being hailed by many as a fundamental shift towards democracy as information and its distribution balances out between the public and traditional media networks. But how effective are all these communities in their objectives? Hopefully more effective than the members of the Burnsong collaboration I experienced last night.
