Theory of group size. (01)
Hypothesis: (02)
The types of activities that groups can participate in
vary following a power of 2 pattern. (03)
1
2
4
8
16
32
64
128
256
512
1024
4096
8192 (04)
A pair of people behave differently and can do
different things than when you remove a person
or when you add a person. (05)
IE, the dynamics of 2 people is distinctly different
than the dynamics of 3 people. (06)
The dynamics of 3 people is much more related to how
4 people work, than to how 2 people work. (07)
Most of the experience I have are in the use
of teams in classes and watching teams interact. (08)
Pairs are different than triplets. (09)
So Either do all pairs, or do groups of 3/4 (010)
4 people behave differently than 5 people.
Anything over 8 people and you can forget about
basic team work. They will naturally split apart
into subgroups. (011)
An optimal size for a team in a complex student
lab is 5-6. (012)
8 is too many
3 is too small. (013)
If you teach in a classroom. A class of 15 behave
differently than a class of 8. (014)
And a class of 16 behave differently than a class of 32. (015)
When your class gets above 32, you end up loosing the
personal relationship with student. And the effect
of the anonymous naysayer in classes becomes more
pronounced. (016)
Getting beyond 64 people in a class makes yet another
quantum jump in how impersonal classes are. And
lecture styles that work for 20 student work poorly
for classes of 32. And fail to work at all for classes of
64. (017)
Communities like churches follow this same kind of
pattern. Groups of 15 do different things than
groups of 32. (018)
When you have 128 people or less, you get one kind
of church. When you get above 256, you get another. (019)
In the mormon ward structure, they break the wards
into smaller pieces, when they get between 325 and 400
people. (020)
This keeps the typical size between 150-300... Right
around my 256 number. I think this is the largest
you want to get a close community where you can actually
recognize and know something about most of the people
in the group and have a personal sense of belonging. (021)
In a Pattern Language, Christopher alexander suggests that
cities (democracies) should not be bigger than 10,000.
I would argue down a bit to the 8000 size. (022)
It is about how bit a group can be and have a
reasonable democratic conversation. (023)
I propose that email lists have these same kinds of
group interactions, where the dynamics change with
size in quantum steps. (024)
-----
John Sechrest . Helping people use
. computers and the Internet
. more effectively
.
. Internet: sechrest@peak.org
.
. http://www.peak.org/~sechrest (025)
--
This message is archived at: (026)
http://collab.blueoxen.net/forums/cgi-bin/mesg.cgi?a=yak&i=200401100033.i0A0XkR20663@jas.peak.org (027)
|