This year's topic is Food, and this year many of my students of my BGIedu class Using the Social Web for Social Change are using the day to help kick off their "Beat Blog" assignments. The goal of Beat Blogs is for each student to choose a topic they are passionate about and blog about it at least weekly for two and a half months. Many students decide to keep their blogs going afterwards, am I'm always tickled when that happens.

Some of the blog posts by my students on the topic of Food:

• Make a Connection for Blog Action Day (from Building Stronger Communities Through Sustainable Agriculture, a blog on sustainable agriculture)
• Blog Action Day & Permaculture (from Dave-A-Culture, a blog on permaculture)
• to Meat or not to Meat (from Near the Level, a moderate's blog on polarities)
• Learning What to Eat and What to Believe (from Liz Toots, a blog on digestive health)
• Food, Attention & Leadership (from Attention to Change, a blog on attention)
• Food and Dignity (from Apps for Change, a blog on web-based and mobile applications for good)
• Food Security, Stewardship, and Cross-Cultural Bridge Building (Cultivating Bridges, a blog on intersection of economic community development & faith)
• The Importantance of Fair Trade Chocolate (from Cacao for a Cause, a blog on cacao, sustainability, and conscious consumption)
• Listen to Your Stomach (from Sounds & Silences, a blog on sound, silence and holding space)
• A Solution for Food Deserts (from Rhizome Design Blog, a blog on designing solutions to empower people to radiate joy)
• Social Ignition via Food (from Social Ignition, a blog on empowering non-profits)
• Local Organic Food IS Clean Technology (from Opportunity Knocks for Cleantech, a blog on opportunities in clean tech)
• Good Food. Good Business. (from Spark in the Dark, a blog on living well while living lighter)
• Monsanto's Perfect Pumpkin (from Taryn's GMO Beat, a blog on GMO genetically modified foods)
• We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programming... (from (ir)Rational minds, a blog on schizophrenia and mental health)
• Redesigning food systems. Redefining impacts. (from Systems Diva (in the Making), a blog on systems thinking)
• Can The Oceans Continue to Feed our Growing Population? (from Follow the Ocean's Heartbeat, a blog on ocean conservation)
• Food and health (care) (from Bodywork Economics, a blog on a business case for health, wellness and preventative therapies)
• Blog Action Day on Food (from ticsnow, a blog on technology innovation creativity and sustainability now)

All of these bloggers are new to the blogosphere, but if you appreciate what they have to say, give a quick comment — it goes a long way to encourage them to continue.

Literally.

That’s because Circles is the Google+ feature that users are generating the most buzz about. It’s Google’s answer to the problem of organizing your social graph online.

If you’re not familiar with a social graph it’s a map of everyone you know and how they are related to you. Social graphs are tricky; as you try to define them you’ll inevitably run into some complications.

Pete Pachal, news director of @PCMag comments:

“People want things easy, and Google Circles isn’t easy. It puts the burden on users to take the time to think about each and every contact and put them in a specific bucket. To use the feature effectively, users will certainly have to create new Circles, and that requires even more thought. After using Google+ for a few minutes last night, I was often unsure which Circles to put certain people in and, more to the point, which to leave them out of. And what if you create a new Circle that should include some of the people in other Circles you already have?”

Circles are lists that you’ve created by grouping people together and giving them a name. They’re important in Google+ because when you post you must explicitly say which “Circles” you wish to share with. Posting to a limited list of people is a big change from existing social networks such as Facebook, where posts are sent to all mutual friends by default, or Twitter, where posts are public. This change forces you to think more deeply about your social graph and who should see each item you post.

Your Initial Set of Circles

Google+ will present you with 4 suggested set of Circles: Friends, Family, Acquaintances, and Following.

Google+ also defines five special Circles: Two are only for reading: "Stream" which is everyone in any of your Circles; and "Incoming" which is are posts that are shared to you by people not in your Circles. Then are three special Circles managed by Google only for posting: "Your Circles" which is everyone in any of your Circles; “Extended” which is everyone in your Circles plus the people in their Circles; and “Public” which is anyone.

Few find this default set to be sufficient. As a result, most Google+ users are soon creating new Circles, moving people around, renaming Circles, etc.

There are sound reasons for people finding the default Circles limiting. Sociological research shows that everyone has a number of concentric personal circles (see my blog post Community by the Numbers, Part II: Personal Circles for more details). These circles are sometimes called “ego-centric” social graphs as the individual is located in the center. This sort of graph is the model I used when I began reorganizing my own Google+ Circles.

I started out using Support (for my Support Circle), Close (for my Sympathy Circle), Trusted (for my Trust Circle), and Colleagues (for my Emotional Circle), but that didn’t work for very long. I’ve since been experimenting with a number of different ways to organize my Circles. I wanted an initial set that would offer useful early advice for using Google+ but would still be applicable for when expanded to hundreds of people. (I now have over 600 people in my Circles.)

One insight I’ve had is to avoid the word ‘friends’, which has been corrupted to almost meaninglessness in recent years. So instead I use terminology like Peers for my trust circle and Kith for the combination of my support and sympathy circles. (Kith may be familiar to you from the phrase “kith and kin”. The root of kith means “to know”, thus it’s those people that you know very well and that know you very well.)

I also learned that sub-Circles exist within Circles. Using a ‘general ledger’ system of naming Circles with numbers—which I’ll demonstrate in a moment—helps me keep these Circles and sub-Circles in order and allows me to easily add new Circles when I need to. Hopefully Google+ will in the future introduce features that allow us to order Circles as we please, but until then this numbering system works.

Working with Google+ has also shown me that some Circles are for reading and other Circles are for posting. I’ll talk a little more about this below.

It has only been a week, but by combining these insights to organize my Circles I’ve improved my ease of use and become better able to manage my time while using Google+.

Here is my recommended initial list of Circles:

0.0 ME - a simple Circle with just yourself in it, for saving posts, for drafts, etc.
1.0 KIN - your family & extended family
2.0 KITH - your best friends, your confidants (i.e. those with whom one shares a secret or private matter, trusting them not to repeat it to others)
3.0 PEERS - your trusted colleagues, those who you work closely with, your collaborators
4.0 LOCAL - your neighbors, parents of your children's friends, people you'd invite to a party
5.0 {various groups & interests}
6.0 ACQUAINTANCES - people you know, but that you don't know well or that don’t know you well
7.0 FOLLOWS ME - people who follow you on Google+, who you may or may not know
8.0 WATCHING - people whose posts you read, but who don't necessarily read your posts
9.0 SPECIAL - useful for special lists & exceptions

Expanding Circles

Many people will find my default set of ~10 Circles to be very useful, and need only add a few more. However, the design of this set is to allow for much greater expansion should you need it.

Like those “personal circles” that I wrote about previously, most of the Circles above are ego-centric: they’re fundamentally centered on your own personal social graph. This isn’t the only potential type of Circle, however. Socio-centric Circles aren’t centered on you, though they still have some sort of membership boundaries, while info-centric Circles are based on topics instead of being based on relationships. These socio-centric and info-centric Circles will support many relationships better than ego-centric Circles do.

If someone seems to write a lot about a particular topic, I put him or her into an appropriate info-centric Circle. My own info-centric Circles thus include people who post about topics like iOS Development, the Social Web, Sustainability/Green, and Entrepreneuring. If a number of people are all part of a group or all come from a certain geographical area then I put them together in a socio-centric circle. After creating the Circles, I put the ones that were geographic into 4.0 of my ledger, then placed the others in 5.0. (I tried separating out groups and interests, and found that didn’t work, so now I keep them together.)

I now have over 600 people in my Google Plus+ social graph. All together my Circles now look something like this:

0.0 Read Later
0.1 Drafts
0.2 Book Project
0.3 iPad Project

1.0 ALL KIN
1.1 Immediate Family
1.2 Extended Family

2.0 ALL KITH
2.1 Close Friends
2.2 Old But Distant Friends
2.3 Distant Family

3.0 ALL PEERS
3.2 Collaborators
3.3 Current Professional Colleagues
3.4 Former Professional Colleagues

4.0 ALL LOCAL
4.1 Local Kith, Kin & Peers
4.2 Local Berkeley
4.3 Non-Local Seattle
4.3 Non-Local Portland

5.0 ALL GROUPS & INTERESTS
5.1 Entrepreneurs
5.2 Apple & iOS
5.3 - iOSDevCamp
5.4 Green & Sustainability
5.5 - BGIedu
5.6 Social Web
5.7 - Jerry’s Kids

6.0 ACQUAINTANCES
6.1 Familiar Strangers
6.2 Friendly Strangers

7.0 FOLLOWS ME
7.1 Core Audience
7.2 Commented or Shared My Posts

8.0 WATCHING
8.2 Pundits
8.3 Celebrities
8.4 Noisy

9.0 ALL
9.1 Everyone But Pundits, Celebrities & Noisy
9.2 Read Daily
9.3 Read Weekly

In a future blog post I’ll share my ongoing experience with using this approach to Circles, but this example shows how easy it is to separate and add Circles as your interests change and grow.

Managing Your Circles

We, as humans, enjoy social networks in large part because we get to interact with people. Managing your Circles is thus about more than just understanding your social graph. It also allows you to manage your time effectively when you read and share with other people on Google+. Here is my approach for how to manage the time you spend reading, sharing, and managing your social graph.

Circles for Reading

I find it useful to think about Circles that are explicitly for reading as different from Circles intended for sharing. I have a few of these read-only Circles. Thus, my “Pundits” Circle contains people that share a lot and for whom I don’t always want to read everything. My “Read Daily” Circle is conversely for people for whom I want to read everything they post.

I’ve also found Circles helpful for close collaborators. It’s easy in Google+ to have a conversation with someone directly by simply typing their name as +<name> into the share field of posts. However, I find these direct posts get lost over time. To resolve this problem, create a Circle dedicated to just the two of you: a dyad. I have a number of people that I’m collaborating with closely and I use these small Circles to both keep track of our mutual posts and to see what they are thinking about at the moment. Examples of this kind of two-person Circle include my “Book Project” and “iPad Project”

Time Management of Reading Circles

Each day I look first at my “ALL KIN”, “ALL KITH” and and “ALL PEER” Circles to see what is going on with my support, sympathy and trust cliques. Then I’ll read my “Read Daily” Circles.

After reading these daily basics (which I try to keep to a limited number), I’ll typically pick an interest, a geography, or a group, depending on what I’m doing that day. (My personal time-management style is to only follow one interest per day, e.g. if I am working on my iPad app then I’m not reading Social Web posts.) If I’m preparing a blog post and want to see what my audience is thinking I might review “Core Audience”, or “FOLLOWS ME”. If I’m traveling I might read one of my non-local Circles such as “Seattle”. If I’m doing ‘weak-signal research’ I might start with “ALL INTERESTS”, but if I’m particularly tolerant of noise I might read “Familiar Strangers”, “FOLLOWS ME”, “Everyone but Pundits & Strangers”, “Pundits”, or even “ALL”.

Posting to Circles

One of the important reasons for creating Circles in the first place is so that you can share with groups of people. I’ve developed some strategies for this as well.

Circles for Posting

I’ve found it useful to create a Circle that only contains yourself. I have two of these — “Read Later”, and “Drafts”. If I’m reading and I see something interesting but don’t have time for it immediately, I’ll share it with my “Read Later” Circle so that I can quickly go back to it. Similarly, if I need to do some more research before writing and sharing, I’ll share my immediate thoughts in “Drafts”. As new features are added to Google+ these Circles will hopefully become obsolete, but they are useful for now.

Managing Sharing Privacy of Private Posts

When sharing, you want to ask yourself if this is ‘private’ post, a ‘quasi-public’ post or a ‘public’ post.

My private posts tend to go “KIN”, “KITH”, a dyad project, or one of the sub-Circles of PEER depending on their context. Some posts that are of only geographic interest (say a party, or local event) will be shared privately to the appropriate local Circle. If you are using my ledger system of using numbers in Circle names, these are the lower numbers—5.0 and below are Circles where I’m more sensitive about privacy.

Once shared, these more personal posts will be labeled as “Limited” instead of using the “Public” label that allows anyone to see them. If a recipient tries to share a “Limited” post, a box will pop up reminding the person: “This post was originally shared with a limited audience – remember to be thoughtful about who you share it with”. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, one purpose of Circles on Google+ is to determine who gets what information.

Though it may be easy to create Circles to segregate those with whom you wish to share private information, the recipients of your posts have no such limitations and could share outward beyond your intent (though they will be warned if they try to, as noted above). To enable further privacy you can disable resharing of these personal posts made to your Circles. To do so, share your post to a non-public Circle, then you select the arrow in the upper-right-hand corner where you can edit, delete or disable the post, and click on the final option, “Disable Reshare”.

There’s another privacy issue: by clicking the grey “Limited” label, a message’s recipient can see all others you shared the post with. This could potentially result in privacy problems, as the reader could discover who is in one of your Circles. There are ways of eliminating this by going into your Privacy account settings, which I will cover in a future post.

Managing Sharing Privacy of Quasi-Public Posts

I call posts “quasi-public” when they’re of narrow interest to a specific group or a topic that isn’t really relevant to other members of my audience. I find these quasi-public posts happen the most for my more esoteric interests—for instance, when I’m sharing a complex iPhone development article that is really only interesting to a narrow group of my contacts.

In Google Reader, I typically wouldn’t share these articles at all because there were so many of my contacts that wouldn’t be interested in them and it would only be noise to them. Ditto with Twitter. I found that sometimes people would stop following me after a conference I attended because I posted regularly and the conference was not of interest to them. This could be quite frustrating at times. Though these posts were not private by any means, I only wanted to share them with a specific group, such as an iPhone group. Now with Circles, I can share this information easily with my “Apple & iOS” Circle. I find that this feature is what makes Google+’s Circles so potentially powerful.

Though I might offer much of this more esoteric information as “quasi-public” posts to a specific group or interest, I’ll probably offer the best of them to the “Public”. Sometimes that is what it means to be a Maven—you share across social network boundaries.

Managing Sharing Privacy of Public Posts

Sharing a post to your “Your Circles” is effectively public, as is sharing to “Extended Circles”. Ask yourself if there is really some reason why you don’t want to make a post totally “Public” so that it is searchable by those who are not members of Google+. If there is some reason, consider sharing to your “ALL” Circle or some other more limited circle instead, as you’ll have more control and can turn off resharing or commenting.

Managing Your Social Graph

Maintaining your Circles can take away from the time you can spend on reading and sharing. I’ve come up with the following strategy to limit the time I spend.

To start with, I have some basic rules for which Circles to place people in:

• When I’m notified that someone is following me, I add them to “FOLLOWS ME” and an appropriate other Circle. If I vaguely recognize a follower’s name or face, I put them in “Familiar Strangers”. If I don’t recognize them at all but they look interesting, I add them to “Friendly Strangers”.

• When I’m notified that someone has +1’ed, commented, or mentioned me in a post, I add them to “Core Audience” and the appropriate sub-Circle. I will also make sure that the other Circles they are in are correct.

• If I discover while I’m reading that someone is too noisy for the Circle I selected, I’ll move them to a more appropriate Circle—or place them in the “Noisy” Circle or even block them.

Time Management of Your Social Graph

In addition I review a few of my Circles every day. I do so by going to “Manage Circles”, then selecting “People in your Circles” and sorting by last name. I choose that letter of the alphabet that corresponds to the day of the month and hover my mouse over each name. (For example, I look at names starting with “L” on July 12th, as “L” is the 12th letter.) Google+ highlights the Circles that each person is in. If they’re in the wrong Circle, I move them. I might even click on some people and review their profile so that I can see who they are—or (if I already know them) see what they are up to lately, update my address book, and maybe send them a brief email. At the end of the month (on the 27th through the 31st) I review my overall Circles lists. This way, over the course of each month I briefly review my entire social network, without spending too much time on it. (I try to spend 10 minutes or so a day.)

Periodically (right now weekly, but hopefully eventually monthly) I do some larger scale management of my Circles. Learning how to do this the first time is a pain, but once you know how it only takes a few minutes.

• I go to “Manage Circles” and select “People Who Have Added You”. I sort that list by “Not Yet in Circles”, “Select All” and add the people revealed to “FOLLOWS ME”.

• I then do the same with all of my Circles to update my “ALL” Circle.

• Finally, I copy my “ALL” circle to “Everyone But Pundits, Celebrities & Noisy” and remove any Pundits, Celebrities or Noisy people from that Circle.

When managing your Circles, remember the motto “Perfection is the Enemy of the Good”. You are the only one that sees who is in which Circle, and you can place people in multiple Circles. So your Circles don’t have to be perfect, just good enough. If you share a lot of private posts, concentrate on making sure that those more personal Circles are more accurate.

Using these approaches, you should find Circle management quick, and you won’t get mired down in Circle management for hours at a time.

Summary

Looking back, I wish I had this organization when I started on Google+ two weeks ago. By using some of these techniques from the beginning I would have made my life a lot easier. Over the next month I now have to go back and re-organize people and re-Circle them. I hope sharing these tips will make your use of Google+ simpler from the start!

Also, I expect that Google will be adding new features to make Google+ easier. For instance I’m hoping for #hashtags (the ability to tag posts into topic categories), favorites (the ability to tag posts into a persistent archive, hopefully with an option tag), ordering Circles, concentric Circles, and better integration with Google Reader. (I share my favorite blog posts on Google Reader at  and my best of best articles and posts in Twitter Favorites or Delicious.)

As with any new online feature, people are finding out new things and coming up with new ideas every day. So what are your methods for organizing your Circles and social graph?

If you want to follow me on Google+, I’m at +Christopher Allen.

If you'd like to comment using Google+, there is a public comment thread about this post.

If you would like to subscribe to my Google+ posts in Google Reader, use my PlusFeed.

Some other posts from my blog related to this post:

• 2005-03: Community by the Numbers, Part II: Personal Circles
• 2005-02: Dunbar Triage: Too Many Connections
• 2004-08: Intimacy Gradient and Other Lessons from Architecture
• 2004-08: Progressive Trust

Some recent high signal-to-noise blog posts on Google+ and/or managing your Circles:

• +Matt Stratton: How I Set Up My Circles in Google+
• +Anson Alex: Guide to Working with Circles in Google Plus
• +Adina Levin: The promise of Google+ for organizing
• +Sterling Ledet A Thought on Google+ Circles – Privacy vs. Relevance
• +Dave Pollard: Google+: On Communities, Circles, Friendship and Love
• +Beth Kanter: Are You Going To Adopt Google+ for Professional Learning/Networking? Why or Why Not?
• +Damon Morda: Five Steps to Configuring Privacy on Google Plus (+)

Some quality recent public Google+ posts regarding Google+ or managing your Circles (be sure to look over the comments):

• +Robert Scoble: My tips for newer users of Google+
• +Dave Gray: Where circles can go
• +Dave Gray: Sharing Universe
• +Dave Gray: Is Google plus public or private?It’s neither, and both!
• +Beth Kanter: Insightful Threads
• +Craig Kanalley: Tips & Thoughts on Google+
• +Paul Goode: Sketch on Google+

My bookmarks to various papers and websites on related to this topic are available at delicious.com/ChristopherA under some of the following tags:

• personal circles - everything I have on the of personal limits.
• familiar strangers - those people you recognize by face.

Illustration by Nancy Margulies, Many thanks to +Elyn Andersson and Shannon Appecline for their assistance with this post.

The real value of participating in this exchange is in the reciprocity and the social capital, but if the indie project is financially successful some ill will can arise about who really owes whom. One way that some creative producers deal with this is to have in effect two budgets, the real budget, and the virtual budget. Joss Whedon (creator and producer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Serenity, Firefly, Dollhouse, etc.) describes how he did this for his recent successful internet project Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog in a recent interview at the Wharton business school:

Whedon: We got so much of this done through people doing us favors — department heads and people who have access to things. But you've got to pay your day-to-day crew. The actors all did it for nothing. And we all did it for nothing. So, the production costs alone — the basic costs of filming the thing, and getting the locations, props and everything — ran a little over $200,000.

We had a secondary budget drawn up in case of a profit, wherein we were trying to find rates for Internet materials. In some cases they didn't exist. We used models that had been created by the guild for repurposed, or reused, material that we used for original [content], because this had never come up before.

We didn't want to leave a sour taste and say, "Well, we made some money off of you guys being kind." It was like: No, everybody has to benefit from what they've done, obviously not enormously — it's Internet money we're talking about — but as soon as we got in the black, we paid everybody off.

So that budget was probably about twice what the original budget was.

Knowledge@Wharton: You've now earned more than twice the original cost?

Whedon: Yes.

Knowledge@Wharton: Which members of the production shared in the profits on the backend?

Whedon: The crew that got paid, got paid. [Those] who didn't get paid [included people like] department heads who had jobs and could afford to do this as a lark.

As we go forward into profit, there are also residual schedules and payment schedules for all of the creative people. We're trying to figure out how that works.

From the start I also laid down a gross participation scheme for my three key actors and the other three writers. While the guild was negotiating for one-tenth of a yen, I said, "How about we just get into some percentages." It was an opportunity to say to the guilds, "Guess how much better we can do" — which, in the case of the Internet, is the only way for the guilds to survive.

I've used a similar technique for internet startups, where the favors and the free time often fly wild and cause the entrepreneurs problems later.

My general rule of thumb is to get entrepreneurs to think one-third brains, one-third brawn, and one-third money. That is, people who bring knowledge, people, resources, brand, etc. get 1/3 of the outcome, people who actually work on the project get 1/3, and people who fronted the money or paid cash for expenses get the last third. Many people get a little equity from all three piles. If money comes in, the people who fronted cash get their money back first, then the other shares of revenues are distributed to everyone else based on the contributions.

It isn't a perfect model, but an afternoon of discussion with a team early on the entrepreneurial process--using this as a starting point for discussions — is often very successful in addressing future issues head-on before people become invested in differing expectations.

I suspect that many other industries may have interesting creative ideas on how to monetize favor if an outcome is good, but otherwise give out reciprocity of favors or social capital in the common good. Do you know of any of these?

Credits: Joss Whedon photo CC-NC licensed by JD Lasica / SocialMedia.biz.

Late this evening while catching up on my feeds, I saw for the first time that this year's Blog Action Day is on the topic of Climate Change. This event is sponsored yearly by Change.org. I wish I had known earlier as this would have been a great exercise for my sustainable MBA students at BGI.edu, as they are all creating their blogs this week for my class "Using the Social Web for Social Change".

This is now the second time this week that a significant event on this topic has slipped by me. Apparently on Monday the 19th there will be a Social Media for Sustainability Conference in San Francisco, that seems to have a really good list of speakers. But I only heard about it yesterday.

Part of the problem is that as a blogger I'm not hooked in tight with the sustainability community — clearly because of my BGIedu connections I am sympathetic, but I mainly for the last I've have been writing about the social web or the iPhone. My disconnect demonstrates the challenge of communicating outside your own social circles, both for those trying to create change, and to those that might benefit from the message.

Which brings me to a point that I need to make to my students – we have to figure out how to get ourselves out of info ruts. I teach a technique of Scan Focus Act that is really good at letting you manage your time to read and connect to a larger number of people via blogs, however, if you are too insular, you still may not get the information you need on time. It is through the weak links that we often get our useful information from, and we have to take time to maintain those weak links as well as the strong links to our community that are more easy to maintain as they are more satisfying.

Other then the fact that I learned about it late, I'm reasonably pleased by the example that the Blog Action Day website serves for my students. It satisfies the basic principles of identification and connection, and has a number of good calls for action, the first being to register your blog. The links featuring blog posts with whitehouse.gov, UK prime minister Gordon Brown, and a number of major websites, including the third on the list being in spanish, give the site a credibility. The most recents tab gave the site authenticity. I think I probably would have made the signup process shorter, and had users fill out information later, but it wasn't bad. 

There are a lot of things at this website which will be a good jumping off point for my students to think about as they work on their on blogs on sustainability, and their future Social Change media projects.

I talk about this a bit in my Group Threshold and Dunbar Number posts, where I call the group threshold size of between 10 and 24 people the “Judas Number” nadir, or low point. These group threshold nadirs exist when groups are too large for some processes to function effectively, but too small for others to work.

I am particularly aware of this threshold when I host small parties at my home. At 7 or so people everything just seems to work — conversations flow, everybody gets to participate, and everyone has fun. A the numbers climb past 10 I find that I as the host have to work harder, to be more aware of making sure that everyone is having a good time and that no one is left out. At some point as a party gets larger things just begin to flow again, as there are enough people that small groups can form and conversation flows well once more.

I've also seen this at business meetings. When my entrepreneurial companies were small an “all hands” meeting could be incredibly effective. All the issues and ideas got brought up, and everyone felt committed to our decisions. However, as these meeting grew, at some point the “all hands” meeting took too long and started requiring process and rules to be effective. The energy this consumed also diminished much of the efficacy of the meeting.

One tool that I've used to manage these odd-sized groups in the past is what I call “The Braid”. It is derived from a group process called the Café Method, of which The World Café and Conversation Café are excellent examples. In The Café Method, people meet in smaller groups around tables, and then flow from table to table sharing ideas, but ideally keeping each table at 4-7 people. There is an excellent free PDF guide to the Café Method offered by The World Café called Cafe To Go.

The Braid is a little more organized then the more ad-hoc Café Method. When you start a meeting you are given a small card that tells you which table to sit at for each round. Each table is assigned a scribe for each round to take notes at the table, and to report out the notes to everyone who arrives for the next round.

One nice thing about the organization of The Braid is that over the course of a number of rounds you'll have a brand new group of people to talk to during each round. Thus over the course of an hour or so you'll actually get to have a relatively short yet rich conversation with almost everyone in the room, rather than with just a few.

There are different forms of The Braid for different numbers of tables and sizes of groups, but my favorite is the Four Table Braid for groups of a minimum of 16 to a maximum of 28 people. One of the peculiar things about this Braid is that it seems to function well if people arrive at different times. The Braid fills first table A with 4 people so that they can begin talking, then fills table B, C, and D the same way. Once those tables are full, new arrivals are woven into The Braid one at a time until all tables have 5 people, then 6, then the max of 7 for a total of 28 people.

Another nice thing about the Four Table Braid is that no one needs to be the scribe more then once; the task is equally shared among all but the last 8 to arrive in a group of 28. Also, in just 4 rounds with 16 people, 90%+ of the participants have met. With 28 people, you simply only need 5 rounds to match the same 90%+ meeting percentage.

I find The Braid useful for a variety of different situations. The simplest usage is as a group warming and introduction exercise. You need not do more then two or three rounds in order for more than half of the people to have met each other. The Braid is also useful with a focused objective. For instance, I once used it after a game designers' conference, with each table having a list of "game design laws" where the participants were asked to either give an example that was in favor of the law or contradicted the law. It also can be useful in combination with a variety of other group process techniques, for instance after an MG Taylor Take-A-Panel, where each participant first creates a page telling a story about themselves 15 years in the future and then the group uses The Braid to discover common insights. The Braid can also be good before an Open Space or other unconference event.

I am including here my templates for a Four Table Braid. It includes 28 cards for printing on Avery business card paper, 4 table pages with instructions for participants, and 1 page with instructions for the host. I make these available as CC-BY-NC-SA license. I welcome any DTP folks out there who would like to make these documents more functional or more attractive.

A Three Table Braid is easy to figure out by hand, but larger Braids are more difficult. I've never figured out an algorithm for designing these quickly (any math wizzes out there?) so I've posted my spreadsheet for the Four Table Braid for those of you who might wish to figure out how to implement larger numbers of tables. I would love to have a Ten Table Braid as a warm up exercise for a small unconference.

Four Table Braid by Christopher Allen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at www.LifeWithAlacrity.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at ChristopherA.LifeWithAlacrity.com. The Power of Conversation graphic is used with permission from The World Cafe Image Bank.

Multiple Passwords

Note that I said that you want to ensure your passwords, plural, are strong. That's because you'll want at least two. They should both be good passwords, but they should be used in different places.

Use a “non-secure” password for any non-financial websites that you sign up for, such as Facebook and Twitter. Use a different “secure” password for places where your credit card is on file or money changes hands, such as eBay, Amazon, your bank, and your stock broker. Because banks and other financial institutions are more likely to maintain good security over their transactions, reserving a password only for those sites makes it more likely that they will remain safe.

Of course, this could just be the tip of the iceberg. You might want to create a third password for shopping sites, or another one for less reliable sites that you might use. Ideally you would use a different password for every site. That would surely be the most secure, as someone breaking into one site couldn't get into your other accounts — but clearly that is too many passwords to remember. As a compromise, I'll talk shortly about an easy technique to both remember and vary your passwords.

Criteria for Bad Passwords

In a moment, I'm going to suggest an excellent method for creating a secure password. However, if you prefer to use your own methods, be sure to watch out for these common problems which could result weak passwords.

• Do not use obvious words. There was a time when “password” was one of the most common passwords on the internet (along with “root” and “”).
• Do not use words from the dictionary as passwords. Some of the oldest password crackers just dumped the entire dictionary at an account to see if any of them worked as passwords. This doesn't apply just to English either. It's easy enough for a password cracker to use any dictionary, whether it be French or Klingon.
• Do not depend on a dictionary word with simple substitutions. Though I'll talk in a bit about the advantage of substituting letters for numbers, a dictionary word with simple substitutions will be no more secure than just a dictionary word. That's because later password crackers would run not only the dictionary, but also a dictionary with a few substitutions, such as “0”s for “o”s and “1”s for “l”s.
• Do not depend on multiple dictionary words concatenated together. If you were concatenating three or four words, you might be OK, but password crackers were checking two word dictionary concatenations a decade ago.
• Do not use obvious names of people or places you know. Your girlfriend's name, your street address, and your favorite pet's name are all straight out. A password cracker may not be able to guess these (though testing against common names is another strategy used by some), but if someone who knows you can break in by hand, that's no good either.
• Do not write down your password, and especially do not write down your password in an online or computer file. If you picked the best password in the world, it doesn't matter if someone else can easily look at it.
• Do not keep the same password forever. It's pain, but you really should change it every year or two, at least, just in case someone has broken into one of your accounts, and you don't know it.

A Method for Creating a Strong Password

So you've learned a lot about what makes a bad password. What makes a good password? The following suggests one method that you can use to create a password that's not easily breakable — but which is easily memorable.

1. Pick a short phrase, or an obscure but memorable long word. For example “amber waves” or “perspicacious”.
2. Shorten it to 7 characters, such as “ambrwvs” or “prspccus”.
3. Convert a letter other then first to a number. You can use those obvious substitutions here (e.g., A=4, B=8, E=3, G=6, I=1, L=1, O=0, R=2, S=5, T=7), since they're not your only method of security. This might produce “ambrwv5” or “pr5pccus”.
4. The next part is the key trick: use a specific letter from the domain name for the last character for your password and capitalize it. For example, you might add the third o from google, producing “ambrwv5O” or “pr5pccusO” for a GMail password. This ensures that even if you use your password at multiple sites, anyone who steals the password can't use it another website unless they know the trick. You can also use this trick with your computer's password by choosing the third letter from the name you use for the computer, or for a password required for a software application, by using the third letter from the app's name.
5. You should check the quality of your example password at Password Meter -- “ambrwv5O” weight is 54%, which is pretty good for an 8-character password, “pr5pccusO” is 44%, which is OK, but both are significantly better because they will be different at every site.

The same technique can be used with longer words to create more secure financial passwords. These might be easier to remember if you use the first letters from a sentence or poem that you can remember to generate the initial phrase. For example, “My first pet's name was Arthur the Valiant Dog” would generate “MfpnwAtVD”. Again, you convert one or more letters to a number (“Mfpnw4tVD”). 

When you add the domain letters to your secure password, you can strengthen it again by adding multiple letters, possibly to different parts of the password. For example, add the first and last letter the domain name. Thus a Google Gmail password might add a “G” to start and an “E” to the end, producing “GMfpnw4tVDE”. This one rates 70% at Password Meter, but again is actually better because of the site variation.

Also, most financial sites will accept, and some even require, passwords to include a symbol — I don't recommend this with your “non-secure” password as many ordinary sites do not allow symbols, but if you need one, then the following are some easy to remember substitutions: A=@, E=#, I=!, L=!, O=* S=$, or you can just put a symbol between the first domain letter and the passphrase (many sites will not allow a symbol at beginning or end). For example, password above could become “G$Mfpnw4tVDE” which raises this password's Password Meter rating to 90%.

With these two passwords you'll find it very easy to both remember and be secure against most password based attacks.

A High-Tech Alternative

An interesting high-security alternative that works best on webpages is to use SuperGenPass Bookmarklet — it takes the domain name plus a private master password and creates a unique high security password for each website based on a cryptographic hash of the two. It can generate any length of password and you can't really get a password that is more secure, but there is the occasional web page that the bookmarklet doesn't work on. Fortunately, you can save http://supergenpass.com/mobile/ as an .html file to your disk and you can open it anytime to manually create a supergenpass password for a website that you can copy and paste. I've even used SuperGenPass on my iPhone.

Secondary Authentication

Many sites require you to give them additional identification, such as mother's maiden name, the name of your pet, etc. Crackers have broken into various celebrities accounts — such as Paris Hilton and Sarah Palin — by researching this information and asking for a password reset.

You can avoid this danger by treating these authentication requests like passwords. I have a standard word that I use for my mother's maiden name, my pet, etc. They're things that I can easily remember, but no one could figure out. Like the password technique above, I can easily add a letter from the domain. I've had no problem with customer service phone calls to banks; when they ask me for my mother's maiden name I just spell it out my encode word for them.

Be Safe

None of these approaches is perfect, but they significantly raise the bar against any but the most determined cracker from breaking into one of your accounts. The domain letter technique will also make it very difficult for a cracker to break into your more important financial accounts if he gets access to your password from a poorly secured website or masquerades as a legitimate website or email by using a phishing attack.

However, don't ever think that a good password is the be-all and end-all of security. You also have to protect it adequately, and that doesn't just mean not writing it down, as mentioned above. You also must be alert to “social engineering”, where a cracker might call you or email you pretending to be associated with some institute where you might have an account.

Security is a constant game of oneupmanship between you and the black hats. Thus you need to ensure that you're always alert to the current best practices for setting, resetting, and protecting all of your security information on the internet.

But mastery of words is not enough to allow effective conversation.

That is because words themselves don't have meaning; the meaning is provided by the people who use them. Meaning is in the mind, not in the words.

Words also require context, outside of which they may have different meanings. For instance, consider the word "trust". To a banker or CPA "trust" is a property held by someone to manage for someone else's benefit. To a cryptographer it is the confidence in a future outcome based on probabilistic mathematics and past experience. Finally, to the lay person "trust" is about honesty. "Spin" is another example of a word that changes with context; to a weaver it is the production of thread, to a physicist it is a property of elemental particles, to an athlete it is a type of exercise class, and to a politician or public relations professional it is a way to tell a story to sway pubic opinion.

Creating a Shared Language

Every time a new group of people meet together — whether in a team, in a marketplace, or in a community — one of the first activities they must do together is create a shared language. They do this in order to communicate more effectively together, to put a context on the words that they have in common, to construct a shared understanding in their minds based both on available information and their individual diversity of experience.

Don't forget that the linguistic root of communication is the Latin verb commūnĭco  — which doesn't mean "to communicate" but instead means "to share something with someone, to take or receive a part of, to partake, to participate in". Thus the creation of a shared language takes us to the roots of communication.

Without taking the time time to create shared language, groups have a difficult time forging mutual trust. Without a shared language there will be no clarity on mutual goals — whether it involves working together, transacting a trade, or creating something. Without a shared language commitments can be hard to make, and if misunderstood can lead to disagreements. These group formation phases — trust building, goal clarification, and commitment — are essential.

Yet the art of creating a shared language together is not taught. Some individuals and groups do it intuitively while others will just let it evolve naturally over time. However, some facilitators have learned that one of the best ways to help a group form a shared language is by having the group create together a shared artifact.

Using Shared Artifacts

A shared artifact is the creation of an object or shared space that is created collaboratively. It allows the individuals participating to ask the questions: "Is this what you mean when you are talking about this? I use these words, so suppose we change it to this? Is that what you mean? Does this reflect our new shared understanding?"

Examples of shared artifacts include Watson & Crick's Tinker-Toy DNA model. Each scientist would work on the model separately, then use grad students to carry the model around to his partner to express certain ideas. Both Compaq Computer and Southwest Airlines were reportedly established after their founders wrote their ideas down together on a table napkin, another shared artifact.

Both of these examples show an important factor in shared artifacts — if the shared artifact is not constrained then it will be too large or complex for the group to reach some measure of completion. Finishing the shared artifact really helps establish trust and the connections between the participants.

A shared artifact is also useful because flooding someone with information and terms gives no assurance that the recipient has gained knowledge of the subject. Instead, the act of creation confirms to both parties that the knowledge was successfully assimilated.

Another advantage to creating a shared artifact is that it isolates any problems to the task at hand. Often there are differences in status, purpose, or perspective that can get in the way of group formation, but a focus on a common task of the creation of a neutral shared artifact allows those issues to come later as the participants develop the trust and shared language required to talk about those tough issues.

The best facilitators know what kinds of shared artifacts work best for different groups under different circumstances. Sometimes a shared artifact is just a model of a process drawn on a white wall. Often it is a creation of a mission statement or joint objectives. I personally like taking old mind maps and trying to recreate them anew with more recent knowledge.

The Future of Shared Language

The nature of shared language is changing in the 21st century. The conjoined social networks in the blogosphere — via Facebook, Twitter, or the attendee-focused Unconference — cause new terminology and new language to form ever faster. I've personally seen words like "retweet" and "attribution" gain important contextual meaning within my social networks. As with any shared language, newcomers have difficulty discovering their meanings only by osmosis.

Tagging is another means by which shared language is rapidly expanding. Certain words are gaining context through common use at Delicious.com, Technorati, Flickr, and other tag-enabled web sites.

To a certain extent, all of these new shared languages are built upon shared artifacts. Twitter, Facebook, Delicious.com and others sites each create constraints on how language is shared and with whom. However, there is little purposeful social design being applied to these new shared languages. Though there may be shared artifacts, they are not purposefully facilitated.

Will these increasingly organic shared languages prove better than more purposefully created ones or worse? Is social language facilitation the next big thing in social network? Or is there just not enough space for it within the tightly constrained social artifacts of the internet? These are questions that we as social software technologists need to address as the future of the internet increasingly becomes the present of our social groupings.

(I learned the concept of Shared Language in 1990 from Michael Schrage's book Shared Minds: The New Technologies of Collaboration. It is out of print, but there is a new edition retitled No More Teams!: Mastering the Dynamics of Creative Collaboration. The use of a modeling language to facilitate group formation I learned from Matt Taylor (@worthyprojects) of MG Taylor Corporation, though the use of the term shared artifacts and approach is my own. I make passing reference to the early stages of team formation ("trust building", "goal clarification", "commitment") which come from the Drexler/Sibbet Team Peformance Model. The poem is by excerpt of a larger work by John Campion and is reprinted with permission — the work reflects the poet's Ecotropic concerns and are part of his third book-length poem Medusa. Look at the work under the Medusa Project link. The table napkin photo is from an excellent post on The Idea Napkin by Morry Potoka and is also reprinted with permission. The Watson-Crick photo is public domain, and the Life With Alacrity graphic was produced using Wordle.)

Defining "Noncommercial":  A Study of how the Online Population Understands "Noncommercial" Use
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Defining_Noncommercial

The topic is somewhat of a sticky one, as there are many competing interests. There are content creators who wish to profit from their work, there are other content creators who don't want anyone to profit (even themselves), and of course there are content creators who want everything to be free provided you share free content back.

There also is not agreement on what noncommerical means. There are some clearly commercial uses, but there are also various type advertising and sponsorship and use by non-profit or education institutions where money changes hands (such as a card at a museum gift shop). Finally, there is use in news or criticism where users feel that they are not restricted due to the rules of fair-use.

I'm not sure that there is anything definitely "new" in this report, but there is some consensus and some interesting facts:

• The vast majority (73%) of creators define “commercial use” as a use where money is made, 76% of content users agreed.
• 33% of content users thought that individual use was noncommercial use, whereas only 19% of the content creators believed so.
• Content creators rate uses by individuals as being less commercial (89%) – unless the user is a professional who earns money (35%)
• 13% of content users thought that fun, enjoyment, entertainment and artistic use was noncommercial use, whereas only 3% of content creators believed so.
• 52% of the content creators don't believe that content users understand the noncommercial provision, and 43% believe that content users don't respect the term.
• 50% of the content creators have been contacted about licensing their noncommercial content, 24% of the content creators have attempted to contact another creator about appropriate use of a CC license.
• There is a lack of agreement on a lot of edge cases of noncommercial use. For instance, some feel cost-recovery is acceptable noncommercial use, money exchanged hands for a charitable use would be noncommercial, or use by a for-profit company where no money changed hands would still be noncommercial.
• There is some interesting analysis of what people might be willing to change their mind about. For instance, before focus group participation only 8% thought that use for charitable purposes for social good would be noncommercial, but after the focus group 17% did.

All in all an excellent report, with lots of good data in it for further investigation. If you are involved in user-generated content, offer users creative-commons licenses, or are a consumer or provider of commercial content online, I recommend you take the time to understand these issues more deeply.

My personal take on this report is that the noncommercial provisions of the CC license need more clarification and there needs to be more user education. In addition I feel that Creative Commons also needs to look at the commercial use side of the problem. I appreciate the recent efforts toward a CC Plus metadata, but it isn't enough.

+

There are also problems in the area of attribution, as all Creative Commons licenses except Public Domain have the BY provision. These get particularly difficult when you have a remix of content from many creators. There's also difficulty in the fact that it's not stated what places attribution must be listed in. For instance, can you do a movie or a podcast with remixed content, but have the attribution credits be a link? Or must they be credits in the media itself?

All are interesting problems that I hope Creative Commons will address in the future.

In order to better define who constitutes the tightly-knit "participant community" upon which the group thresholds act, we have to study power laws which let us measure the intensity of individuals' involvement in a group.

An Overview of Power Laws

The best-known power law is probably the Pareto principle, which is otherwise known as the "80/20 law." It's been overused throughout the years; Pareto's actual law only said that 80% of the wealth would be held by 20% of the population.

However, it offers a fine example of how power laws work. They generally describe a discrepancy between intensity and population: inevitably, some people do a lot more of the work in any social situation. Other examples include Zipf's Law, which suggests that the frequency of a word's usage is inversely proportionate to its ranking among words (making the second ranked word appear half as much, the third a quarter as much, etc), and the long tail, which talks about selling a very large number of items in a very small individual quantity.

For online communities, which have been the focus of most of my studies on the topic of community sizes, I've found that the participation inequality power rule is very apt.

This term comes from Will Hill of AT&T Laboratories, who said, "A major reason why user-contributed content rarely turns into a true community is that all aspects of Internet use are characterized by severe participation inequality." It's often equated with the 1% law, though I like to be more precise and say that 90% of an online community tends to be lurkers, 9% tends to be intermittent participants, and 1% tends to be active participants.

These values heavily influence online community sizes that are larger than the tightly-knit communities group thresholds that I previously discussed.

Power Laws & Group Thresholds

When I wrote about tightly-knit communities in my first article, I didn't consider the degree of participation. That's certainly an entirely valid model for some types of groups. Corporations, for example, ideally should be entirely filled with active participants, while Skotos' online game Castle Marrach also fits into the category due to the implicit requirements it creates for participation. There are some challenges to grow this type of community, since you're only searching for a specific type of high-energy participant — but they can be overcome if you offer sufficient incentive (such as a salary or a lot of internal feedback).

However, most communities, and in particular, online communities, will not fall into this category, and thus when we're looking at group thresholds, we have to measure them against the number of active participants, not against the number of total members. Thus, for groups which allow for non-participation, we'll often measure 10% (or maybe 1%) of the group size against the group thresholds.

RPGnet, one of the community sites that Skotos runs, offers a good example of this. We regularly see monthly uniques of approximately 200,000 users. However we probably have about 20,000 active registered users, confirming the lurker:participant ratio. When we recognize that only 2,000 of those are particularly active participants and that they're divided upon 6 successful forums, we start to see how community numbers that actually match the group thresholds can gel.

You can reverse this approach and look at active participants first. During some recent consulting for a local non-profit organization with 60 active online members, I was able to infer that their broader community was around 6000, which turned out to fairly accurately predict the total number of people who came to their live events over the course of a year.

Generally, this logic can be applied to a community of any size. You first measure whether it's an all-participant community or one that matches an existing power law, and then you use the corrected community number to truly measure which of the group thresholds may apply to it.

Power Laws & Leaders

The power laws can also help you to measure the number of leaders in a community. Inevitably all of your participants will become leaders of some sort, while your high-level participants will become the top-tier leaders.

I noted this in my first discussions of group threshold. In a group of 7 members, you can reasonably expect to have one higher level participant, and thus the one leader that we saw naturally appear. Similarly in a Judas group of 13, there's the opportunity for more than one leader to appear, creating the possibility for the first hierarchical conflicts.

Understanding your count of leaders can help you see how to grow groups. For example when I first created iPhoneWebDev I had to do an immense amount of effort to grow the community. This is because with Participation Inequality I had to grow the group by 10 members before I got the least amount of help increasing the content of the group and I had to grow it by 100 members before I had someone who was doing as much work as I was to create content.

At 100 members, with my first active participant, we continued to grow, but we were both were working hard and felt rather lonely.

I finally saw the group stabilize, then take off on its own, when it hit 600-700 members, and that shows how beautifully the power logs work hand-in-hand with the group thresholds. With 700 members, I could reasonably expect there to be 7 leaders. In other words, I had a committee of leaders: the perfect size for a starting working group.

From my experience with other online groups, if the iPhoneWebDev grows to over 10,000 members, I can expect that there will be some transition issues. As the core active community members exceed 100 people I will start having some Non-Exclusive Dunbar Number problems, typically social contract failures. These can be solved by either adding some hierarchy (appointing some people to be official "staff"), or by starting to break the group into sub-communities.

Varying the Power Laws

In my first article, I noted that it's possible to expend additional energy to make tightly-knit groups able to function effectively at non-optimal sizes. It is similarly possible for the values of the participation inequality sized groups to change by expending more energy. Conversely, a drain on energy may decrease this ratio.

For example when I used to run AOL forums I would frequently reward first-time participants with free time (at that time worth $5 an hour) if they asked good questions or offered valuable input. CompuServe similarly offered constructive feedback by telling users how many responses they'd received to a new comment when they logged back in, encouraging them to leave lurker status. More energy in the community — driven either by the moderators, good social software design, or by a greater commitment by its members — can allow you to increase the active participant percentage, maybe times 2, or even 4, but even with a lot of effort not by an order of magnitude.

As a group grows in size, I believe the participation inequality worsens. A huge Yahoo! group with a million members might have moved from a 90/9/1 ratio to 95/4.5/.5. I suspect this is because the energy required to change the participation inequality numbers is so large as to not be economical.

There are also some interesting interrelations between the numbers of people at the various levels of participation. Though discovering 100 new members has a good chance of adding 10 new participants, 1 of whom is very active, my experience has been that things trickle-down in the other direction as well: that adding 1 new high-level participant can lead to the creation of 9 medium-level participants and 90 lurkers (though don't let that suggest that all of your effort should be expended on the high-level participants only).

Looking at Participation Inequality

Here is a close look at four online communities, using the quantcast.com metrics service, where you can see some participation inequality in action:

From this you can see a typical online community site shows the normal 90% 9% 1% participation inequality. RPGnet shows a slightly better then average participation inequality due to its longevity and the quality of the community. ObesityHealth shows evidence of a great community with its 4% active participants, probably because you have to be very committed if you are going to have bariatric surgery. Last, an example of relatively unhealthy community that is unable to sustain its active participants.

You do have to be careful when analyzing quantcast numbers if you see active participants of greater then 6% — in almost all cases if you look deeper it is because there is some restriction that keeps people from lurking, either a fee or some other type of gateway, causing a distortion in the statistics.

Conclusion

Multiple factors influence the success (or failure) or community. As we saw in my first article on community numbers, the first factor is the differing group thresholds of community sizes. In my second article, I show that personal limits on the number of people you can have intimacy and trust with is an important factor. In this article I show that larger groups are subject to the power law of participation inequality, causing a small fraction of a community to be subject to group thresholds. In all three articles I show how expending energy can allow you to change the numbers, but with limits.

I hope this discussion of community numbers will give you some tools to look at the communities you are in, or are trying to build, and to better understand how to make them more successful.

Some other posts about the Dunbar Number and group size issues:

• 2004-03: The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes
  (also some really good comments)
• 2005-02: Dunbar Triage: Too Many Connections
• 2005-03: Dunbar, Altruistic Punishment, and Meta-Moderation
• 2005-07: Cheers: Belongingness and Para-Social Relationships
• 2005-08: Dunbar & World of Warcraft
• 2005-10: Dunbar Number & Group Cohesion
• 2008-09: Community by the Numbers, Part One: Group Thresholds
• 2008-11: Community by the Numbers, Part II: Personal Circles

My bookmarks to various papers and websites on this topic are available at delicious.com/ChristopherA under some of the following tags:

• participation inequality - more specifics on participation inequality.
• participation inequality - everything I have on the topic of power laws, including participation inequality.

If you have any links on this topic that you would like to share with me, tag them for:ChristopherA and I'll take a look.

Illustrations by Nancy Margulies. Many thanks to Shannon Appecline and F. Randall Farmer for their assistance with this series.

Unlike the group limits, personal limits actually measure something different: the number of connections that an individual can hold. They're yet another thing that you must consider when thinking about communities of people.

Personal Limits

The Support Circle: This is the number of individuals that you seek advice, support, or help from in times of severe emotional or financial stress. In most societies, the average size of an individual's Support Circle is 3-5. The people are the core of your intimate social network and most typically are also kin. In sociology papers this is often called the "support clique".

The Sympathy Circle: This is larger then the Support Circle — it is the number of people that you go to for sympathy and also those people whose death would be devastating to you. The Sympathy Circle typically is in the range of 10-15 people, but can vary widely from as few as 7 to as many as 20. The Sympathy Circle often may be made up of kin, but usually includes some peers as well.

In sociology papers the Sympathy Circle is also known as a "sympathy group", but I wanted to avoid the term "group", as it is implies that all the members of a Sympathy Circle are connected. Instead, members of your Sympathy Circle will have additional people in their own Sympathy Circles that are not part of your own.

An interesting issue with the Sympathy Circle is that as a personal limit, 10-15 is a typical size. however, if you bring them all together in one place, they will likely become a Judas-Number-sized group, with all of the problems associated with that size.

The Trust Circle: These are the people that you have some type of intimate connection to. One study measured it as the people that you would send a family Christmas card to, while another simply tested emotional closeness.

In pre-Friendster days the Trust Circle would be those people that you considered your "friends", however today the meaning of that term has begun to change. In my own usage, your Trust Circle are people that you have strong ties to and that in some measure you can trust. I have also called the Trust Circle your personal "intimate social network".

The size of different individuals' Trust Circles can vary widely (40-200), but some studies show that the mean is on the low side of 150. This has led a number of researchers to compare this number with the Exclusive Dunbar Number of 150. However, I believe that this is a mistake; they are related, but in today's society members of your Trust Circle are rarely in the same mutual group.

The Emotional Circle

I personally define your Emotional Circle as the total number of people that you can have some type of non-mutual emotional connection with, most likely spread across numerous groups of all sorts. You "like" them in some way, but do not necessarily have to have strong ties to them.

In academia this threshold is called "social channel capacity". A study using two different methods to estimate, both suggest that it falls right around 290. However, I like to describe this number as "just short of 300." As I wrote in Dunbar Triage, many people confuse this number with the Dunbar Number (and in fact I have in some of my older pieces). However, like the Trust Circle, it's a distinct entity.

Emotional Circle size can vary quite a bit from individual to individual. Some people might have half the average capacity, and others considerably more — which is much more variation than you see among the sizes of smaller personal thresholds.

Some of those variations are individual, but some are societal. As I wrote in Cheers: Belongingness and Para-Social Relationships, I believe that our modern era of television causes us to create para-social relationships with imaginary characters who we nonetheless become emotionally involved with, and thus might reduce our social channel capacity.

Is our Emotional Circle smaller today because of TV or is it higher because online communities can help to remind us of our emotional connections to other people? That's a topic that probably deserves more study.

An interesting point to make is that the people who are in your Emotional Circle, but are not in your Trust Circle, are your "weak ties" in social network terms. What is important about weak ties is that studies show (pdf) that opportunities and knowledge flow to you much more through weak ties than through the more insular strong ties of your trust circle.

The Familiar Stranger

Outside of our Emotional Circle is a larger, more tenuous circle: those people whose faces you recognize, but who you know nothing more about. These are your "Familiar Strangers".

Studies show that the percentage of familiar strangers in your vicinity has a real impact on your willingness to take risks. If you are in a new place with no one that you recognize, you'll avoid eye contact and will generally be unwilling to approach strangers. In a place where there are a lot of people that you've seen before (say in your favorite cafe, at a conference, or in the lunchroom of a large company), you'll be much more willing to take risks, such as asking questions, or sitting down next to someone to eat lunch.

I haven't been able to find any studies to show how many people that we can recognize, but for some people it is much larger than the number of people in your Emotional Circle, probably well over a thousand. However, there is also a lot more variance: some people are face-blind or near face-blind, and have a difficult time even recognizing friends.

There could also be some interesting research looking more closely at social network software. I find it fascinating that the professionally-oriented social network LinkedIn resisted supporting photos in profiles for so long yet ultimately failed, as well as how other social network software companies have attempted to require "real" photos of people rather then allowing "fakesters" or avatars.

Crossing the Circles

I've used the term "circles" throughout this article because it's a great metaphor for these levels of personal involvement. They can literally be thought of as concentric circles of people getting further and further away from an individual.

However, if you want to consider them with an even more graphic bent, think of these circles as the ridge lines of a topographical map. An individual sits at the center, and around him lie many other people, fading slowly away as the distance increases.

Winding through these topographical lines, like forests or rivers, are geographies of physical and emotional connection.

Kin are one of the most interesting geographies, because they lie all across the map. There's a clump of them in the innermost circles, but there are also many who lie in the realm of Familiar Strangers, including those cousins and great-aunts who you only see at family gatherings, and whom you know nothing about.

There are also forces being exerted upon the circles, acting like gravity to draw people together. They are the forces of trust, influence, and more. Their pulls are greatest toward the center, across your Circles of Support and Sympathy, but as people move farther away, these forces drop off quickly.

Conclusion

Whereas the group thresholds that I discussed in my last article define the limits placed on community group size, the personal limits described herein instead define the limits placed on how many people an individual can know with various degrees of intimacy.

Perhaps there are societies where these two things might be the same. A true survival community might contain everyone a person knows, and thus he could draw out all his personal circles across that community canvas. However, in our modern era they're much more likely to be distinct, with an individual interacting with the members of his circles of acquaintances through numerous different group communities.

With this bifurcation of personal and group community limits, we have to briefly stop and ask a few questions. How do they relate? What can personal limits tell us about efficient community creation? Does founding a group upon a personal circle make its growth easier or harder? Conversely, what type of communities lead naturally to the creation of intimate circles?

In my next article "Community by the Numbers, Part III: Power Laws", I will talk about how both group thresholds and personal thresholds have a role in larger, less tightly-knit groups.

Some other posts about the Dunbar Number and group size issues:

• 2004-03: The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes
  (also some really good comments)
• 2005-02: Dunbar Triage: Too Many Connections
• 2005-03: Dunbar, Altruistic Punishment, and Meta-Moderation
• 2005-07: Cheers: Belongingness and Para-Social Relationships
• 2005-08: Dunbar & World of Warcraft
• 2005-10: Dunbar Number & Group Cohesion
• 2008-09: Community by the Numbers, Part One: Group Thresholds

My bookmarks to various papers and websites on this topic are available at delicious.com/ChristopherA under some of the following tags:

• personal circles - everything I have on the topic.
• familiar strangers - those people you recognize by face.

If you have any links on this topic that you would like to share with me, tag them for:ChristopherA and I'll take a look.

Illustrations by Nancy Margulies, photo by davitydave. Many thanks to Shannon Appecline and F. Randall Farmer for their assistance with this series.

If a community is too small you'll often have insufficient critical mass to sustain it. Conversely, if it's too large you can end up with a community that's too noisy, too cliquey, or otherwise problematic. These optimal and sub-optimal community sizes appear in strata, like discrete layers of rock. For a community to advance from one strata to the next often takes immense energy.

We can analyze these community sizes in three ways. In this first article I'm going to talk about numerical group thresholds that have been observed in various sizes of tightly-knit communities, while in its sequel I'm going to talk about personal thresholds and how they relate to group thresholds. In my final post, I'm going to consider how power laws and inequalities of participation further complicate these simple values in the creation of larger communities. Together these three articles constitute what I call "Community by the Numbers," a theory of community size.

Though I'm going to point to some studies which support these numbers, in general my goal here isn't to try and prove this theory of community size numbers, but rather to lay the theory out completely.

Tightly-Knit Group Thresholds

Groups can clearly exist at any size, from a partnership of two, on upward. However what I'm going to write about here are the threshold values: the ideal numbers where a community seems to function best, and the less than ideal numbers at which a community begins to grow unstable, remaining so until a new threshold number is reached.

I'm also specifically talking about groups that are both tightly-knit and participatory communities. Clearly Ford Motor Company, with 250,000 employees, doesn't match any of these group thresholds. But any self-contained community within Ford probably will (and in fact, it will probably be either a "Working Group" or a "Non-Exclusive Dunbar Group", both terms I'll explain below). Similarly, a non-corporate community that doesn't require everyone to participate won't work quite the same as a community that does require participation from each member (though that's again the topic of the third article in this series).

7, "The Working Group". This community size probably runs from about 4-9 members, but 7 is a pretty good average, and one that shows up in multiple studies. This number may well relate to the general rule of seven (original paper), which suggests that 7 is a number that the brain can easily and intuitively comprehend.

It has become increasingly clear that a tightly-knit group of 7 is the first group size which is truly an optimal community size. Groups below this size can function effectively, but risk not having enough manpower to deliver a result that everyone is happy with, or having insufficient viewpoints to avoid group think.

Seven is not only an optimal size for a wide variety of corporate and government committees, it is also a healthy size for a small business and even a good size for a party of close friends. More importantly, 7 is a very comfortable group size as it "feels" relatively natural. At this size members find it easy to get to know the other members of the group, and they're able to function well together in a very intuitive and organic fashion.

An interesting example of this group size is the modern infantry "squad", which consists of two fire teams of 4 people, and a squad leader, for a total of 9 people. Each fire team is is large enough to function on its own, but together the group of 9 can still have effective small group dynamics.

It is typically at this size that the first signs of leadership in a group informally emerge, but the leadership usually isn't overbearing at this level, nor does there tend to be any rebellion against it — perhaps because the group may be too small to elicit multiple leaders.

13—"The Judas Number". A group size of 13 doesn't represent a threshold ideal value, but rather a threshold nadir. It is one of the points where groups can change behavior and risk becoming dysfunctional. There's one of these nadirs beyond every group threshold, where the previously harmonious group dynamics become more difficult. I've chosen to highlight this specific number because it's a point that small communities often hit, particularly as entrepreneurial organizations try to grow above their startup beginnings.

(I should note that 13 isn't a precise number, but rather one offered because it's in the right range and because it's poetically easy to remember. The exact number occurs somewhere between 9 and 25, but I suspect it is worst in the range of 12-15.)

In a group of this community size no one ever feels like they get a fair share of time. Studies show that at this size participants underestimate the amount of time they contributed to the conversation, and thus will come out feeling like they were unfairly ignored despite having a fair share of the conversation. Groups of this size risk people being lumped into categories and ceasing to be trusted as individuals. In addition, problems start with the development of "too many chiefs," yet there is not enough enough variety of non-chiefs for them to direct. Furthermore, multiple leaders may struggle for hierarchical status, increasing the conflict in an already troublesome group.

If your community is unfortunately stuck at this nadir, one of two things usually occurs.

Most commonly, the group shrinks. This could be because participants unhappy with the group dynamics abandon it; or it could occur in a more organized way with the unwieldy large group breaking into two or more smaller groups. For example, a terrible group of 13 could become two more functional groups of 6 and 7.

Alternatively, more energy could be expended. This could be in the form of more formal organization, rewards for participation, or more time to be casual and socialize in order to shake off the tensions of this size group. Though these efforts don't usually change the size of the group, they can improve its dynamics.

Energy could also be spent to help push the group up to the next threshold. Though this could occur naturally — for example if the group focuses on a topic of particular interest that causes new people to continually be added. In addition, in order to grow a group to a new threshold it often requires the efforts of more than one leader to succeed.

A group size of 13 isn't necessarily bad, just more difficult. Anthropological studies show that primitive hunting tribes often temporarily broke into "bands" of this size — my presumption is that the value of having that many people hunting together outweighed the social costs of the group. It is interesting that most juries are made up of groups this size. I believe that the social dynamics of this size of group with all new members creates some tension among the jurors, which may serve justice to make sure that all sides are considered by the jury without falling into groupthink. However, from my experience, the interpersonal conflict in a jury can also slow down the deliberation process and cause much frustration among the participants.

50—"The Non-Exclusive Dunbar Number". More properly this group size falls in the range of 25-75 participants, but it seems to feel the most natural in the range of 50-60. Studies of the sizes guilds in online games support this hypothesis. For instance, based on graphs of the guild sizes in Ultima Online, groups have a median of 61 members. Similar numbers hold true in studies of a more recent game, World of Warcraft.

I call this value the "Non-Exclusive Dunbar Number" because it matches the lower end of a threshold that Robin Dunbar set for group sizes. However, at this size it applies to mostly non-exclusive groupings, which includes the above mentioned online guilds, many employee communities, and the majority of social gatherings that manage to rise above the size of a Working Group. Groups of this size can be serious or take up a lot of time, but in general they are not exclusive — they don't tend to be the only group that individual participants are involved in.

90—"The Dunbar Valley". As Non-Exclusive Dunbar Number communities grow, they reach a point where increased time obligations and the noise of socialization required to keep the group cohesive requires a much more serious commitment from the participants. Like the Judas Number, the Dunbar Valley is a threshold nadir where more energy is required to keep a tightly-knit community together;  either the community agrees to a higher level of commitment and grows to the next level, or the community splits apart.

I've found this to be true when growing a small business — where it is too small for any middle-management, but the sub-groups are too large for one person to manage effectively. I've also seen this with more ephemeral groups, such as when a small conference that worked well at 60 participants tries to grow and finds at at 100 participants they can't sustain a high enough intimacy level.

Another illustration of the Dunbar Valley is the history of the ancient Roman "century", a grouping that was originally 100 soldiers. However, as the years went by, centuries tended to decrease in numbers to only include 70 or 80 soldiers. This might well be due to Non-Exclusive Dunbar constraints: even in a very devoted group of military men, there was still the need for relationships with other century groups, with support staff, and with camp followers, ultimately lowering the attention that could be spent on the century itself.

150—"The Exclusive Dunbar Number". Robin Dunbar got much of the discussion of group thresholds started with his article, "Co-Evolution Of Neocortex Size, Group Size And Language In Humans." However, as I've written previously, and as I've described in this article, Dunbar's group threshold of 150 applies more to groups that are highly incentivized and relatively exclusive and whose goal is survival.

Dunbar makes this obvious by the statement that such a grouping "would require as much as 42% of the total time budget to be devoted to social grooming."

The result of the grooming requirement is that communities bounded by the Exclusive Dunbar Number are relatively few. You will find hunter/gatherer and other subsistence societies where this is a natural tribe size. You'll also find these groups sizes in terrorist and mafia organizations.

Clearly, as we step up toward higher group thresholds, more and more time is required to simply keep the group going. You see this in depictions of mafia life — in the TV series The Sopranos a lot of time is spent dining, hanging out, and drinking together. That is part of that 42% social grooming time required for that intense of a survival group.

It is possible for a large company to force groups up to this size by expending lots of energy (which is to say money) to keep it healthy. Apple did this during the invention of the Macintosh, the first OS X operating system, and the iPhone, but the intensity required of such large teams is not sustainable for long periods of time.

Without that extra energy, few modern tightly-knit communities can reach this threshold, or else can't hold it for very long. Instead they fracture into groups of individual interest (even if they continue to "meet" in the same real-world or online forum), which are more than more likely to be bounded by the Non-Exclusive Dunbar number.

Given the difficulty in even arriving at the Exclusive Dunbar number, it may well be the highest limit of all for a tightly-knit community. Beyond this limit, communities are less cohesive, less trusted, and less participatory (and the topic of my third article in this series.)

Conclusion

There are many different ways to measure groups, and one is by counting its members. As I've discussed here, the number of members can have a huge impact on whether the communities are successful or not. Thus, as community organizers, social software engineers, game designers, or as sociologists interested in community dynamics, we must ultimately consider group thresholds and group nadirs; to understand how to create cohesive communities, rather than groups that fly apart.

In my next article I'm going to talk about thresholds that are personal, rather then group-oriented.

Some other posts about the Dunbar Number and group size issues:

• 2004-03: The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes
  (also some really good comments)
• 2005-02: Dunbar Triage: Too Many Connections
• 2005-03: Dunbar, Altruistic Punishment, and Meta-Moderation
• 2005-07: Cheers: Belongingness and Para-Social Relationships
• 2005-08: Dunbar & World of Warcraft
• 2005-10: Dunbar Number & Group Cohesion
• 2008-11: Community by the Numbers, Part II: Personal Circles

My bookmarks to various papers and websites on this topic are available at delicious.com/ChristopherA under some of the following tags:

• group threshold - everything I have on the topic
• workinggroup - on small groups such as committees
• dunbar number - on larger groups such as tribes

If you have any links on this topic that you would like to share with me, tag them for:ChristopherA and I'll take a look.

Many thanks to Shannon Appecline and F. Randall Farmer for their assistance with this series.

I've been reluctant to post too many of these off posts on this blog, as I like the length, quality and high-signal-to-noise ratio of the posts that I've written for this blog. I do plan to continue to offer more social software and social media posts, including followups to my Collective Choice articles, as well as updates on my popular Dunbar Number posts. But I don't want to spam my readers here with notes on iPhone Apps, my thoughts on movies, circuses, the odd conferences I speak at, etc.

So I've been trying to figure out how to cover some of the other things that I am up to without loosing my readers here, so decided to a create a new blog for my shorter and more transitory thoughts: Christopher Allen's Ephemera Blog. So far I have posted:

• Max 9 pages, thus Max 144 Apps on iPhone OS 2.0
• First Look at AirMe App for iPhone
• Trying Out TypePad's Blog It Web App
• iPhone TypePad App Second Pass
• iPhone TypePad App First Look
• Ephemera Blog

The RSS feed for this blog is here .

If you are interested in some of the other things I am looking at, you can follow my del.icio.us bookmarks, or read my Google Shared Items, watch my Twitter posts, or see them all combined together in either FriendFeed or Plaxo Pulse.

My presentation is an offshoot of an odd sideline of mine, executive blog and social web coaching. Basically, many times over the last couple of years I've been asked by colleagues and friends to help them with the social web. I've always been honored to spend the time to teach them how to blog, better manage the noise of the web by using a feed reader, how to participate in social networks, and how to improve their personal brand.

Increasingly, the social network of their peers is now asking me to help them to do the same for them. So I've been doing this more and more over the last year on a consulting basis as their social networks appear to be saying saying that I have a lot to offer.

I've twice now been out to Cincinnati where I've been working with Drew Boyd at Johnson & Johnson, where I've been coaching him on his blog and personal brand. He has been blogging now for almost six months at Innovation in Practice with some success. Now he is referring me to other executives at Johnson & Johnson who need similar coaching, or need strategic advice on how to deal with specific social web initiatives within Johnson & Johnson.

Most recently, Drew has asked me to join him in Seoul to speak at the Global Forum, which is a worldwide gathering of executive trainers. There I am presenting a synopsis of what I teach, and how they can begin to learn how to teach their staff how to do the same. My trip has been sponsored by Johnson & Johnson, so it has been a lot of fun to be here. I get to both dive into deep discussions of methodologies for teaching inside business, as well as learn about the Korean and other international business cultures and how they are different from the United States.

During the evenings I've had a chance to wander the streets of downtown Seoul. It is very different then wandering though streets in Europe, not only because of the different culture and language, but also because all of the signs are in Hangul, the korean character set. Very few signs use the roman alphabet, so it is often very difficult to figure out what is what without walking in. Like Japan, there are some signs in English to represent a brand or a style, but not many. Even China has more signs in English then Korean's do -- the last time I was there I was surprised by how almost every important sign was in both Chinese and English, so much so I was beginning to learn Chinese language characters just by association! Despite the language problems everyone is nice and it feels safe to wander in these neighborhoods.

I return on Monday, and I'll make a copy of my final presentation available here.

I was the keynote speaker on Saturday and Master of Ceremonies for the MacHack-style Hack-a-Thon Demo on Sunday.

At the Hack-a-Thon almost 50 iPhone web applications were demonstrated to an enthusiastic audience. Take a look at Tilt, a game that takes advantage of the iPhone's motion sensor, PickleView, which is a same-time live baseball game enhancer, and The Pool, an attractive social game of water droplets hitting a pool. What is remarkable about these applications is not just the quality, but that each of them was written over just the weekend by a small team of 3-4 people who hadn't met each other before Friday!

Prizes were awarded after the Hack-a-Thon based on the spirit of openness, contribution, sharing, and participation. Prizes included 3 iPhones and some very expensive Adobe software. In particular Joe Hewitt, of Firebug fame, was honored for his positive contributions, generous spirit, and wonderful iPhone UI example code. During the demonstrations, more than one person praised Joe, saying that his assistance, his code, or his debugger made their apps possible. Personally, I think about one-third of the web apps presented used some of his code.

Building on my experience with the same-time collaboration tool SynchroEdit, and the Skotos web-based games, I worked remotely with Kalle from Sweden and Erwin from Kansas to present an AJAX chat application called iLace. I am particularly proud of how well this little web application performs and how well it works using the iPhone UI. In particular, I think its melding of text entry and chat message receipt and its response to changes between portrait and landscape modes are very good examples of what can be done for chat on the iPhone. Source code is available!

My keynote presentation slides are now available in .pdf and .mov. I'm told a live recording of the session and an .mp3 will be available soon.

Over the last few weeks an online developer community that I started at WWDC called iPhoneWebDev has grown to over 650 members. It's now the best place to get online support for building iPhone web pages and webapps. I'd like to keep the momentum from the iPhoneDevCamp going forward on this list, so if you are interested in developing for the iPhone, check out the example code and join the discussion today!