From the Laws of Connectedness to the Power Law of Participation
Ross Mayfield recently published an interesting hierarchisation of the concepts of collective intelligence and collaborative intelligence, in his post on the Power Law of Participation, which has an interesting graphic, available here; the issue is well summarized by Sam Rose:
For example, a case study of the Apache project published in 2000 found that 80% to 90% of the submissions came from a set of 15 core developers in a community of more than 3000 people. A study of the GNOME project had similar results with 11 people contributing most of the output. Relating this back to the Power Law of Participation, the small number of core community members leads to collaborative intelligence, while the larger community provides an important collective intelligence by contributing bug reports, ideas, and comments. These two types of contributors and the resulting intelligence generated both feed off of each other and allow the community to prosper.
A previous attempt was made by Jon Collins in his blog. Here we have a hierarchy going from connectedness to participation to collaboration.
Laws of connection
1. Connectedness is about joining in
2. Joining in happens automatically when the barriers to joining are low enough
3. Connections form between individuals, not organisations
4. Connections link devices, services and people
5. Connections are two way
6. The value of connections increases based on the number of touch points
7. Connection is a means to an end: the end is participation
Laws of participation
8. Communities form as a natural consequence of connectedness
9. Communities define their own mechanisms, language and etiquette
10. Individuals occupy roles within communities
11. Participation can be active or passive, hub or spoke
12. Declaration is a pre-requisite to active participation
13. Participation is a means to an end: the end is collaboration
Laws of collaboration
14. Collaboration is the achievement of goals by a connected community
15. Goals benefit individual participants, not the community
16. Active feedback is essential to achieving goals
17. Success is proportionate to the number of participants
18. Open collaboration is self regulating
These laws are not specific to any technology or group. Example themes that have driven these laws are: text messaging, Make Poverty History, Blogging, Marillion, BNI, LinkedIn, Cluetrain, peer to peer, mashups, Warcraft, ecademy, eBay, street teams, open source, Skype, Flickr, wisdom of crowds, SOA, agile development, Usenet, Sharepoint.
