On 5/18/05, Artur Silva <arturfsi...@yahoo.com> wrote: > Hello all: > > > > I think that Chris Allen's analysis on "The Dunbar number as a limit to > group sizes", posted in his blog, is very interesting and can give some > ideas about crisis points for the growing of lists, forums, etc - as well as > to companies and other organizations. You can see it at: > > http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html > > > > I have reasons to believe that the special conditions of the OSLIST allow us > to bypass those numbers without suffering too much. But I would like to > confirm this. > > > > Can someone tell me how many members are there in the OSLIST at this moment? > And has someone access to the statistics of evolution in the last years? > > > > I would appreciate to receive those number through the list or directly.
Hi, Allow me to delurk, and make a comment. Delurking itself is an important act, because it shows that there are a lot of people who, like me, skim it from time to time, and rarely appear to say anything. The Dunbar number doesn't really take those numbers into account. Hmm... looking at those numbers, the original theory misses an important fact about online games. Mainly, that out of median numbers, there will be a certain percentage of inactive members, and another percentage of people who have two accounts (there are certain benefits to running two characters at the same time, which is rather irrelevant to the discussion at hand). I should note that another game, City of Heroes, limits guilds to 75 people, for both technical reasons, and because they feel that this number is more of a practical limit for an online community. World of Warcraft also aims at smaller communities. The 7-8 break point, and the 50 person break point seems to hold true on online game communities. Most guilds have around 50 active, committed people, and most people exist in play groups of around 7-12 people. >From my own experiences, with less thn 20 people, it's very hard to have a sustained community (and a game or BBS that survives). Either you have 5-12 people who are commited to something, and function as a team on a regular basis (which, I think, can be considered to be something different from a community), or you need about 25-50+ regular participants, who will vary in their participation. Of course, in order to sustain that, you would also need regular teams within that community, performing activities to sustain interest from everyone else. * * ========================================================== osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs: http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
