Thanks to Santiago Bunce at Interaction Institute for Social Change for the pointer to Clay Shirky's talk at TED in 2005, which begins thusly:
How do groups get anything done? Right? How do you organize a group of individuals so that the output of the group is something coherent and of lasting value, instead of just begin chaos? And the economic framing of that problem is called coordination costs.
One of best explanations I've heard of the "power law" whereby a small number of people are responsible for a great proportion of the output/productivity/input of the "group"...whatever...and a large number of people are responsible for a fraction of same. Let me go out on a limb here and call it the classic 80/20 rule (as Clay, and everyone else, does). Clay illustrates with pictures from Flickr and points to how a single person making one really good contribution is also critical to the "system"--as well as one stellar example of a Linux developer coming up with a single phenomenal security patch, not 3000 patches.
Provocative, lots to think about. Thanks, as always, Clay.
Oh, the title of this post? Clay points out that inventors rarely know how people will use their brilliant ideas. As of the time of his TED talk, Clay points out that stay-at-home moms, not classic Internet affinity groups per se, were the original power users of meetup.com. If you want to know "what technology is going to change the world," he says, "Don't pay attention to 13-year-old boys. Pay attention to young mothers because they don't have an ounce of support for technology that doesn't make their lives better." Touche!
