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 <article>
 <h1>A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy</h1>
 <h2><a href="http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html">Source originale du contenu</a></h2>
 <p><em>A speech at ETech, April, 2003</em></p>
 <p>
 Published July 1, 2003 on the “Networks, Economics, and Culture” mailing list.
 <a href="mailto:nec-request@shirky.com?subject=subscribe">Subscribe</a>
 to the mailing list.
 </p>

 <p>
 This is a lightly edited version of the keynote I gave on Social
 Software at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference in Santa
 Clara on April 24, 2003
 </p>

 <hr>

 <p>
 Good morning, everybody. I want to talk this morning about social
 software ...there’s a surprise. I want to talk about a pattern I’ve seen
 over and over again in social software that supports large and
 long-lived groups.  And that pattern is the pattern described in the
 title of this talk: “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.”

 </p>

 <p>
 In particular, I want to talk about what I now think is one of the core challenges for designing large-scale social software.  Let me offer a definition of social software, because it’s a term that’s still fairly amorphous.  My definition is fairly simple: It’s software that supports group interaction.  I also want to emphasize, although that’s a fairly simple definition, how radical that pattern is.  The Internet supports lots of communications patterns, principally point-to-point and two-way, one-to-many outbound, and many-to-many two-way.
 </p>

 <p>
 Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that supported point-to-point two-way.  We had telephones, we had the telegraph.  We were familiar with technological mediation of those kinds of conversations. Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that supported one-way outbound.  I could put something on television or the radio, I could publish a newspaper.  We had the printing press.  So although the Internet does good things for those patterns, they’re patterns we knew from before.
 </p>

 <p>
 Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table.  There was no technological mediation for group conversations.  The closest we got was the conference call, which never really worked right -- “Hello?  Do I push this button now?  Oh, shoot, I just hung up.” It’s not easy to set up a conference call, but it’s very easy to email five of your friends and say “Hey, where are we going for pizza?”  So ridiculously easy group forming is really news.
 </p>

 <p>
 We’ve had social software for 40 years at most, dated from the Plato BBS system, and we’ve only had 10 years or so of widespread availability, so we’re just finding out what works.  We’re still learning how to make these kinds of things.
 </p>

 <p>
 Now, software that supports group interaction is a fundamentally unsatisfying definition in many ways, because it doesn’t point to a specific class of technology. If you look at email, it obviously supports social patterns, but it can also support a broadcast pattern. If I’m a spammer, I’m going to mail things out to a million people, but they’re not going to be talking to one another, and I’m not going to be talking to them -- spam is email, but it isn’t social.  If I’m mailing you, and you’re mailing me back, we’re having point-to-point and two-way conversation, but not one that creates group dynamics.
 </p>

 <p>
 So email doesn’t necessarily support social patterns, group patterns, although it can.  Ditto a weblog.  If I’m Glenn Reynolds, and I’m publishing something with Comments Off and reaching a million users a month, that’s really broadcast. It’s interesting that I can do it as a single individual, but the pattern is closer to MSNBC than it is to a conversation.  If it’s a cluster of half a dozen LiveJournal users, on the other hand, talking about their lives with one another, that’s social.  So, again, weblogs are not necessarily social, although they can support social patterns.
 </p>

 <p>
 Nevertheless, I think that definition is the right one, because it recognizes the fundamentally social nature of the problem.  Groups are a run-time effect.  You cannot specify in advance what the group will do, and so you can’t substantiate in software everything you expect to have happen.
 </p>

 <p>
 Now, there’s a large body of literature saying  “We built this software, a group came and used it, and they began to exhibit behaviors that surprised us enormously, so we’ve gone and documented these behaviors.”  Over and over and over again this pattern comes up.  (I hear Stewart [Brand, of the WELL] laughing.)  The WELL is one of those places where this pattern came up over and over again.
 </p>

 <p>
 This talk is in three parts.  The best explanation I have found for the kinds of things that happen when groups of humans interact is psychological research that predates the Internet, so the first part is going to be about W.R. Bion’s research, which I will talk about in a moment, research that I believe explains how and why a group is its own worst enemy.
 </p>

 <p>
 The second part is: Why now?  What’s going on now that makes this worth thinking about?  I think we’re seeing a revolution in social software in the current environment that’s really interesting.
 </p>

 <p>
 And third, I want to identify some things, about half a dozen things, in fact, that I think are core to any software that supports larger, long-lived groups.
 </p>

 <h2>Part One: How is a group its own worst enemy?</h2>

 <p>
 So, Part One.  The best explanation I have found for the ways in which this pattern establishes itself, the group is its own worst enemy, comes from a book by W.R. Bion called “Experiences in Groups,” written in the middle of the last century.
 </p>

 <p>
 Bion was a psychologist who was doing group therapy with groups of neurotics.  (Drawing parallels between that and the Internet is left as an exercise for the reader.)  The thing that Bion discovered was that the neurotics in his care were, as a group, conspiring to defeat therapy.
 </p>

 <p>
 There was no overt communication or coordination.  But he could see that whenever he would try to do anything that was meant to have an effect, the group would somehow quash it.  And he was driving himself crazy, in the colloquial sense of the term, trying to figure out whether or not he should be looking at the situation as: Are these individuals taking action on their own?  Or is this a coordinated group?
 </p>

 <p>
 He could never resolve the question,  and so he decided that the unresolvability of the question was the answer.  To the question: Do you view groups of people as aggregations of individuals or as a cohesive group, his answer was: “Hopelessly committed to both.”
 </p>

 <p>
 He said that humans are fundamentally individual, and also fundamentally social.  Every one of us has a kind of rational decision-making mind where we can assess what’s going on and make decisions and act on them.  And we are all also able to enter viscerally into emotional bonds with other groups of people that transcend the intellectual aspects of the individual.
 </p>

 <p>
 In fact, Bion was so convinced that this was the right answer that the image he put on the front cover of his book was a Necker cube, one of those cubes that you can look at and make resolve in one of two ways, but you can never see both views of the cube at the same time.  So groups can be analyzed both as collections of individuals and having this kind of emotive group experience.
 </p>

 <p>
 Now, it’s pretty easy to see how groups of people who have formal memberships, groups that have been labeled and named like “I am a member of such-and-such a guild in a massively multi-player online role-playing game,”  it’s easy to see how you would have some kind of group cohesion there.  But Bion’s thesis is that this effect is much, much deeper, and kicks in much, much sooner than many of us expect.  So I want to illustrate this with a story, and to illustrate the illustration, I’ll use a story from your life.  Because even if I don’t know you, I know what I’m about to describe has happened to you.
 </p>

 <p>
 You are at a party, and you get bored.  You say “This isn’t doing it for me anymore.  I’d rather be someplace else.  I’d rather be home asleep.  The people I wanted to talk to aren’t here.”  Whatever. The party fails to meet some threshold of interest.  And then a really remarkable thing happens: You don’t leave.  You make a decision “I don’t like this.”  If you were in a bookstore and you said “I’m done,” you’d walk out.  If you were in a coffee shop and said “This is boring,” you’d walk out.
 </p>

 <p>
 You’re sitting at a party, you decide “I don’t like this; I don’t want to be here.”  And then you don’t leave.  That kind of social stickiness is what Bion is talking about.
 </p>

 <p>
 And then, another really remarkable thing happens.  Twenty minutes later, one person stands up and gets their coat, and what happens?  Suddenly everyone is getting their coats on, all at the same time.  Which means that everyone had decided that the party was not for them, and no one had done anything about it, until finally this triggering event let the air out of the group, and everyone kind of felt okay about leaving.
 </p>

 <p>
 This effect is so steady it’s sometimes called the paradox of groups.  It’s obvious that there are no groups without members.  But what’s less obvious is that there are no members without a group.  Because what would you be a member of?
 </p>

 <p>
 So there’s this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected.  And at that moment, even if it’s subconscious, you start getting group effects. And the effects that we’ve seen come up over and over and over again in online communities.
 </p>

 <p>
 Now, Bion decided that what he was watching with the neurotics was the group defending itself against his attempts to make the group do what they said they were supposed to do.  The group was convened to get better, this group of people was in therapy to get better.  But they were defeating that. And he said, there are some very specific patterns that they’re entering into to defeat the ostensible purpose of the group meeting together.  And he detailed three patterns.
 </p>

 <p>
 The first is sex talk, what he called, in his mid-century prose, “A group met for pairing off.”  And what that means is, the group conceives of its purpose as the hosting of flirtatious or salacious talk or emotions passing between pairs of members.
 </p>

 <p>
 You go on IRC and you scan the channel list, and you say “Oh, I know what that group is about, because I see the channel label.”  And you go into the group, you will also almost invariably find that it’s about sex talk as well.  Not necessarily overt.  But that is always in scope in human conversations, according to Bion.  That is one basic pattern that groups can always devolve into, away from the sophisticated purpose and towards one of these basic purposes.
 </p>

 <p>
 The second basic pattern that Bion detailed:  The identification and vilification of external enemies.  This is a very common pattern.  Anyone who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time.  If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do.  But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates.  And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad.
 </p>

 <p>
 If you want to make it better, there’s a list of things to do.  It’s Open Source, right?  Just fix it.  “No, no, Microsoft and Bill Gates grrrrr ...”, the froth would start coming out.  The external enemy -- nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy.
 </p>

 <p>
 So even if someone isn’t really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion.  And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies.
 </p>

 <p>
 The third pattern Bion identified: Religious veneration.  The nomination and worship of a religious icon or a set of religious tenets. The religious pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that’s beyond critique.  You can see this pattern on the Internet any day you like.  Go onto a Tolkein newsgroup or discussion forum, and try saying “You know, The Two Towers is a little dull.  I mean loooong.  We didn’t need that much description about the forest, because it’s pretty much the same forest all the way.”
 </p>

 <p>
 Try having that discussion.  On the door of the group it will say: “This is for discussing the works of Tolkein.”  Go in and try and have that discussion.
 </p>

 <p>
 Now, in some places people say “Yes, but it needed to, because it had to convey the sense of lassitude,” or whatever.  But in most places you’ll simply be flamed to high heaven, because you’re interfering with the religious text.
 </p>

 <p>
 So these are human patterns that have shown up on the Internet, not because of the software, but because it’s being used by humans. Bion has identified this possibility of groups sandbagging their sophisticated goals with these basic urges.  And what he finally came to, in analyzing this tension, is that group structure is necessary.  Robert’s Rules of Order are necessary.  Constitutions are necessary.  Norms, rituals, laws, the whole list of ways that we say, out of the universe of possible behaviors, we’re going to draw a relatively small circle around the acceptable ones.
 </p>

 <p>
 He said the group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself.  Group structure exists to keep a group on target, on track, on message, on charter, whatever.  To keep a group focused on its own sophisticated goals and to keep a group from sliding into these basic patterns.  Group structure defends the group from the action of its own members.
 </p>

 <p>
 In the Seventies -- this is a pattern that’s shown up on the network over and over again -- in the Seventies, a BBS called Communitree launched, one of the very early dial-up BBSes.  This was launched when people didn’t own computers, institutions owned computers.
 </p>

 <p>
 Communitree was founded on the principles of open access and free dialogue.  “Communitree” -- the name just says “California in the Seventies.”  And the notion was, effectively, throw off structure and new and beautiful patterns will arise.
 </p>

 <p>
 And, indeed, as anyone who has put discussion software into groups that were previously disconnected has seen, that does happen.  Incredible things happen.  The early days of Echo, the early days of usenet, the early days of Lucasfilms Habitat, over and over again, you see all this incredible upwelling of people who suddenly are connected in ways they weren’t before.
 </p>

 <p>
 And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge.  In this case, one of the difficulties was occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that got hold of some modems was a high school.  And who, in 1978, was hanging out in the room with the computer and the modems in it, but the boys of that high school.  And the boys weren’t terribly interested in sophisticated adult conversation.  They were interested in fart jokes.  They were interested in salacious talk.  They were interested in running amok and posting four-letter words and nyah-nyah-nyah, all over the bulletin board.
 </p>

 <p>
 And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students.  The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness.  They couldn’t defend themselves against their own users.  The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom.  They had no way of saying “No, that’s not the kind of free speech we meant.”
 </p>

 <p>
 But that was a requirement.  In order to defend themselves against being overrun, that was something that they needed to have that they didn’t have, and as a result, they simply shut the site down.
 </p>

 <p>
 Now you could ask whether or not the founders’ inability to defend themselves from this onslaught, from being overrun, was a technical or a social problem.  Did the software not allow the problem to be solved?  Or was it the social configuration of the group that founded it, where they simply couldn’t stomach the idea of adding censorship to protect their system.  But in a way, it doesn’t matter, because technical and social issues are deeply intertwined.  There’s no way to completely separate them.
 </p>

 <p>
 What matters is, a group designed this and then was unable, in the context they’d set up, partly a technical and partly a social context, to save it from this attack from within.  And attack from within is what matters.  Communitree wasn’t shut down by people trying to crash or syn-flood the server.  It was shut down by people logging in and posting, which is what the system was designed to allow. The technological pattern of normal use and attack were identical at the machine level, so there was no way to specify technologically what should and shouldn’t happen. Some of the users wanted the system to continue to exist and to provide a forum for discussion.  And other of the users, the high school boys, either didn’t care or were actively inimical.  And the system provided no way for the former group to defend itself from the latter.
 </p>

 <p>
 Now, this story has been written many times.  It’s actually frustrating to see how many times it’s been written.  You’d hope that at some point that someone would write it down, and they often do, but what then doesn’t happen is other people don’t read it.
 </p>

 <p>
 The most charitable description of this repeated pattern is “learning from experience.” But learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something.  Learning from experience is one up from remembering.  That’s not great.  The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: “Don’t go in that swamp.  There are alligators in there.”
 </p>

 <p>
 Learning from experience about the alligators is lousy, compared to learning from reading, say.  There hasn’t been, unfortunately, in this arena, a lot of learning from reading.  And so, lessons from Lucasfilms’ Habitat, written in 1990, reads a lot like Rose Stone’s description of Communitree from 1978.
 </p>

 <p>
 This pattern has happened over and over and over again.  Someone built the system, they assumed certain user behaviors.  The users came on and exhibited different behaviors.  And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled.
 </p>

 <p>
 There’s a great document called “LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction,” which is about the wizards of LambdaMOO, Pavel Curtis’s Xerox PARC experiment in building a MUD world.  And one day the wizards of LambdaMOO announced “We’ve gotten this system up and running, and all these interesting social effects are happening.  Henceforth we wizards will only be involved in technological issues.  We’re not going to get involved in any of that social stuff.”
 </p>

 <p>
 And then, I think about 18 months later -- I don’t remember the exact gap of time -- they come back.  The wizards come back, extremely cranky.  And they say: “What we have learned from you whining users is that we can’t do what we said we would do.  We cannot separate the technological aspects from the social aspects of running a virtual world.
 </p>

 <p>
 “So we’re back, and we’re taking wizardly fiat back, and we’re going to do things to run the system.  We are effectively setting ourselves up as a government, because this place needs a government, because without us, the place was falling apart.”
 </p>

 <p>
 People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers.  They both look like programming, but when you’re dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice.  In the political realm, we would call these kinds of crises a constitutional crisis.  It’s what happens when the tension between the individual and the group, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals and groups, gets so serious that something has to be done.
 </p>

 <p>
 And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it’s not just “We need to have some rules.”  It’s also “We need to have some rules for making some rules.”  And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups.
 </p>

 <p>
 Geoff Cohen has a great observation about this.  He said “The likelihood that any unmoderated group will eventually get into a flame-war about whether or not to have a moderator approaches one as time increases.”  As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high.
 </p>

 <h2>Part Two: Why now?  </h2>

 <p>
 If these things I’m saying have happened so often before, have been happening and been documented and we’ve got psychological literature that predates the Internet, what’s going on now that makes this important?
 </p>

 <p>
 I can’t tell you precisely why, but observationally there is a revolution in social software going on.  The number of people writing tools to support or enhance group collaboration or communication is astonishing.
 </p>

 <p>
 The web turned us all into size queens for six or eight years there. It was loosely coupled, it was stateless, it scaled like crazy, and everything became about How big can you get? “How many users does Yahoo have?  How many customers does Amazon have?  How many readers does MSNBC have?”  And the answer could be “Really a lot!”  But it could only be really a lot if you didn’t require MSNBC to be answering those readers, and you didn’t require those readers to be talking to one another.
 </p>

 <p>
 The downside of going for size and scale above all else is that the dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration isn’t supportable at any large scale.  Less is different -- small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can’t.   And so we blew past that interesting scale of small groups.  Larger than a dozen, smaller than a few hundred, where people can actually have these conversational forms that can’t be supported when you’re talking about tens of thousands or millions of users, at least in a single group.
 </p>

 <p>
 We’ve had things like mailing lists and BBSes for a long time, and more recently we’ve had IM, we’ve had these various patterns.  And now, all of a sudden, these things are popping up.  We’ve gotten weblogs and wikis, and I think, even more importantly, we’re getting platform stuff.  We’re getting RSS.  We’re getting shared Flash objects.  We’re getting ways to quickly build on top of some infrastructure we can take for granted, that lets us try new things very rapidly.
 </p>

 <p>
 I was talking to Stewart Butterfield about the chat application they’re trying here.  I said “Hey, how’s that going?”  He said: “Well, we only had the idea for it two weeks ago.  So this is the launch.” When you can go from “Hey, I’ve got an idea” to “Let’s launch this in front of a few hundred serious geeks and see how it works,” that suggests that there’s a platform there that is letting people do some really interesting things really quickly.  It’s not that you couldn’t have built a similar application a couple of years ago, but the cost would have been much higher.  And when you lower costs, interesting new kinds of things happen.
 </p>

 <p>
 So the first answer to Why Now? is simply “Because it’s time.” I can’t tell you why it took as long for weblogs to happen as it did, except to say it had absolutely nothing to do with technology.  We had every bit of technology we needed to do weblogs the day Mosaic launched the first forms-capable browser.  Every single piece of it was right there.  Instead, we got Geocities.  Why did we get Geocities and not weblogs?  We didn’t know what we were doing.
 </p>

 <p>
 One was a bad idea, the other turns out to be a really good idea.  It took a long time to figure out that people talking to one another, instead of simply uploading badly-scanned photos of their cats, would be a useful pattern.
 </p>

 <p>
 We got the weblog pattern in around ’96 with Drudge.  We got weblog platforms starting in ’98.  The thing really was taking off in 2000. By last year, everyone realized: Omigod, this thing is going mainstream, and it’s going to change everything.
 </p>

 <p>
 The vertigo moment for me was when Phil Gyford launched the Pepys weblog, Samuel Pepys’ diaries of the 1660’s turned into a weblog form, with a new  post every day from Pepys’ diary.  What that said to me was: Phil was asserting, and I now believe, that weblogs will be around for at least 10 years, because that’s how long Pepys kept a diary.  And that was this moment of projecting into the future: This is now infrastructure we can take for granted.
 </p>

 <p>
 Why was there an eight-year gap between a forms-capable browser and the Pepys diaries?  I don’t know.  It just takes a while for people to get used to these ideas.
 </p>

 <p>
 So, first of all, this is a revolution in part because it is a revolution.  We’ve internalized the ideas and people are now working with them.  Second, the things that people are now building are web-native.
 </p>

 <p>
 When you got social software on the web in the mid-Nineties, a lot of it was: “This is the Giant Lotus Dreadnought, now with New Lightweight Web Interface!”  It never felt like the web.  It felt like this hulking thing with a little, you know, “Here’s some icons.  Don’t look behind the curtain.”
 </p>

 <p>
 A weblog is web-native.  It’s the web all the way in.  A wiki is a web-native way of hosting collaboration.  It’s lightweight, it’s loosely coupled, it’s easy to extend, it’s easy to break down. And it’s not just the surface, like oh, you can just do things in a form.  It assumes http is transport.  It assumes markup in the coding.  RSS is a web-native way of doing syndication.  So we’re taking all of these tools and we’re extending them in a way that lets us build new things really quickly.
 </p>

 <p>
 Third, in David Weinberger’s felicitous phrase, we can now start to have a Small Pieces Loosely Joined pattern.  It’s really worthwhile to look into what Joi Ito is doing with the Emergent Democracy movement, even if you’re not interested in the themes of emerging democracy. This started because a conversation was going on, and Ito said “I am frustrated.  I’m sitting here in Japan, and I know all of these people are having these conversations in real-time with one another.  I want to have a group conversation, too.  I’ll start a conference call.
 </p>

 <p>
 “But since conference calls are so lousy on their own, I’m going to bring up a chat window at the same time.”  And then, in the first meeting, I think it was Pete Kaminski said “Well, I’ve also opened up a wiki, and here’s the URL.”  And he posted it in the chat window.  And people can start annotating things.  People can start adding bookmarks; here are the lists.
 </p>

 <p>
 So, suddenly you’ve got this meeting, which is going on in three separate modes at the same time, two in real-time and one annotated.  So you can have the conference call going on, and you know how conference calls are.  Either one or two people dominate it, or everyone’s like “Oh, can I -- no, but --”, everyone interrupting and cutting each other off.
 </p>

 <p>
 It’s very difficult to coordinate a conference call, because people can’t see one another, which makes it hard to manage the interrupt logic.  In Joi’s conference call, the interrupt logic got moved to the chat room.  People would type “Hand,” and the moderator of the conference call will then type “You’re speaking next,” in the chat.  So the conference call flowed incredibly smoothly.
 </p>

 <p>
 Meanwhile, in the chat, people are annotating what people are saying.  “Oh, that reminds me of So-and-so’s work.”  Or “You should look at this URL...you should look at that ISBN number.”  In a conference call, to read out a URL, you have to spell it out -- “No, no, no, it’s w w w dot net dash...”  In a chat window, you get it and you can click on it right there.  You can say, in the conference call or the chat: “Go over to the wiki and look at this.”
 </p>

 <p>
 This is a broadband conference call, but it isn’t a giant thing.  It’s just three little pieces of software laid next to each other and held together with a little bit of social glue.  This is an incredibly powerful pattern.  It’s different from: Let’s take the Lotus juggernaut and add a web front-end.
 </p>

 <p>
 And finally, and this is the thing that I think is the real freakout, is ubiquity.  The web has been growing for a long, long time.  And so some people had web access, and then lots of people had web access, and then most people had web access.
 </p>

 <p>
 But something different is happening now.  In many situations, all people have access to the network.  And “all” is a different kind of amount than “most.”  “All” lets you start taking things for granted.
 </p>

 <p>
 Now, the Internet isn’t everywhere in the world.  It isn’t even everywhere in the developed world.  But for some groups of people -- students, people in high-tech offices, knowledge workers -- everyone they work with is online.  Everyone they’re friends with is online.  Everyone in their family is online.
 </p>

 <p>
 And this pattern of ubiquity lets you start taking this for granted.  Bill Joy once said “My method is to look at something that seems like a good idea and assume it’s true.”  We’re starting to see software that simply assumes that all offline groups will have an online component, no matter what.
 </p>

 <p>
 It is now possible for every grouping, from a Girl Scout troop on up, to have an online component, and for it to be lightweight and easy to manage.  And that’s a different kind of thing than the old pattern of “online community.” I have this image of two hula hoops, the old two-hula hoop world, where my real life is over here, and my online life is over there, and there wasn’t much overlap between them. If the hula hoops are swung together, and everyone who’s offline is also online, at least from my point of view, that’s a different kind of pattern.
 </p>

 <p>
 There’s a second kind of ubiquity, which is the kind we’re enjoying here thanks to Wifi. If you assume whenever a group of people are gathered together, that they can be both face to face and online at the same time, you can start to do different kinds of things. I now don’t run a meeting without either having a chat room or a wiki up and running.  Three weeks ago I ran a meeting for the Library of Congress.  We had a wiki, set up by Socialtext, to capture a large and very dense amount of technical information on long-term digital preservation.
 </p>

 <p>
 The people who organized the meeting had never used a wiki before, and now the Library of Congress is talking as if they always had a wiki for their meetings, and are assuming it’s going to be at the next meeting as well -- the wiki went from novel to normal in a couple of days.
 </p>

 <p>
 It really quickly becomes an assumption that a group can do things like “Oh, I took my PowerPoint slides, I showed them, and then I dumped them into the wiki.  So now you can get at them.” It becomes a sort of shared repository for group memory.  This is new.  These kinds of ubiquity, both everyone is online, and everyone who’s in a room can be online together at the same time, can lead to new patterns.
 </p>

 <h2>Part Three: What can we take for granted?</h2>

 <p>
 If these assumptions are right, one that a group is its own worst enemy, and two, we’re seeing this explosion of social software, what should we do?  Is there anything we can say with any certainty about building social software, at least for large and long-lived groups?
 </p>

 <p>
 I think there is.  A little over 10 years ago, I quit my day job, because Usenet was so interesting, I thought: This is really going to be big.  And I actually wrote a book about net culture at the time: Usenet, the Well, Echo, IRC and so forth.  It launched in April of ’95, just as that world was being washed away by the web.  But it was my original interest, so I’ve been looking at this problem in one way or another for 10 years, and I’ve been looking at it pretty hard for the a year and a half or so.
 </p>

 <p>
 So there’s this question “What is required to make a large, long-lived online group successful?” and I think I can now answer with some confidence: “It depends.”  I’m hoping to flesh that answer out a little bit in the next ten years.
 </p>

 <p>
 But I can at least say some of the things it depends on.  The Calvinists had a doctrine of natural grace and supernatural grace.  Natural grace was “You have to do all the right things in the world to get to heaven...”  and supernatural grace was “...and God has to anoint you.”  And you never knew if you had supernatural grace or not.  This was their way of getting around the fact that the Book of Revelations put an upper limit on the number of people who were going to heaven.
 </p>

 <p>
 Social software is like that.  You can find the same piece of code running in many, many environments.  And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.  So there is something supernatural about groups being a run-time experience.
 </p>

 <p>
 The normal experience of social software is failure.  If you go into Yahoo groups and you map out the subscriptions, it is, unsurprisingly, a power law.  There’s a small number of highly populated groups, a moderate number of moderately populated groups, and this long, flat tail of failure.  And the failure is inevitably more than 50% of the total mailing lists in any category.  So it’s not like a cake recipe.  There’s nothing you can do to make it come out right every time.
 </p>

 <p>
 There are, however, I think, about half a dozen things that are broadly true of all the groups I’ve looked at and all the online constitutions I’ve read for software that supports large and long-lived groups.  And I’d break that list in half.  I’d say, if you are going to create a piece of social software designed to support large groups, you have to accept three things, and design for four things.
 </p>

 <h2>Three Things to Accept</h2>

 <ol>
 <li>
 <p>
 Of the things you have to accept, the first is that you cannot completely separate technical and social issues.  There are two attractive patterns.  One says, we’ll handle technology over `here, we’ll do social issues there.  We’ll have separate mailing lists with separate discussion groups, or we’ll have one track here and one track there.  This doesn’t work.  It’s never been stated more clearly than in the pair of documents called “LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction.”  I can do no better than to point you to those documents.
 </p>
 <p>
 But recently we’ve had this experience where there was a social software discussion list, and someone said “I know, let’s set up a second mailing list for technical issues.”  And no one moved from the first list, because no one could fork the conversation between social and technical issues, because the conversation can’t be forked.
 </p>
 <p>
 The other pattern that’s very, very attractive -- anybody who looks at this stuff has the same epiphany, which is: “Omigod, this software is determining what people do!”  And that is true, up to a point.  But you cannot completely program social issues either.  So you can’t separate the two things, and you also can’t specify all social issues in technology.  The group is going to assert its rights somehow, and you’re going to get this mix of social and technological effects.
 </p>
 <p>
 So the group is real.  It will exhibit emergent effects.  It can’t be ignored, and it can’t be programmed, which means you have an ongoing issue.  And the best pattern, or at least the pattern that’s worked the most often, is to put into the hands of the group itself the responsibility for defining what value is, and defending that value, rather than trying to ascribe those things in the software upfront.
 </p>
 </li>
 <li>
 <p>
 The second thing you have to accept: Members are different than users.  A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole.  And that becomes your core group, Art Kleiner’s phrase for “the group within the group that matters most.”
 </p>
 <p>
 The core group on Communitree was undifferentiated from the group of random users that came in.  They were separate in their own minds, because they knew what they wanted to do, but they couldn’t defend themselves against the other users.  But in all successful online communities that I’ve looked at, a core group arises that cares about and gardens effectively.  Gardens the environment, to keep it growing, to keep it healthy.
 </p>
 <p>
 Now, the software does not always allow the core group to express itself, which is why I say you have to accept this.  Because if the software doesn’t allow the core group to express itself, it will invent new ways of doing so.
 </p>
 <p>
 On alt.folklore.urban , the discussion group about urban folklore on Usenet, there was a group of people who hung out there and got to be friends.  And they came to care about the existence of AFU, to the point where, because Usenet made no distinction between members in good standing and drive-by users, they set up a mailing list called The Old Hats. The mailing list was for meta-discussion, discussion about AFU, so they could coordinate efforts formally if they were going to troll someone or flame someone or ignore someone, on the mailing list.
 </p>
 <p>
 <em>
 Addendum, July 2, 2003: A longtime a.f.u participant says that the Old
 Hat list was created to allow the Silicon Valley-dwelling members to
 plan a barbecue, so that they could add a face-to-face dimension to
 their virtual interaction. The use of the list as a backstage area for
 discussing the public newsgroup arose after the fact.
 </em>
 </p>
 <p> Then, as Usenet kept growing, many newcomers came along and
 seemed to like the environment, because it was well-run. In order to
 defend themselves from the scaling issues that come from of adding a
 lot of new members to the Old Hats list, they said “We’re starting a
 second list, called the Young Hats.”  </p>
 <p> So they created this
 three-tier system, not dissimilar to the tiers of anonymous cowards,
 logged-in users, and people with high karma on Slashdot.  But because
 Usenet didn’t let them do it in the software, they brought in other
 pieces of software, these mailing lists, that they needed to build the
 structure.  So you don’t get the program users, the members in good
 standing will find one another and be recognized to one another.
 </p>
 </li>
 <li>
 <p>
 The third thing you need to accept: The core group has
 rights that trump individual rights in some situations.  This pulls
 against the libertarian view that’s quite common on the network, and
 it absolutely pulls against the one person/one vote notion.  But you
 can see examples of how bad an idea voting is when citizenship is the
 same as ability to log in.  </p>
 <p> In the early Nineties, a proposal
 went out to create a Usenet news group for discussing Tibetan culture,
 called soc.culture.tibet.  And it was voted down, in large part
 because a number of Chinese students who had Internet access voted it
 down, on the logic that Tibet wasn’t a country; it was a region of
 China.  And in their view, since Tibet wasn’t a country, there
 oughtn’t be any place to discuss its culture, because that was
 oxymoronic.  </p>
 <p> Now, everyone could see that this was the wrong
 answer.  The people who wanted a place to discuss Tibetan culture
 should have it.  That was the core group.  But because the one
 person/one vote model on Usenet said “Anyone who’s on Usenet gets to
 vote on any group,” sufficiently contentious groups could simply be
 voted away.  </p>
 <p> Imagine today if, in the United States, Internet
 users had to be polled before any anti-war group could be created.  Or
 French users had to be polled before any pro-war group could be
 created. The people who want to have those discussions are the people
 who matter.  And absolute citizenship, with the idea that if you can
 log in, you are a citizen, is a harmful pattern, because it is the
 tyranny of the majority.  </p>
 <p> So the core group needs ways to
 defend itself -- both in getting started and because of the effects I
 talked about earlier -- the core group needs to defend itself so that
 it can stay on its sophisticated goals and away from its basic
 instincts.  </p>
 <p> The Wikipedia has a similar system today, with a
 volunteer fire department, a group of people who care to an unusual
 degree about the success of the Wikipedia.  And they have enough
 leverage, because of the way wikis work, they can always roll back
 graffiti and so forth, that that thing has stayed up despite repeated
 attacks.  So leveraging the core group is a really powerful system.
 </p>
 </li>
 </ol>

 <p> Now, when I say these are three things you have to accept, I
 mean you <i>have to</i> accept them.  Because if you don’t accept them
 upfront, they’ll happen to you anyway.  And then you’ll end up writing
 one of those documents that says “Oh, we launched this and we tried
 it, and then the users came along and did all these weird things.  And
 now we’re documenting it so future ages won’t make this mistake.”
 Even though you didn’t read the thing that was written in 1978.
 </p>

 <p> All groups of any integrity have a constitution.  The
 constitution is always partly formal and partly informal.  At the very
 least, the formal part is what’s substantiated in code -- “the
 software works this way.”  </p>

 <p> The informal part is the sense of
 “how we do it around here.”  And no matter how is substantiated in
 code or written in charter, whatever, there will always be an informal
 part as well.  You can’t separate the two.  </p>

 <h2>Four Things to Design For</h2>

 <ol>
 <li>
 <p>If you were going to build a piece of
 social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you
 design for?  The first thing you would design for is handles the user
 can invest in.  </p>
 <p> Now, I say “handles,” because I don’t want to
 say “identity,” because identity has suddenly become one of those
 ideas where, when you pull on the little thread you want, this big bag
 of stuff comes along with it.  Identity is such a hot-button issue
 now, but for the lightweight stuff required for social software, its
 really just a handle that matters.  </p>
 <p> It’s pretty widely
 understood that anonymity doesn’t work well in group settings, because
 “who said what when” is the minimum requirement for having a
 conversation.  What’s less well understood is that weak pseudonymity
 doesn’t work well, either.  Because I need to associate who’s saying
 something to me now with previous conversations.  </p>
 <p> The world’s
 best reputation management system is right here, in the brain.  And
 actually, it’s right here, in the back, in the emotional part of the
 brain.  Almost all the work being done on reputation systems today is
 either trivial or useless or both, because reputations aren’t
 linearizable, and they’re not portable.  </p>
 <p> There are people who
 cheat on their spouse but not at cards, and vice versa, and both and
 neither.  Reputation is not necessarily portable from one situation to
 another, and it’s not easily expressed.  </p>
 <p> eBay has done us all
 an enormous disservice, because eBay works in non-iterated atomic
 transactions, which are the opposite of social situations.  eBay’s
 reputation system works incredibly well, because it starts with a
 linearizable transaction -- “How much money for how many Smurfs?” --
 and turns that into a metric that’s equally linear.  </p>
 <p> That
 doesn’t work well in social situations.  If you want a good reputation
 system, just let me remember who you are.  And if you do me a favor,
 I’ll remember it.  And I won’t store it in the front of my brain, I’ll
 store it here, in the back.  I’ll just get a good feeling next time I
 get email from you; I won’t even remember why.  And if you do me a
 disservice and I get email from you, my temples will start to throb,
 and I won’t even remember why. If you give users a way of remembering
 one another, reputation will happen, and that requires nothing more
 than simple and somewhat persistent handles.  </p>
 <p> Users have to be
 able to identify themselves and there has to be a penalty for
 switching handles. The penalty for switching doesn’t have to be total.
 But if I change my handle on the system, I have to lose some kind of
 reputation or some kind of context. This keeps the system functioning.
 </p>
 <p> Now, this pulls against the sense that we’ve had since the
 early psychological writings about the Internet.  “Oh, on the Internet
 we’re all going to be changing identities and genders like we change
 our socks.”  </p>
 <p> And you see things like the Kaycee Nicole story,
 where a woman in Kansas pretended to be a high school student, and
 then because the invented high school student’s friends got so
 emotionally involved, she then tried to kill the Kaycee Nicole persona
 off.  “Oh, she’s got cancer and she’s dying and it’s all very tragic.”
 And of course, everyone wanted to fly to meet her.  So then she sort
 of panicked and vanished.  And a bunch of places on the Internet,
 particularly the MetaFilter community, rose up to find out what was
 going on, and uncovered the hoax.  It was sort of a distributed
 detective movement.  </p>
 <p> Now a number of people point to this and
 say “See, I told you about that identity thing!”  But the Kaycee
 Nicole story is this: changing your identity is really weird.  And
 when the community understands that you’ve been doing it and you’re
 faking, that is seen as a huge and violent transgression.  And they
 will expend an astonishing amount of energy to find you and punish
 you.  So identity is much less slippery than the early literature
 would lead us to believe.  </p>
 </li>
 <li>
 <p>Second, you have to design a
 way for there to be members in good standing.  Have to design some way
 in which good works get recognized.  The minimal way is, posts appear
 with identity.  You can do more sophisticated things like having
 formal karma or “member since.”  </p>
 <p> I’m on the fence about
 whether or not this is a design or accepting.  Because in a way I
 think members in good standing will rise.  But more and more of the
 systems I’m seeing launching these days are having some kind of
 additional accretion so you can tell how much involvement members have
 with the system.  </p>
 <p> There’s an interesting pattern I’m seeing
 among the music-sharing group that operates between Tokyo and Hong
 Kong.  They operate on a mailing list, which they set up for
 themselves.  But when they’re trading music, what they’re doing is,
 they’re FedExing one another 180-gig hard-drives.  So you’re getting
 .wav files and not MP3s, and you’re getting them in bulk.  </p>
 <p>
 Now, you can imagine that such a system might be a target for
 organizations that would frown on this activity.  So when you join
 that group, your user name is appended with the user name of the
 person who is your sponsor.  You can’t get in without your name being
 linked to someone else.  You can see immediately the reputational
 effects going on there, just from linking two handles.  </p>
 <p> So in
 that system, you become a member in good standing when your sponsor
 link goes away and you’re there on your own report.  If, on the other
 hand, you defect, not only are you booted, but your sponsor is booted.
 There are lots and lots of lightweight ways to accept and work with
 the idea of member in good standing.  </p>
 </li>
 <li>
 <p>Three, you need
 barriers to participation.  This is one of the things that killed
 Usenet.  You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if
 not at the lowest level, then at higher levels.  There needs to be
 some kind of segmentation of capabilities.  </p>
 <p> Now, the
 segmentation can be total -- you’re in or you’re out, as with the
 music group I just listed.  Or it can be partial -- anyone can read
 Slashdot, anonymous cowards can post, non-anonymous cowards can post
 with a higher rating.  But to moderate, you really have to have been
 around for a while.  </p>
 <p> It has to be hard to do at least some
 things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have
 the tools that they need to defend themselves.  </p>
 <p> Now, this
 pulls against the cardinal virtue of ease of use.  But ease of use is
 wrong.  Ease of use is the wrong way to look at the situation, because
 you’ve got the Necker cube flipped in the wrong direction.  The user
 of social software is the group, not the individual.  </p>
 <p> I think
 we’ve all been to meetings where everyone had a really good time,
 we’re all talking to one another and telling jokes and laughing, and
 it was a great meeting, except we got nothing done.  Everyone was
 amusing themselves so much that the group’s goal was defeated by the
 individual interventions.  </p>
 <p> The user of social software is the
 group, and ease of use should be for the group.  If the ease of use is
 only calculated from the user’s point of view, it will be difficult to
 defend the group from the “group is its own worst enemy” style attacks
 from within.  </p>
 </li>
 <li>
 <p>And, finally, you have to find a way to
 spare the group from scale.  Scale alone kills conversations, because
 conversations require dense two-way conversations.  In conversational
 contexts, Metcalfe’s law is a drag.  The fact that the amount of
 two-way connections you have to support goes up with the square of the
 users means that the density of conversation falls off very fast as
 the system scales even a little bit.  You have to have some way to let
 users hang onto the less is more pattern, in order to keep associated
 with one another.  </p>
 <p> This is an inverse value to scale question.
 Think about your Rolodex.  A thousand contacts, maybe 150 people you
 can call friends, 30 people you can call close friends, two or three
 people you’d donate a kidney to.  The value is inverse to the size of
 the group.  And you have to find some way to protect the group within
 the context of those effects.  </p>
 <p> Sometimes you can do soft
 forking.  Live Journal does the best soft forking of any software I’ve
 ever seen, where the concepts of “you” and “your group” are pretty
 much intertwingled.  The average size of a Live Journal group is about
 a dozen people.  And the median size is around five.  </p>
 <p> But each
 user is a little bit connected to other such clusters, through their
 friends, and so while the clusters are real, they’re not completely
 bounded -- there’s a soft overlap which means that though most users
 participate in small groups, most of the half-million LiveJournal
 users are connected to one another through some short chain.  </p>
 <p>
 IRC channels and mailing lists are self-moderating with scale, because
 as the signal to noise ratio gets worse, people start to drop off,
 until it gets better, so people join, and so it gets worse.  You get
 these sort of oscillating patterns.  But it’s self-correcting.
 </p>
 <p> And then my favorite pattern is from MetaFilter, which is:
 When we start seeing effects of scale, we shut off the new user page.
 “Someone mentions us in the press and how great we are?  Bye!” That’s
 a way of raising the bar, that’s creating a threshold of
 participation. And anyone who bookmarks that page and says “You know,
 I really want to be in there; maybe I’ll go back later,” that’s the
 kind of user MeFi wants to have.  </p>
 <p> You have to find some way to
 protect your own users from scale.  This doesn’t mean the scale of the
 whole system can’t grow.  But you can’t try to make the system large
 by taking individual conversations and blowing them up like a balloon;
 human interaction, many to many interaction, doesn’t blow up like a
 balloon.  It either dissipates, or turns into broadcast, or collapses.
 So plan for dealing with scale in advance, because it’s going to
 happen anyway.  </p>
 </li>
 </ol>

 <h2>Conclusion</h2>

 <p> Now, those four
 things are of course necessary but not sufficient conditions.  I
 propose them more as a platform for building the interesting
 differences off.  There are lots and lots and lots of other effects
 that make different bits of software interesting enough that you would
 want to keep more than one kind of pattern around.  But those are
 commonalities I’m seeing across a range of social software for large
 and long-lived groups.  </p>

 <p> In addition, you can do all sorts of
 things with explicit clustering, whether it’s guilds in massively
 multi-player games, or communities on Live Journal or what have you.
 You can do things with conversational artifacts, where the group
 participation leaves behind some record.  The Wikipedia right now, the
 group collaborated online encyclopedia is the most interesting
 conversational artifact I know of, where product is a result of
 process. Rather than “We’re specifically going to get together and
 create this presentation” it’s just “What’s left is a record of what
 we said.”  </p>

 <p> There are all these things, and of course they
 differ platform to platform.  But there is this, I believe, common
 core of things that will happen whether you plan for them or not, and
 things you should plan for, that I think are invariant across large
 communal software.  </p>

 <p> Writing social software is hard.  And, as
 I said, the act of writing social software is more like the work of an
 economist or a political scientist.  And the act of hosting social
 software, the relationship of someone who hosts it is more like a
 relationship of landlords to tenants than owners to boxes in a
 warehouse.  </p>

 <p> The people using your software, even if you own it
 and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights.
 And if you abrogate those rights, you’ll hear about it very quickly.
 </p>

 <p> That’s part of the problem that the John Hegel theory of
 community -- community leads to content, which leads to commerce --
 never worked.  Because lo and behold, no matter who came onto the
 Clairol chat boards, they sometimes wanted to talk about things that
 weren’t Clairol products.  </p>

 <p> “But we paid for this!  This is the
 Clairol site!”  Doesn’t matter.  The users are there for one another.
 They may be there on hardware and software paid for by you, but the
 users are there for one another.  </p>

 <p> The patterns here, I am
 suggesting, both the things to accept and the things to design for,
 are givens.  Assume these as a kind of social platform, and then you
 can start going out and building on top of that the interesting stuff
 that I think is going to be the real result of this period of
 experimentation with social software.  </p>

 <p> Thank you very much.</p>

 <p><em>
 Published June 30, 2003 on the “Networks, Economics, and Culture” mailing list. </em></p>
 </article>


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 hash_url: 4d81a301bbb7936312cd16e6674f3ff6

 <em>A speech at ETech, April, 2003</em>

 <p>
 Published July 1, 2003 on the “Networks, Economics, and Culture” mailing list.
 <a href="mailto:nec-request@shirky.com?subject=subscribe">Subscribe</a>
 to the mailing list.
 </p>

 <p>
 This is a lightly edited version of the keynote I gave on Social
 Software at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference in Santa
 Clara on April 24, 2003
 </p>

 <hr>

 <p>
 Good morning, everybody. I want to talk this morning about social
 software ...there’s a surprise. I want to talk about a pattern I’ve seen
 over and over again in social software that supports large and
 long-lived groups.  And that pattern is the pattern described in the
 title of this talk: “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.”

 </p>
 <p>
 In particular, I want to talk about what I now think is one of the core challenges for designing large-scale social software.  Let me offer a definition of social software, because it’s a term that’s still fairly amorphous.  My definition is fairly simple: It’s software that supports group interaction.  I also want to emphasize, although that’s a fairly simple definition, how radical that pattern is.  The Internet supports lots of communications patterns, principally point-to-point and two-way, one-to-many outbound, and many-to-many two-way.
 </p>
 <p>
 Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that supported point-to-point two-way.  We had telephones, we had the telegraph.  We were familiar with technological mediation of those kinds of conversations. Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that supported one-way outbound.  I could put something on television or the radio, I could publish a newspaper.  We had the printing press.  So although the Internet does good things for those patterns, they’re patterns we knew from before.
 </p>
 <p>
 Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table.  There was no technological mediation for group conversations.  The closest we got was the conference call, which never really worked right -- “Hello?  Do I push this button now?  Oh, shoot, I just hung up.” It’s not easy to set up a conference call, but it’s very easy to email five of your friends and say “Hey, where are we going for pizza?”  So ridiculously easy group forming is really news.
 </p>
 <p>
 We’ve had social software for 40 years at most, dated from the Plato BBS system, and we’ve only had 10 years or so of widespread availability, so we’re just finding out what works.  We’re still learning how to make these kinds of things.
 </p>
 <p>
 Now, software that supports group interaction is a fundamentally unsatisfying definition in many ways, because it doesn’t point to a specific class of technology. If you look at email, it obviously supports social patterns, but it can also support a broadcast pattern. If I’m a spammer, I’m going to mail things out to a million people, but they’re not going to be talking to one another, and I’m not going to be talking to them -- spam is email, but it isn’t social.  If I’m mailing you, and you’re mailing me back, we’re having point-to-point and two-way conversation, but not one that creates group dynamics.
 </p>
 <p>
 So email doesn’t necessarily support social patterns, group patterns, although it can.  Ditto a weblog.  If I’m Glenn Reynolds, and I’m publishing something with Comments Off and reaching a million users a month, that’s really broadcast. It’s interesting that I can do it as a single individual, but the pattern is closer to MSNBC than it is to a conversation.  If it’s a cluster of half a dozen LiveJournal users, on the other hand, talking about their lives with one another, that’s social.  So, again, weblogs are not necessarily social, although they can support social patterns.
 </p>
 <p>
 Nevertheless, I think that definition is the right one, because it recognizes the fundamentally social nature of the problem.  Groups are a run-time effect.  You cannot specify in advance what the group will do, and so you can’t substantiate in software everything you expect to have happen.
 </p>
 <p>
 Now, there’s a large body of literature saying  “We built this software, a group came and used it, and they began to exhibit behaviors that surprised us enormously, so we’ve gone and documented these behaviors.”  Over and over and over again this pattern comes up.  (I hear Stewart [Brand, of the WELL] laughing.)  The WELL is one of those places where this pattern came up over and over again.
 </p>
 <p>
 This talk is in three parts.  The best explanation I have found for the kinds of things that happen when groups of humans interact is psychological research that predates the Internet, so the first part is going to be about W.R. Bion’s research, which I will talk about in a moment, research that I believe explains how and why a group is its own worst enemy.
 </p>
 <p>
 The second part is: Why now?  What’s going on now that makes this worth thinking about?  I think we’re seeing a revolution in social software in the current environment that’s really interesting.
 </p>
 <p>
 And third, I want to identify some things, about half a dozen things, in fact, that I think are core to any software that supports larger, long-lived groups.
 </p>
 <h2>Part One: How is a group its own worst enemy?</h2>
 <p>
 So, Part One.  The best explanation I have found for the ways in which this pattern establishes itself, the group is its own worst enemy, comes from a book by W.R. Bion called “Experiences in Groups,” written in the middle of the last century.
 </p>
 <p>
 Bion was a psychologist who was doing group therapy with groups of neurotics.  (Drawing parallels between that and the Internet is left as an exercise for the reader.)  The thing that Bion discovered was that the neurotics in his care were, as a group, conspiring to defeat therapy.
 </p>
 <p>
 There was no overt communication or coordination.  But he could see that whenever he would try to do anything that was meant to have an effect, the group would somehow quash it.  And he was driving himself crazy, in the colloquial sense of the term, trying to figure out whether or not he should be looking at the situation as: Are these individuals taking action on their own?  Or is this a coordinated group?
 </p>
 <p>
 He could never resolve the question,  and so he decided that the unresolvability of the question was the answer.  To the question: Do you view groups of people as aggregations of individuals or as a cohesive group, his answer was: “Hopelessly committed to both.”
 </p>
 <p>
 He said that humans are fundamentally individual, and also fundamentally social.  Every one of us has a kind of rational decision-making mind where we can assess what’s going on and make decisions and act on them.  And we are all also able to enter viscerally into emotional bonds with other groups of people that transcend the intellectual aspects of the individual.
 </p>
 <p>
 In fact, Bion was so convinced that this was the right answer that the image he put on the front cover of his book was a Necker cube, one of those cubes that you can look at and make resolve in one of two ways, but you can never see both views of the cube at the same time.  So groups can be analyzed both as collections of individuals and having this kind of emotive group experience.
 </p>
 <p>
 Now, it’s pretty easy to see how groups of people who have formal memberships, groups that have been labeled and named like “I am a member of such-and-such a guild in a massively multi-player online role-playing game,”  it’s easy to see how you would have some kind of group cohesion there.  But Bion’s thesis is that this effect is much, much deeper, and kicks in much, much sooner than many of us expect.  So I want to illustrate this with a story, and to illustrate the illustration, I’ll use a story from your life.  Because even if I don’t know you, I know what I’m about to describe has happened to you.
 </p>
 <p>
 You are at a party, and you get bored.  You say “This isn’t doing it for me anymore.  I’d rather be someplace else.  I’d rather be home asleep.  The people I wanted to talk to aren’t here.”  Whatever. The party fails to meet some threshold of interest.  And then a really remarkable thing happens: You don’t leave.  You make a decision “I don’t like this.”  If you were in a bookstore and you said “I’m done,” you’d walk out.  If you were in a coffee shop and said “This is boring,” you’d walk out.
 </p>
 <p>
 You’re sitting at a party, you decide “I don’t like this; I don’t want to be here.”  And then you don’t leave.  That kind of social stickiness is what Bion is talking about.
 </p>
 <p>
 And then, another really remarkable thing happens.  Twenty minutes later, one person stands up and gets their coat, and what happens?  Suddenly everyone is getting their coats on, all at the same time.  Which means that everyone had decided that the party was not for them, and no one had done anything about it, until finally this triggering event let the air out of the group, and everyone kind of felt okay about leaving.
 </p>
 <p>
 This effect is so steady it’s sometimes called the paradox of groups.  It’s obvious that there are no groups without members.  But what’s less obvious is that there are no members without a group.  Because what would you be a member of?
 </p>
 <p>
 So there’s this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected.  And at that moment, even if it’s subconscious, you start getting group effects. And the effects that we’ve seen come up over and over and over again in online communities.
 </p>
 <p>
 Now, Bion decided that what he was watching with the neurotics was the group defending itself against his attempts to make the group do what they said they were supposed to do.  The group was convened to get better, this group of people was in therapy to get better.  But they were defeating that. And he said, there are some very specific patterns that they’re entering into to defeat the ostensible purpose of the group meeting together.  And he detailed three patterns.
 </p>
 <p>
 The first is sex talk, what he called, in his mid-century prose, “A group met for pairing off.”  And what that means is, the group conceives of its purpose as the hosting of flirtatious or salacious talk or emotions passing between pairs of members.
 </p>
 <p>
 You go on IRC and you scan the channel list, and you say “Oh, I know what that group is about, because I see the channel label.”  And you go into the group, you will also almost invariably find that it’s about sex talk as well.  Not necessarily overt.  But that is always in scope in human conversations, according to Bion.  That is one basic pattern that groups can always devolve into, away from the sophisticated purpose and towards one of these basic purposes.
 </p>
 <p>
 The second basic pattern that Bion detailed:  The identification and vilification of external enemies.  This is a very common pattern.  Anyone who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time.  If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do.  But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates.  And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad.
 </p>
 <p>
 If you want to make it better, there’s a list of things to do.  It’s Open Source, right?  Just fix it.  “No, no, Microsoft and Bill Gates grrrrr ...”, the froth would start coming out.  The external enemy -- nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy.
 </p>
 <p>
 So even if someone isn’t really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion.  And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies.
 </p>
 <p>
 The third pattern Bion identified: Religious veneration.  The nomination and worship of a religious icon or a set of religious tenets. The religious pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that’s beyond critique.  You can see this pattern on the Internet any day you like.  Go onto a Tolkein newsgroup or discussion forum, and try saying “You know, The Two Towers is a little dull.  I mean loooong.  We didn’t need that much description about the forest, because it’s pretty much the same forest all the way.”
 </p>
 <p>
 Try having that discussion.  On the door of the group it will say: “This is for discussing the works of Tolkein.”  Go in and try and have that discussion.
 </p>
 <p>
 Now, in some places people say “Yes, but it needed to, because it had to convey the sense of lassitude,” or whatever.  But in most places you’ll simply be flamed to high heaven, because you’re interfering with the religious text.
 </p>
 <p>
 So these are human patterns that have shown up on the Internet, not because of the software, but because it’s being used by humans. Bion has identified this possibility of groups sandbagging their sophisticated goals with these basic urges.  And what he finally came to, in analyzing this tension, is that group structure is necessary.  Robert’s Rules of Order are necessary.  Constitutions are necessary.  Norms, rituals, laws, the whole list of ways that we say, out of the universe of possible behaviors, we’re going to draw a relatively small circle around the acceptable ones.
 </p>
 <p>
 He said the group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself.  Group structure exists to keep a group on target, on track, on message, on charter, whatever.  To keep a group focused on its own sophisticated goals and to keep a group from sliding into these basic patterns.  Group structure defends the group from the action of its own members.
 </p>
 <p>
 In the Seventies -- this is a pattern that’s shown up on the network over and over again -- in the Seventies, a BBS called Communitree launched, one of the very early dial-up BBSes.  This was launched when people didn’t own computers, institutions owned computers.
 </p>
 <p>
 Communitree was founded on the principles of open access and free dialogue.  “Communitree” -- the name just says “California in the Seventies.”  And the notion was, effectively, throw off structure and new and beautiful patterns will arise.
 </p>
 <p>
 And, indeed, as anyone who has put discussion software into groups that were previously disconnected has seen, that does happen.  Incredible things happen.  The early days of Echo, the early days of usenet, the early days of Lucasfilms Habitat, over and over again, you see all this incredible upwelling of people who suddenly are connected in ways they weren’t before.
 </p>
 <p>
 And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge.  In this case, one of the difficulties was occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that got hold of some modems was a high school.  And who, in 1978, was hanging out in the room with the computer and the modems in it, but the boys of that high school.  And the boys weren’t terribly interested in sophisticated adult conversation.  They were interested in fart jokes.  They were interested in salacious talk.  They were interested in running amok and posting four-letter words and nyah-nyah-nyah, all over the bulletin board.
 </p>
 <p>
 And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students.  The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness.  They couldn’t defend themselves against their own users.  The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom.  They had no way of saying “No, that’s not the kind of free speech we meant.”
 </p>
 <p>
 But that was a requirement.  In order to defend themselves against being overrun, that was something that they needed to have that they didn’t have, and as a result, they simply shut the site down.
 </p>
 <p>
 Now you could ask whether or not the founders’ inability to defend themselves from this onslaught, from being overrun, was a technical or a social problem.  Did the software not allow the problem to be solved?  Or was it the social configuration of the group that founded it, where they simply couldn’t stomach the idea of adding censorship to protect their system.  But in a way, it doesn’t matter, because technical and social issues are deeply intertwined.  There’s no way to completely separate them.
 </p>
 <p>
 What matters is, a group designed this and then was unable, in the context they’d set up, partly a technical and partly a social context, to save it from this attack from within.  And attack from within is what matters.  Communitree wasn’t shut down by people trying to crash or syn-flood the server.  It was shut down by people logging in and posting, which is what the system was designed to allow. The technological pattern of normal use and attack were identical at the machine level, so there was no way to specify technologically what should and shouldn’t happen. Some of the users wanted the system to continue to exist and to provide a forum for discussion.  And other of the users, the high school boys, either didn’t care or were actively inimical.  And the system provided no way for the former group to defend itself from the latter.
 </p>
 <p>
 Now, this story has been written many times.  It’s actually frustrating to see how many times it’s been written.  You’d hope that at some point that someone would write it down, and they often do, but what then doesn’t happen is other people don’t read it.
 </p>
 <p>
 The most charitable description of this repeated pattern is “learning from experience.” But learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something.  Learning from experience is one up from remembering.  That’s not great.  The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: “Don’t go in that swamp.  There are alligators in there.”
 </p>
 <p>
 Learning from experience about the alligators is lousy, compared to learning from reading, say.  There hasn’t been, unfortunately, in this arena, a lot of learning from reading.  And so, lessons from Lucasfilms’ Habitat, written in 1990, reads a lot like Rose Stone’s description of Communitree from 1978.
 </p>
 <p>
 This pattern has happened over and over and over again.  Someone built the system, they assumed certain user behaviors.  The users came on and exhibited different behaviors.  And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled.
 </p>
 <p>
 There’s a great document called “LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction,” which is about the wizards of LambdaMOO, Pavel Curtis’s Xerox PARC experiment in building a MUD world.  And one day the wizards of LambdaMOO announced “We’ve gotten this system up and running, and all these interesting social effects are happening.  Henceforth we wizards will only be involved in technological issues.  We’re not going to get involved in any of that social stuff.”
 </p>
 <p>
 And then, I think about 18 months later -- I don’t remember the exact gap of time -- they come back.  The wizards come back, extremely cranky.  And they say: “What we have learned from you whining users is that we can’t do what we said we would do.  We cannot separate the technological aspects from the social aspects of running a virtual world.
 </p>
 <p>
 “So we’re back, and we’re taking wizardly fiat back, and we’re going to do things to run the system.  We are effectively setting ourselves up as a government, because this place needs a government, because without us, the place was falling apart.”
 </p>
 <p>
 People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers.  They both look like programming, but when you’re dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice.  In the political realm, we would call these kinds of crises a constitutional crisis.  It’s what happens when the tension between the individual and the group, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals and groups, gets so serious that something has to be done.
 </p>
 <p>
 And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it’s not just “We need to have some rules.”  It’s also “We need to have some rules for making some rules.”  And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups.
 </p>
 <p>
 Geoff Cohen has a great observation about this.  He said “The likelihood that any unmoderated group will eventually get into a flame-war about whether or not to have a moderator approaches one as time increases.”  As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high.
 </p>
 <h2>Part Two: Why now?  </h2>
 <p>
 If these things I’m saying have happened so often before, have been happening and been documented and we’ve got psychological literature that predates the Internet, what’s going on now that makes this important?
 </p>
 <p>
 I can’t tell you precisely why, but observationally there is a revolution in social software going on.  The number of people writing tools to support or enhance group collaboration or communication is astonishing.
 </p>
 <p>
 The web turned us all into size queens for six or eight years there. It was loosely coupled, it was stateless, it scaled like crazy, and everything became about How big can you get? “How many users does Yahoo have?  How many customers does Amazon have?  How many readers does MSNBC have?”  And the answer could be “Really a lot!”  But it could only be really a lot if you didn’t require MSNBC to be answering those readers, and you didn’t require those readers to be talking to one another.
 </p>
 <p>
 The downside of going for size and scale above all else is that the dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration isn’t supportable at any large scale.  Less is different -- small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can’t.   And so we blew past that interesting scale of small groups.  Larger than a dozen, smaller than a few hundred, where people can actually have these conversational forms that can’t be supported when you’re talking about tens of thousands or millions of users, at least in a single group.
 </p>
 <p>
 We’ve had things like mailing lists and BBSes for a long time, and more recently we’ve had IM, we’ve had these various patterns.  And now, all of a sudden, these things are popping up.  We’ve gotten weblogs and wikis, and I think, even more importantly, we’re getting platform stuff.  We’re getting RSS.  We’re getting shared Flash objects.  We’re getting ways to quickly build on top of some infrastructure we can take for granted, that lets us try new things very rapidly.
 </p>
 <p>
 I was talking to Stewart Butterfield about the chat application they’re trying here.  I said “Hey, how’s that going?”  He said: “Well, we only had the idea for it two weeks ago.  So this is the launch.” When you can go from “Hey, I’ve got an idea” to “Let’s launch this in front of a few hundred serious geeks and see how it works,” that suggests that there’s a platform there that is letting people do some really interesting things really quickly.  It’s not that you couldn’t have built a similar application a couple of years ago, but the cost would have been much higher.  And when you lower costs, interesting new kinds of things happen.
 </p>
 <p>
 So the first answer to Why Now? is simply “Because it’s time.” I can’t tell you why it took as long for weblogs to happen as it did, except to say it had absolutely nothing to do with technology.  We had every bit of technology we needed to do weblogs the day Mosaic launched the first forms-capable browser.  Every single piece of it was right there.  Instead, we got Geocities.  Why did we get Geocities and not weblogs?  We didn’t know what we were doing.
 </p>
 <p>
 One was a bad idea, the other turns out to be a really good idea.  It took a long time to figure out that people talking to one another, instead of simply uploading badly-scanned photos of their cats, would be a useful pattern.
 </p>
 <p>
 We got the weblog pattern in around ’96 with Drudge.  We got weblog platforms starting in ’98.  The thing really was taking off in 2000. By last year, everyone realized: Omigod, this thing is going mainstream, and it’s going to change everything.
 </p>
 <p>
 The vertigo moment for me was when Phil Gyford launched the Pepys weblog, Samuel Pepys’ diaries of the 1660’s turned into a weblog form, with a new  post every day from Pepys’ diary.  What that said to me was: Phil was asserting, and I now believe, that weblogs will be around for at least 10 years, because that’s how long Pepys kept a diary.  And that was this moment of projecting into the future: This is now infrastructure we can take for granted.
 </p>
 <p>
 Why was there an eight-year gap between a forms-capable browser and the Pepys diaries?  I don’t know.  It just takes a while for people to get used to these ideas.
 </p>
 <p>
 So, first of all, this is a revolution in part because it is a revolution.  We’ve internalized the ideas and people are now working with them.  Second, the things that people are now building are web-native.
 </p>
 <p>
 When you got social software on the web in the mid-Nineties, a lot of it was: “This is the Giant Lotus Dreadnought, now with New Lightweight Web Interface!”  It never felt like the web.  It felt like this hulking thing with a little, you know, “Here’s some icons.  Don’t look behind the curtain.”
 </p>
 <p>
 A weblog is web-native.  It’s the web all the way in.  A wiki is a web-native way of hosting collaboration.  It’s lightweight, it’s loosely coupled, it’s easy to extend, it’s easy to break down. And it’s not just the surface, like oh, you can just do things in a form.  It assumes http is transport.  It assumes markup in the coding.  RSS is a web-native way of doing syndication.  So we’re taking all of these tools and we’re extending them in a way that lets us build new things really quickly.
 </p>
 <p>
 Third, in David Weinberger’s felicitous phrase, we can now start to have a Small Pieces Loosely Joined pattern.  It’s really worthwhile to look into what Joi Ito is doing with the Emergent Democracy movement, even if you’re not interested in the themes of emerging democracy. This started because a conversation was going on, and Ito said “I am frustrated.  I’m sitting here in Japan, and I know all of these people are having these conversations in real-time with one another.  I want to have a group conversation, too.  I’ll start a conference call.
 </p>
 <p>
 “But since conference calls are so lousy on their own, I’m going to bring up a chat window at the same time.”  And then, in the first meeting, I think it was Pete Kaminski said “Well, I’ve also opened up a wiki, and here’s the URL.”  And he posted it in the chat window.  And people can start annotating things.  People can start adding bookmarks; here are the lists.
 </p>
 <p>
 So, suddenly you’ve got this meeting, which is going on in three separate modes at the same time, two in real-time and one annotated.  So you can have the conference call going on, and you know how conference calls are.  Either one or two people dominate it, or everyone’s like “Oh, can I -- no, but --”, everyone interrupting and cutting each other off.
 </p>
 <p>
 It’s very difficult to coordinate a conference call, because people can’t see one another, which makes it hard to manage the interrupt logic.  In Joi’s conference call, the interrupt logic got moved to the chat room.  People would type “Hand,” and the moderator of the conference call will then type “You’re speaking next,” in the chat.  So the conference call flowed incredibly smoothly.
 </p>
 <p>
 Meanwhile, in the chat, people are annotating what people are saying.  “Oh, that reminds me of So-and-so’s work.”  Or “You should look at this URL...you should look at that ISBN number.”  In a conference call, to read out a URL, you have to spell it out -- “No, no, no, it’s w w w dot net dash...”  In a chat window, you get it and you can click on it right there.  You can say, in the conference call or the chat: “Go over to the wiki and look at this.”
 </p>
 <p>
 This is a broadband conference call, but it isn’t a giant thing.  It’s just three little pieces of software laid next to each other and held together with a little bit of social glue.  This is an incredibly powerful pattern.  It’s different from: Let’s take the Lotus juggernaut and add a web front-end.
 </p>
 <p>
 And finally, and this is the thing that I think is the real freakout, is ubiquity.  The web has been growing for a long, long time.  And so some people had web access, and then lots of people had web access, and then most people had web access.
 </p>
 <p>
 But something different is happening now.  In many situations, all people have access to the network.  And “all” is a different kind of amount than “most.”  “All” lets you start taking things for granted.
 </p>
 <p>
 Now, the Internet isn’t everywhere in the world.  It isn’t even everywhere in the developed world.  But for some groups of people -- students, people in high-tech offices, knowledge workers -- everyone they work with is online.  Everyone they’re friends with is online.  Everyone in their family is online.
 </p>
 <p>
 And this pattern of ubiquity lets you start taking this for granted.  Bill Joy once said “My method is to look at something that seems like a good idea and assume it’s true.”  We’re starting to see software that simply assumes that all offline groups will have an online component, no matter what.
 </p>
 <p>
 It is now possible for every grouping, from a Girl Scout troop on up, to have an online component, and for it to be lightweight and easy to manage.  And that’s a different kind of thing than the old pattern of “online community.” I have this image of two hula hoops, the old two-hula hoop world, where my real life is over here, and my online life is over there, and there wasn’t much overlap between them. If the hula hoops are swung together, and everyone who’s offline is also online, at least from my point of view, that’s a different kind of pattern.
 </p>
 <p>
 There’s a second kind of ubiquity, which is the kind we’re enjoying here thanks to Wifi. If you assume whenever a group of people are gathered together, that they can be both face to face and online at the same time, you can start to do different kinds of things. I now don’t run a meeting without either having a chat room or a wiki up and running.  Three weeks ago I ran a meeting for the Library of Congress.  We had a wiki, set up by Socialtext, to capture a large and very dense amount of technical information on long-term digital preservation.
 </p>
 <p>
 The people who organized the meeting had never used a wiki before, and now the Library of Congress is talking as if they always had a wiki for their meetings, and are assuming it’s going to be at the next meeting as well -- the wiki went from novel to normal in a couple of days.
 </p>
 <p>
 It really quickly becomes an assumption that a group can do things like “Oh, I took my PowerPoint slides, I showed them, and then I dumped them into the wiki.  So now you can get at them.” It becomes a sort of shared repository for group memory.  This is new.  These kinds of ubiquity, both everyone is online, and everyone who’s in a room can be online together at the same time, can lead to new patterns.
 </p>
 <h2>Part Three: What can we take for granted?</h2>
 <p>
 If these assumptions are right, one that a group is its own worst enemy, and two, we’re seeing this explosion of social software, what should we do?  Is there anything we can say with any certainty about building social software, at least for large and long-lived groups?
 </p>
 <p>
 I think there is.  A little over 10 years ago, I quit my day job, because Usenet was so interesting, I thought: This is really going to be big.  And I actually wrote a book about net culture at the time: Usenet, the Well, Echo, IRC and so forth.  It launched in April of ’95, just as that world was being washed away by the web.  But it was my original interest, so I’ve been looking at this problem in one way or another for 10 years, and I’ve been looking at it pretty hard for the a year and a half or so.
 </p>
 <p>
 So there’s this question “What is required to make a large, long-lived online group successful?” and I think I can now answer with some confidence: “It depends.”  I’m hoping to flesh that answer out a little bit in the next ten years.
 </p>
 <p>
 But I can at least say some of the things it depends on.  The Calvinists had a doctrine of natural grace and supernatural grace.  Natural grace was “You have to do all the right things in the world to get to heaven...”  and supernatural grace was “...and God has to anoint you.”  And you never knew if you had supernatural grace or not.  This was their way of getting around the fact that the Book of Revelations put an upper limit on the number of people who were going to heaven.
 </p>
 <p>
 Social software is like that.  You can find the same piece of code running in many, many environments.  And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.  So there is something supernatural about groups being a run-time experience.
 </p>
 <p>
 The normal experience of social software is failure.  If you go into Yahoo groups and you map out the subscriptions, it is, unsurprisingly, a power law.  There’s a small number of highly populated groups, a moderate number of moderately populated groups, and this long, flat tail of failure.  And the failure is inevitably more than 50% of the total mailing lists in any category.  So it’s not like a cake recipe.  There’s nothing you can do to make it come out right every time.
 </p>
 <p>
 There are, however, I think, about half a dozen things that are broadly true of all the groups I’ve looked at and all the online constitutions I’ve read for software that supports large and long-lived groups.  And I’d break that list in half.  I’d say, if you are going to create a piece of social software designed to support large groups, you have to accept three things, and design for four things.
 </p>
 <h2>Three Things to Accept</h2>
 <ol>
 <li>
 <p>
 Of the things you have to accept, the first is that you cannot completely separate technical and social issues.  There are two attractive patterns.  One says, we’ll handle technology over `here, we’ll do social issues there.  We’ll have separate mailing lists with separate discussion groups, or we’ll have one track here and one track there.  This doesn’t work.  It’s never been stated more clearly than in the pair of documents called “LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction.”  I can do no better than to point you to those documents.
 </p>
 <p>
 But recently we’ve had this experience where there was a social software discussion list, and someone said “I know, let’s set up a second mailing list for technical issues.”  And no one moved from the first list, because no one could fork the conversation between social and technical issues, because the conversation can’t be forked.
 </p>
 <p>
 The other pattern that’s very, very attractive -- anybody who looks at this stuff has the same epiphany, which is: “Omigod, this software is determining what people do!”  And that is true, up to a point.  But you cannot completely program social issues either.  So you can’t separate the two things, and you also can’t specify all social issues in technology.  The group is going to assert its rights somehow, and you’re going to get this mix of social and technological effects.
 </p>
 <p>
 So the group is real.  It will exhibit emergent effects.  It can’t be ignored, and it can’t be programmed, which means you have an ongoing issue.  And the best pattern, or at least the pattern that’s worked the most often, is to put into the hands of the group itself the responsibility for defining what value is, and defending that value, rather than trying to ascribe those things in the software upfront.
 </p>
 </li>
 <li>
 <p>
 The second thing you have to accept: Members are different than users.  A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole.  And that becomes your core group, Art Kleiner’s phrase for “the group within the group that matters most.”
 </p>
 <p>
 The core group on Communitree was undifferentiated from the group of random users that came in.  They were separate in their own minds, because they knew what they wanted to do, but they couldn’t defend themselves against the other users.  But in all successful online communities that I’ve looked at, a core group arises that cares about and gardens effectively.  Gardens the environment, to keep it growing, to keep it healthy.
 </p>
 <p>
 Now, the software does not always allow the core group to express itself, which is why I say you have to accept this.  Because if the software doesn’t allow the core group to express itself, it will invent new ways of doing so.
 </p>
 <p>
 On alt.folklore.urban , the discussion group about urban folklore on Usenet, there was a group of people who hung out there and got to be friends.  And they came to care about the existence of AFU, to the point where, because Usenet made no distinction between members in good standing and drive-by users, they set up a mailing list called The Old Hats. The mailing list was for meta-discussion, discussion about AFU, so they could coordinate efforts formally if they were going to troll someone or flame someone or ignore someone, on the mailing list.
 </p>
 <p>
 <em>
 Addendum, July 2, 2003: A longtime a.f.u participant says that the Old
 Hat list was created to allow the Silicon Valley-dwelling members to
 plan a barbecue, so that they could add a face-to-face dimension to
 their virtual interaction. The use of the list as a backstage area for
 discussing the public newsgroup arose after the fact.
 </em>
 </p>
 <p> Then, as Usenet kept growing, many newcomers came along and
 seemed to like the environment, because it was well-run. In order to
 defend themselves from the scaling issues that come from of adding a
 lot of new members to the Old Hats list, they said “We’re starting a
 second list, called the Young Hats.”  </p>
 <p> So they created this
 three-tier system, not dissimilar to the tiers of anonymous cowards,
 logged-in users, and people with high karma on Slashdot.  But because
 Usenet didn’t let them do it in the software, they brought in other
 pieces of software, these mailing lists, that they needed to build the
 structure.  So you don’t get the program users, the members in good
 standing will find one another and be recognized to one another.
 </p>
 </li>
 <li>
 <p>
 The third thing you need to accept: The core group has
 rights that trump individual rights in some situations.  This pulls
 against the libertarian view that’s quite common on the network, and
 it absolutely pulls against the one person/one vote notion.  But you
 can see examples of how bad an idea voting is when citizenship is the
 same as ability to log in.  </p>
 <p> In the early Nineties, a proposal
 went out to create a Usenet news group for discussing Tibetan culture,
 called soc.culture.tibet.  And it was voted down, in large part
 because a number of Chinese students who had Internet access voted it
 down, on the logic that Tibet wasn’t a country; it was a region of
 China.  And in their view, since Tibet wasn’t a country, there
 oughtn’t be any place to discuss its culture, because that was
 oxymoronic.  </p>
 <p> Now, everyone could see that this was the wrong
 answer.  The people who wanted a place to discuss Tibetan culture
 should have it.  That was the core group.  But because the one
 person/one vote model on Usenet said “Anyone who’s on Usenet gets to
 vote on any group,” sufficiently contentious groups could simply be
 voted away.  </p>
 <p> Imagine today if, in the United States, Internet
 users had to be polled before any anti-war group could be created.  Or
 French users had to be polled before any pro-war group could be
 created. The people who want to have those discussions are the people
 who matter.  And absolute citizenship, with the idea that if you can
 log in, you are a citizen, is a harmful pattern, because it is the
 tyranny of the majority.  </p>
 <p> So the core group needs ways to
 defend itself -- both in getting started and because of the effects I
 talked about earlier -- the core group needs to defend itself so that
 it can stay on its sophisticated goals and away from its basic
 instincts.  </p>
 <p> The Wikipedia has a similar system today, with a
 volunteer fire department, a group of people who care to an unusual
 degree about the success of the Wikipedia.  And they have enough
 leverage, because of the way wikis work, they can always roll back
 graffiti and so forth, that that thing has stayed up despite repeated
 attacks.  So leveraging the core group is a really powerful system.
 </p>
 </li>
 </ol>

 <p> Now, when I say these are three things you have to accept, I
 mean you <i>have to</i> accept them.  Because if you don’t accept them
 upfront, they’ll happen to you anyway.  And then you’ll end up writing
 one of those documents that says “Oh, we launched this and we tried
 it, and then the users came along and did all these weird things.  And
 now we’re documenting it so future ages won’t make this mistake.”
 Even though you didn’t read the thing that was written in 1978.
 </p>
 <p> All groups of any integrity have a constitution.  The
 constitution is always partly formal and partly informal.  At the very
 least, the formal part is what’s substantiated in code -- “the
 software works this way.”  </p>
 <p> The informal part is the sense of
 “how we do it around here.”  And no matter how is substantiated in
 code or written in charter, whatever, there will always be an informal
 part as well.  You can’t separate the two.  </p>

 <h2>Four Things to Design For</h2>

 <ol>
 <li>
 <p>If you were going to build a piece of
 social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you
 design for?  The first thing you would design for is handles the user
 can invest in.  </p>
 <p> Now, I say “handles,” because I don’t want to
 say “identity,” because identity has suddenly become one of those
 ideas where, when you pull on the little thread you want, this big bag
 of stuff comes along with it.  Identity is such a hot-button issue
 now, but for the lightweight stuff required for social software, its
 really just a handle that matters.  </p>
 <p> It’s pretty widely
 understood that anonymity doesn’t work well in group settings, because
 “who said what when” is the minimum requirement for having a
 conversation.  What’s less well understood is that weak pseudonymity
 doesn’t work well, either.  Because I need to associate who’s saying
 something to me now with previous conversations.  </p>
 <p> The world’s
 best reputation management system is right here, in the brain.  And
 actually, it’s right here, in the back, in the emotional part of the
 brain.  Almost all the work being done on reputation systems today is
 either trivial or useless or both, because reputations aren’t
 linearizable, and they’re not portable.  </p>
 <p> There are people who
 cheat on their spouse but not at cards, and vice versa, and both and
 neither.  Reputation is not necessarily portable from one situation to
 another, and it’s not easily expressed.  </p>
 <p> eBay has done us all
 an enormous disservice, because eBay works in non-iterated atomic
 transactions, which are the opposite of social situations.  eBay’s
 reputation system works incredibly well, because it starts with a
 linearizable transaction -- “How much money for how many Smurfs?” --
 and turns that into a metric that’s equally linear.  </p>
 <p> That
 doesn’t work well in social situations.  If you want a good reputation
 system, just let me remember who you are.  And if you do me a favor,
 I’ll remember it.  And I won’t store it in the front of my brain, I’ll
 store it here, in the back.  I’ll just get a good feeling next time I
 get email from you; I won’t even remember why.  And if you do me a
 disservice and I get email from you, my temples will start to throb,
 and I won’t even remember why. If you give users a way of remembering
 one another, reputation will happen, and that requires nothing more
 than simple and somewhat persistent handles.  </p>
 <p> Users have to be
 able to identify themselves and there has to be a penalty for
 switching handles. The penalty for switching doesn’t have to be total.
 But if I change my handle on the system, I have to lose some kind of
 reputation or some kind of context. This keeps the system functioning.
 </p>
 <p> Now, this pulls against the sense that we’ve had since the
 early psychological writings about the Internet.  “Oh, on the Internet
 we’re all going to be changing identities and genders like we change
 our socks.”  </p>
 <p> And you see things like the Kaycee Nicole story,
 where a woman in Kansas pretended to be a high school student, and
 then because the invented high school student’s friends got so
 emotionally involved, she then tried to kill the Kaycee Nicole persona
 off.  “Oh, she’s got cancer and she’s dying and it’s all very tragic.”
 And of course, everyone wanted to fly to meet her.  So then she sort
 of panicked and vanished.  And a bunch of places on the Internet,
 particularly the MetaFilter community, rose up to find out what was
 going on, and uncovered the hoax.  It was sort of a distributed
 detective movement.  </p>
 <p> Now a number of people point to this and
 say “See, I told you about that identity thing!”  But the Kaycee
 Nicole story is this: changing your identity is really weird.  And
 when the community understands that you’ve been doing it and you’re
 faking, that is seen as a huge and violent transgression.  And they
 will expend an astonishing amount of energy to find you and punish
 you.  So identity is much less slippery than the early literature
 would lead us to believe.  </p>
 </li>
 <li>
 <p>Second, you have to design a
 way for there to be members in good standing.  Have to design some way
 in which good works get recognized.  The minimal way is, posts appear
 with identity.  You can do more sophisticated things like having
 formal karma or “member since.”  </p>
 <p> I’m on the fence about
 whether or not this is a design or accepting.  Because in a way I
 think members in good standing will rise.  But more and more of the
 systems I’m seeing launching these days are having some kind of
 additional accretion so you can tell how much involvement members have
 with the system.  </p>
 <p> There’s an interesting pattern I’m seeing
 among the music-sharing group that operates between Tokyo and Hong
 Kong.  They operate on a mailing list, which they set up for
 themselves.  But when they’re trading music, what they’re doing is,
 they’re FedExing one another 180-gig hard-drives.  So you’re getting
 .wav files and not MP3s, and you’re getting them in bulk.  </p>
 <p>
 Now, you can imagine that such a system might be a target for
 organizations that would frown on this activity.  So when you join
 that group, your user name is appended with the user name of the
 person who is your sponsor.  You can’t get in without your name being
 linked to someone else.  You can see immediately the reputational
 effects going on there, just from linking two handles.  </p>
 <p> So in
 that system, you become a member in good standing when your sponsor
 link goes away and you’re there on your own report.  If, on the other
 hand, you defect, not only are you booted, but your sponsor is booted.
 There are lots and lots of lightweight ways to accept and work with
 the idea of member in good standing.  </p>
 </li>
 <li>
 <p>Three, you need
 barriers to participation.  This is one of the things that killed
 Usenet.  You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if
 not at the lowest level, then at higher levels.  There needs to be
 some kind of segmentation of capabilities.  </p>
 <p> Now, the
 segmentation can be total -- you’re in or you’re out, as with the
 music group I just listed.  Or it can be partial -- anyone can read
 Slashdot, anonymous cowards can post, non-anonymous cowards can post
 with a higher rating.  But to moderate, you really have to have been
 around for a while.  </p>
 <p> It has to be hard to do at least some
 things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have
 the tools that they need to defend themselves.  </p>
 <p> Now, this
 pulls against the cardinal virtue of ease of use.  But ease of use is
 wrong.  Ease of use is the wrong way to look at the situation, because
 you’ve got the Necker cube flipped in the wrong direction.  The user
 of social software is the group, not the individual.  </p>
 <p> I think
 we’ve all been to meetings where everyone had a really good time,
 we’re all talking to one another and telling jokes and laughing, and
 it was a great meeting, except we got nothing done.  Everyone was
 amusing themselves so much that the group’s goal was defeated by the
 individual interventions.  </p>
 <p> The user of social software is the
 group, and ease of use should be for the group.  If the ease of use is
 only calculated from the user’s point of view, it will be difficult to
 defend the group from the “group is its own worst enemy” style attacks
 from within.  </p>
 </li>
 <li>
 <p>And, finally, you have to find a way to
 spare the group from scale.  Scale alone kills conversations, because
 conversations require dense two-way conversations.  In conversational
 contexts, Metcalfe’s law is a drag.  The fact that the amount of
 two-way connections you have to support goes up with the square of the
 users means that the density of conversation falls off very fast as
 the system scales even a little bit.  You have to have some way to let
 users hang onto the less is more pattern, in order to keep associated
 with one another.  </p>
 <p> This is an inverse value to scale question.
 Think about your Rolodex.  A thousand contacts, maybe 150 people you
 can call friends, 30 people you can call close friends, two or three
 people you’d donate a kidney to.  The value is inverse to the size of
 the group.  And you have to find some way to protect the group within
 the context of those effects.  </p>
 <p> Sometimes you can do soft
 forking.  Live Journal does the best soft forking of any software I’ve
 ever seen, where the concepts of “you” and “your group” are pretty
 much intertwingled.  The average size of a Live Journal group is about
 a dozen people.  And the median size is around five.  </p>
 <p> But each
 user is a little bit connected to other such clusters, through their
 friends, and so while the clusters are real, they’re not completely
 bounded -- there’s a soft overlap which means that though most users
 participate in small groups, most of the half-million LiveJournal
 users are connected to one another through some short chain.  </p>
 <p>
 IRC channels and mailing lists are self-moderating with scale, because
 as the signal to noise ratio gets worse, people start to drop off,
 until it gets better, so people join, and so it gets worse.  You get
 these sort of oscillating patterns.  But it’s self-correcting.
 </p>
 <p> And then my favorite pattern is from MetaFilter, which is:
 When we start seeing effects of scale, we shut off the new user page.
 “Someone mentions us in the press and how great we are?  Bye!” That’s
 a way of raising the bar, that’s creating a threshold of
 participation. And anyone who bookmarks that page and says “You know,
 I really want to be in there; maybe I’ll go back later,” that’s the
 kind of user MeFi wants to have.  </p>
 <p> You have to find some way to
 protect your own users from scale.  This doesn’t mean the scale of the
 whole system can’t grow.  But you can’t try to make the system large
 by taking individual conversations and blowing them up like a balloon;
 human interaction, many to many interaction, doesn’t blow up like a
 balloon.  It either dissipates, or turns into broadcast, or collapses.
 So plan for dealing with scale in advance, because it’s going to
 happen anyway.  </p>
 </li>
 </ol>

 <h2>Conclusion</h2>
 <p> Now, those four
 things are of course necessary but not sufficient conditions.  I
 propose them more as a platform for building the interesting
 differences off.  There are lots and lots and lots of other effects
 that make different bits of software interesting enough that you would
 want to keep more than one kind of pattern around.  But those are
 commonalities I’m seeing across a range of social software for large
 and long-lived groups.  </p>
 <p> In addition, you can do all sorts of
 things with explicit clustering, whether it’s guilds in massively
 multi-player games, or communities on Live Journal or what have you.
 You can do things with conversational artifacts, where the group
 participation leaves behind some record.  The Wikipedia right now, the
 group collaborated online encyclopedia is the most interesting
 conversational artifact I know of, where product is a result of
 process. Rather than “We’re specifically going to get together and
 create this presentation” it’s just “What’s left is a record of what
 we said.”  </p>
 <p> There are all these things, and of course they
 differ platform to platform.  But there is this, I believe, common
 core of things that will happen whether you plan for them or not, and
 things you should plan for, that I think are invariant across large
 communal software.  </p>
 <p> Writing social software is hard.  And, as
 I said, the act of writing social software is more like the work of an
 economist or a political scientist.  And the act of hosting social
 software, the relationship of someone who hosts it is more like a
 relationship of landlords to tenants than owners to boxes in a
 warehouse.  </p>
 <p> The people using your software, even if you own it
 and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights.
 And if you abrogate those rights, you’ll hear about it very quickly.
 </p>
 <p> That’s part of the problem that the John Hegel theory of
 community -- community leads to content, which leads to commerce --
 never worked.  Because lo and behold, no matter who came onto the
 Clairol chat boards, they sometimes wanted to talk about things that
 weren’t Clairol products.  </p>
 <p> “But we paid for this!  This is the
 Clairol site!”  Doesn’t matter.  The users are there for one another.
 They may be there on hardware and software paid for by you, but the
 users are there for one another.  </p>
 <p> The patterns here, I am
 suggesting, both the things to accept and the things to design for,
 are givens.  Assume these as a kind of social platform, and then you
 can start going out and building on top of that the interesting stuff
 that I think is going to be the real result of this period of
 experimentation with social software.  </p>
 <p> Thank you very much.</p>
 <p><em>
 Published June 30, 2003 on the “Networks, Economics, and Culture” mailing list. </em></p>
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 <article>
 <h1>The Tyranny of Stuctureless</h1>
 <h2><a href="https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm">Source originale du contenu</a></h2>
 <p><em>The
 earliest version of this article was given as a talk at a conference
 called by the Southern Female Rights Union, held in Beulah, Mississippi
 in May 1970. It was written up for <u>Notes from the Third Year</u> (1971),
 but the editors did not use it. It was then submitted to several movement
 publications, but only one asked permission to publish it; others did
 so without permission. The first official place of publication was
 in Vol. 2, No. 1 of <u>The Second Wave</u> (1972). This early version
 in movement publications was authored by Joreen. Different versions
 were published in the <u>Berkeley Journal of Sociology</u>, Vol. 17,
 1972-73, pp. 151-165, and <u>Ms.</u> magazine, July 1973, pp. 76-78,
 86-89, authored by Jo Freeman. This piece spread all over the world.
 Numerous people have edited, reprinted, cut, and translated “Tyranny” for
 magazines, books and web sites, usually without the permission or knowledge
 of the author. The version below is a blend of the three cited here. 
 </em></p>

 <hr>

 <p>During 
  the years in which the women’s liberation movement has been taking shape, 
  a great emphasis has been placed on what are called leaderless, structureless 
  groups as the main -- if not sole -- organizational form of the movement. 
  The source of this idea was a natural reaction against the over-structured 
  society in which most of us found ourselves, and the inevitable control 
  this gave others over our lives, and the continual elitism of the Left 
  and similar groups among those who were supposedly fighting this overstructuredness.
 </p>

 <p>The 
  idea of “structurelessness,” however, has moved from a healthy 
  counter to those tendencies to becoming a goddess in its own right. The 
  idea is as little examined as the term is much used, but it has become 
  an intrinsic and unquestioned part of women’s liberation ideology. For 
  the early development of the movement this did not much matter. It early 
  defined its main goal, and its main method, as consciousness-raising, 
  and the “structureless” rap group was an excellent means to 
  this end. The looseness and informality of it encouraged participation 
  in discussion, and its often supportive atmosphere elicited personal insight. 
  If nothing more concrete than personal insight ever resulted from these 
  groups, that did not much matter, because their purpose did not really 
  extend beyond this.
 </p>

 <p>The
    basic problems didn’t appear until individual rap groups exhausted
    the virtues of consciousness-raising and decided they wanted to do
    something more specific. At this point they usually foundered because
    most groups were unwilling to change their structure when they changed
    their tasks. Women had thoroughly accepted the idea of “structurelessness” without
    realizing the limitations of its uses. People would try to use the “structureless” group
    and the informal conference for purposes for which they were unsuitable
    out of a blind belief that no other means could possibly be anything
    but oppressive.
 </p>

 <p>If
    the movement is to grow beyond these elementary stages of development,
    it will have to disabuse itself of some of its prejudices about organization
    and structure. There is nothing inherently bad about either of these.
    They can be and often are misused, but to reject them out of hand because
    they are misused is to deny ourselves the necessary tools to further
    development. We need to understand why “structurelessness” does
 not work.</p>

 <h2>FORMAL AND INFORMAL STRUCTURES</h2>

 <p>Contrary 
  to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless 
  group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for 
  any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in 
  some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it 
  may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the 
  members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, 
  personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that 
  we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds 
  makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any 
  basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is 
  not the nature of a human group.
 </p>

 <p>This 
  means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, 
  as to aim at an “objective” news story, “value-free” 
  social science, or a “free” economy. A “laissez faire” 
  group is about as realistic as a “laissez faire” society; the 
  idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned 
  hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because 
  the idea of “structurelessness” does not prevent the formation 
  of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly “laissez faire” 
  philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing 
  control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented 
  the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of 
  masking power, and within the women’s movement is usually most strongly 
  advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious 
  of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, 
  the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness 
  of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know 
  the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, 
  or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which 
  they are not quite aware.
 </p>

 <p>For
    everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and
    to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not
    implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to
    everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized. This is
    not to say that formalization of a structure of a group will destroy
    the informal structure. It usually doesn’t. But it does hinder the
    informal structure from having predominant control and make available
    some means of attacking it if the people involved are not at least
    responsible to the needs of the group at large. “Structurelessness” is
    organizationally impossible. We cannot decide whether to have a structured
    or structureless group, only whether or not to have a formally structured
    one. Therefore the word will not be used any longer except to refer
    to the idea it represents. Unstructured will refer to those groups
    which have not been deliberately structured in a particular manner.
    Structured will refer to those which have. A Structured group always
    has formal structure, and may also have an informal, or covert, structure.
    It is this informal structure, particularly in Unstructured groups,
    which forms the basis for elites.</p>

 <h2>THE NATURE OF ELITISM</h2>

 <p>“Elitist” 
  is probably the most abused word in the women’s liberation movement. It 
  is used as frequently, and for the same reasons, as “pinko” 
  was used in the fifties. It is rarely used correctly. Within the movement 
  it commonly refers to individuals, though the personal characteristics 
  and activities of those to whom it is directed may differ widely: An individual, 
  as an individual can never be an elitist, because the only proper application 
  of the term “elite” is to groups. Any individual, regardless 
  of how well-known that person may be, can never be an elite.
 </p>

 <p>Correctly, 
  an elite refers to a small group of people who have power over a larger 
  group of which they are part, usually without direct responsibility to 
  that larger group, and often without their knowledge or consent. A person 
  becomes an elitist by being part of, or advocating the rule by, such a 
  small group, whether or not that individual is well known or not known 
  at all. Notoriety is not a definition of an elitist. The most insidious 
  elites are usually run by people not known to the larger public at all. 
  Intelligent elitists are usually smart enough not to allow themselves 
  to become well known; when they become known, they are watched, and the 
  mask over their power is no longer firmly lodged.
 </p>

 <p>Elites 
  are not conspiracies. Very seldom does a small group of people get together 
  and deliberately try to take over a larger group for its own ends. Elites 
  are nothing more, and nothing less, than groups of friends who also happen 
  to participate in the same political activities. They would probably maintain 
  their friendship whether or not they were involved in political activities; 
  they would probably be involved in political activities whether or not 
  they maintained their friendships. It is the coincidence of these two 
  phenomena which creates elites in any group and makes them so difficult 
  to break.
 </p>

 <p>These 
  friendship groups function as networks of communication outside any regular 
  channels for such communication that may have been set up by a group. 
  If no channels are set up, they function as the only networks of communication. 
  Because people are friends, because they usually share the same values 
  and orientations, because they talk to each other socially and consult 
  with each other when common decisions have to be made, the people involved 
  in these networks have more power in the group than those who don’t. And 
  it is a rare group that does not establish some informal networks of communication 
  through the friends that are made in it.
 </p>

 <p>Some 
  groups, depending on their size, may have more than one such informal 
  communications network. Networks may even overlap. When only one such 
  network exists, it is the elite of an otherwise Unstructured group, whether 
  the participants in it want to be elitists or not. If it is the only such 
  network in a Structured group it may or may not be an elite depending 
  on its composition and the nature of the formal Structure. If there are 
  two or more such networks of friends, they may compete for power within 
  the group, thus forming factions, or one may deliberately opt out of the 
  competition, leaving the other as the elite. In a Structured group, two 
  or more such friendship networks usually compete with each other for formal 
  power. This is often the healthiest situation, as the other members are 
  in a position to arbitrate between the two competitors for power and thus 
  to make demands on those to whom they give their temporary allegiance.
 </p>

 <p>The 
  inevitably elitist and exclusive nature of informal communication networks 
  of friends is neither a new phenomenon characteristic of the women’s movement 
  nor a phenomenon new to women. Such informal relationships have excluded 
  women for centuries from participating in integrated groups of which they 
  were a part. In any profession or organization these networks have created 
  the “locker room” mentality and the “old school” ties 
  which have effectively prevented women as a group (as well as some men 
  individually) from having equal access to the sources of power or social 
  reward. Much of the energy of past women’s movements has been directed 
  to having the structures of decision-making and the selection processes 
  formalized so that the exclusion of women could be confronted directly. 
  As we well know, these efforts have not prevented the informal male-only 
  networks from discriminating against women, but they have made it more 
  difficult.
 </p>

 <p>Because 
  elites are informal does not mean they are invisible. At any small group 
  meeting anyone with a sharp eye and an acute ear can tell who is influencing 
  whom. The members of a friendship group will relate more to each other 
  than to other people. They listen more attentively, and interrupt less; 
  they repeat each other’s points and give in amiably; they tend to ignore 
  or grapple with the “outs” whose approval is not necessary for 
  making a decision. But it is necessary for the “outs” to stay 
  on good terms with the “ins.” Of course the lines are not as 
  sharp as I have drawn them. They are nuances of interaction, not prewritten 
  scripts. But they are discernible, and they do have their effect. Once 
  one knows with whom it is important to check before a decision is made, 
  and whose approval is the stamp of acceptance, one knows who is running 
  things.
 </p>

 <p>Since 
  movement groups have made no concrete decisions about who shall exercise 
  power within them, many different criteria are used around the country. 
  Most criteria are along the lines of traditional female characteristics. 
  For instance, in the early days of the movement, marriage was usually 
  a prerequisite for participation in the informal elite. As women have 
  been traditionally taught, married women relate primarily to each other, 
  and look upon single women as too threatening to have as close friends. 
  In many cities, this criterion was further refined to include only those 
  women married to New Left men. This standard had more than tradition behind 
  it, however, because New Left men often had access to resources needed 
  by the movement -- such as mailing lists, printing presses, contacts, 
  and information -- and women were used to getting what they needed through 
  men rather than independently. As the movement has charged through time, 
  marriage has become a less universal criterion for effective participation, 
  but all informal elites establish standards by which only women who possess 
  certain material or personal characteristics may join. They frequently 
  include: middle-class background (despite all the rhetoric about relating 
  to the working class); being married; not being married but living with 
  someone; being or pretending to be a lesbian; being between the ages of 
  twenty and thirty; being college educated or at least having some college 
  background; being “hip”; not being too “hip”; holding 
  a certain political line or identification as a “radical”; having 
  children or at least liking them; not having children; having certain 
  “feminine” personality characteristics such as being “nice”; 
  dressing right (whether in the traditional style or the antitraditional 
  style); etc. There are also some characteristics which will almost always 
  tag one as a “deviant” who should not be related to. They include: 
  being too old; working full time, particularly if one is actively committed 
  to a “career”; not being “nice”; and being avowedly 
  single (i.e., neither actively heterosexual nor homosexual).
 </p>

 <p>Other 
  criteria could be included, but they all have common themes. The characteristics 
  prerequisite for participating in the informal elites of the movement, 
  and thus for exercising power, concern one’s background, personality, 
  or allocation of time. They do not include one’s competence, dedication 
  to feminism, talents, or potential contribution to the movement. The former 
  are the criteria one usually uses in determining one’s friends. The latter 
  are what any movement or organization has to use if it is going to be 
  politically effective.
 </p>

 <p>The 
  criteria of participation may differ from group to group, but the means 
  of becoming a member of the informal elite if one meets those criteria 
  are pretty much the same. The only main difference depends on whether 
  one is in a group from the beginning, or joins it after it has begun. 
  If involved from the beginning it is important to have as many of one’s 
  personal friends as possible also join. If no one knows anyone else very 
  well, then one must deliberately form friendships with a select number 
  and establish the informal interaction patterns crucial to the creation 
  of an informal structure. Once the informal patterns are formed they act 
  to maintain themselves, and one of the most successful tactics of maintenance 
  is to continuously recruit new people who “fit in.” One joins 
  such an elite much the same way one pledges a sorority. If perceived as 
  a potential addition, one is “rushed” by the members of the 
  informal structure and eventually either dropped or initiated. If the 
  sorority is not politically aware enough to actively engage in this process 
  itself it can be started by the outsider pretty much the same way one 
  joins any private club. Find a sponsor, i.e., pick some member of the 
  elite who appears to be well respected within it, and actively cultivate 
  that person’s friendship. Eventually, she will most likely bring you into 
  the inner circle.
 </p>

 <p>All
    of these procedures take time. So if one works full time or has a similar
    major commitment, it is usually impossible to join simply because there
    are not enough hours left to go to all the meetings and cultivate the
    personal relationship necessary to have a voice in the decision-making.
    That is why formal structures of decision making are a boon to the
    overworked person. Having an established process for decision-making
    ensures that everyone can participate in it to some extent.
 </p>

 <p>Although
    this dissection of the process of elite formation within small groups
    has been critical in perspective, it is not made in the belief that
    these informal structures are inevitably bad -- merely inevitable.
    All groups create informal structures as a result of interaction patterns
    among the members of the group. Such informal structures can do very
    useful things But only Unstructured groups are totally governed by
    them. When informal elites are combined with a myth of “structurelessness,” there
    can be no attempt to put limits on the use of power. It becomes capricious.
 </p>

 <p>This
    has two potentially negative consequences of which we should be aware.
    The first is that the informal structure of decision-making will be
    much like a sorority -- one in which people listen to others because
    they like them and not because they say significant things. As long
    as the movement does not do significant things this does not much matter.
    But if its development is not to be arrested at this preliminary stage,
    it will have to alter this trend. The second is that informal structures
    have no obligation to be responsible to the group at large. Their power
    was not given to them; it cannot be taken away. Their influence is
    not based on what they do for the group; therefore they cannot be directly
    influenced by the group. This does not necessarily make informal structures
    irresponsible. Those who are concerned with maintaining their influence
    will usually try to be responsible. The group simply cannot compel
 such responsibility; it is dependent on the interests of the elite.</p>

 <h2>THE “STAR” SYSTEM</h2>

 <p>The 
  idea of “structurelessness” has created the “star” 
  system. We live in a society which expects political groups to make decisions 
  and to select people to articulate those decisions to the public at large. 
  The press and the public do not know how to listen seriously to individual 
  women as women; they want to know how the group feels. Only three techniques 
  have ever been developed for establishing mass group opinion: the vote 
  or referendum, the public opinion survey questionnaire, and the selection 
  of group spokespeople at an appropriate meeting. The women’s liberation 
  movement has used none of these to communicate with the public. Neither 
  the movement as a whole nor most of the multitudinous groups within it 
  have established a means of explaining their position on various issues. 
  But the public is conditioned to look for spokespeople.
 </p>

 <p>While 
  it has consciously not chosen spokespeople, the movement has thrown up 
  many women who have caught the public eye for varying reasons. These women 
  represent no particular group or established opinion; they know this and 
  usually say so. But because there are no official spokespeople nor any 
  decision-making body that the press can query when it wants to know the 
  movement’s position on a subject, these women are perceived as the spokespeople. 
  Thus, whether they want to or not, whether the movement likes it or not, 
  women of public note are put in the role of spokespeople by default.
 </p>

 <p>This 
  is one main source of the ire that is often felt toward the women who 
  are labeled “stars.” Because they were not selected by the women 
  in the movement to represent the movement’s views, they are resented when 
  the press presumes that they speak for the movement. But as long as the 
  movement does not select its own spokeswomen, such women will be placed 
  in that role by the press and the public, regardless of their own desires.
 </p>

 <p>This 
  has several negative consequences for both the movement and the women 
  labeled “stars.” First, because the movement didn’t put them 
  in the role of spokesperson, the movement cannot remove them. The press 
  put them there and only the press can choose not to listen. The press 
  will continue to look to “stars” as spokeswomen as long as it 
  has no official alternatives to go to for authoritative statements from 
  the movement. The movement has no control in the selection of its representatives 
  to the public as long as it believes that it should have no representatives 
  at all. Second, women put in this position often find themselves viciously 
  attacked by their sisters. This achieves nothing for the movement and 
  is painfully destructive to the individuals involved. Such attacks only 
  result in either the woman leaving the movement entirely-often bitterly 
  alienated -- or in her ceasing to feel responsible to her “sisters.” 
  She may maintain some loyalty to the movement, vaguely defined, but she 
  is no longer susceptible to pressures from other women in it. One cannot 
  feel responsible to people who have been the source of such pain without 
  being a masochist, and these women are usually too strong to bow to that 
  kind of personal pressure. Thus the backlash to the “star” system 
  in effect encourages the very kind of individualistic nonresponsibility 
  that the movement condemns. By purging a sister as a “star,” 
  the movement loses whatever control it may have had over the person who 
  then becomes free to commit all of the individualistic sins of which she 
 has been accused.</p>

 <h2>POLITICAL IMPOTENCE</h2>

 <p>Unstructured 
  groups may be very effective in getting women to talk about their lives; 
  they aren’t very good for getting things done. It is when people get tired 
  of “just talking” and want to do something more that the groups 
  flounder, unless they change the nature of their operation. Occasionally, 
  the developed informal structure of the group coincides with an available 
  need that the group can fill in such a way as to give the appearance that 
  an Unstructured group “works.” That is, the group has fortuitously 
  developed precisely the kind of structure best suited for engaging in 
  a particular project. 
 </p>

 <p>While working in this kind of group is a very heady experience, it is also rare 
  and very hard to replicate. There are almost inevitably four conditions 
  found in such a group:
 </p>

 <ol>
 <li><em> It is task oriented</em>. Its function is very narrow and very specific, 
  like putting on a conference or putting out a newspaper. It is the task 
  that basically structures the group. The task determines what needs to 
  be done and when it needs to be done. It provides a guide by which people 
  can judge their actions and make plans for future activity.
 </li>
 <li><em>It is relatively small and homogeneous</em>. Homogeneity is necessary 
  to insure that participants have a “common language” for interaction. 
  People from widely different backgrounds may provide richness to a consciousness-raising 
  group where each can learn from the others’ experience, but too great 
  a diversity among members of a task-oriented group means only that they 
  continually misunderstand each other. Such diverse people interpret words 
  and actions differently. They have different expectations about each other’s 
  behavior and judge the results according to different criteria. If everyone 
  knows everyone else well enough to understand the nuances, these can be 
  accommodated. Usually, they only lead to confusion and endless hours spent 
  straightening out conflicts no one ever thought would arise.
 </li>
 <li><em>There is a high degree of communication</em>. Information must be passed 
  on to everyone, opinions checked, work divided up, and participation assured 
  in the relevant decisions. This is only possible if the group is small 
  and people practically live together for the most crucial phases of the 
  task. Needless to say, the number of interactions necessary to involve 
  everybody increases geometrically with the number of participants. This 
  inevitably limits group participants to about five, or excludes some from 
  some of the decisions. Successful groups can be as large as 10 or 15, 
  but only when they are in fact composed of several smaller subgroups which 
  perform specific parts of the task, and whose members overlap with each 
  other so that knowledge of what the different subgroups are doing can 
  be passed around easily.
 </li>
 <li><em>There is a low degree of skill specialization</em>. Not everyone has 
  to be able to do everything, but everything must be able to be done by 
  more than one person. Thus no one is indispensable. To a certain extent, 
  people become interchangeable parts.
 </li>
 </ol>

 <p>While 
  these conditions can occur serendipitously in small groups, this is not 
  possible in large ones. Consequently, because the larger movement in most 
  cities is as unstructured as individual rap groups, it is not too much 
  more effective than the separate groups at specific tasks. The informal 
  structure is rarely together enough or in touch enough with the people 
  to be able to operate effectively. So the movement generates much motion 
  and few results. Unfortunately, the consequences of all this motion are 
  not as innocuous as the results’ and their victim is the movement itself.
 </p>

 <p>Some 
  groups have formed themselves into local action projects if they do not 
  involve many people and work on a small scale. But this form restricts 
  movement activity to the local level; it cannot be done on the regional 
  or national. Also, to function well the groups must usually pare themselves 
  down to that informal group of friends who were running things in the 
  first place. This excludes many women from participating. As long as the 
  only way women can participate in the movement is through membership in 
  a small group, the nongregarious are at a distinct disadvantage. As long 
  as friendship groups are the main means of organizational activity, elitism 
  becomes institutionalized.
 </p>

 <p>For 
  those groups which cannot find a local project to which to devote themselves, 
  the mere act of staying together becomes the reason for their staying 
  together. When a group has no specific task (and consciousness raising 
  is a task), the people in it turn their energies to controlling others 
  in the group. This is not done so much out of a malicious desire to manipulate 
  others (though sometimes it is) as out of a lack of anything better to 
  do with their talents. Able people with time on their hands and a need 
  to justify their coming together put their efforts into personal control, 
  and spend their time criticizing the personalities of the other members 
  in the group. Infighting and personal power games rule the day. When a 
  group is involved in a task, people learn to get along with others as 
  they are and to subsume personal dislikes for the sake of the larger goal. 
  There are limits placed on the compulsion to remold every person in our 
  image of what they should be.
 </p>

 <p>The
    end of consciousness-raising leaves people with no place to go, and
    the lack of structure leaves them with no way of getting there. The
    women the movement either turn in on themselves and their sisters or
    seek other alternatives of action. There are few that are available.
    Some women just “do their own thing.” This can lead to a
    great deal of individual creativity, much of which is useful for the
    movement, but it is not a viable alternative for most women and certainly
    does not foster a spirit of cooperative group effort. Other women drift
    out of the movement entirely because they don’t want to develop an
    individual project and they have found no way of discovering, joining,
    or starting group projects that interest them.
 </p>

 <p>Many
    turn to other political organizations to give them the kind of structured,
    effective activity that they have not been able to find in the women’s
    movement. Those political organizations which see women’s liberation
    as only one of many issues to which women should devote their time
    thus find the movement a vast recruiting ground for new members. There
    is no need for such organizations to “infiltrate” (though
    this is not precluded). The desire for meaningful political activity
    generated in women by their becoming part of the women’s liberation
    movement is sufficient to make them eager to join other organizations
    when the movement itself provides no outlets for their new ideas and
    energies. Those women who join other political organizations while
    remaining within the women’s liberation movement, or who join women’s
    liberation while remaining in other political organizations, in turn
    become the framework for new informal structures. These friendship
    networks are based upon their common nonfeminist politics rather than
    the characteristics discussed earlier, but operate in much the same
    way. Because these women share common values, ideas, and political
    orientations, they too become informal, unplanned, unselected, unresponsible
    elites -- whether they intend to be so or not.
 </p>

 <p>These
    new informal elites are often perceived as threats by the old informal
    elites previously developed within different movement groups. This
    is a correct perception. Such politically oriented networks are rarely
    willing to be merely “sororities” as many of the old ones
    were, and want to proselytize their political as well as their feminist
    ideas. This is only natural, but its implications for women’s liberation
    have never been adequately discussed. The old elites are rarely willing
    to bring such differences of opinion out into the open because it would
    involve exposing the nature of the informal structure of the group.
 </p>

 <p>Many
    of these informal elites have been hiding under the banner of “anti-elitism” and “structurelessness.” To
    effectively counter the competition from another informal structure,
    they would have to become “public,” and this possibility
    is fraught with many dangerous implications. Thus, to maintain its
    own power, it is easier to rationalize the exclusion of the members
    of the other informal structure by such means as “red-baiting,” “reformist-baiting,” “lesbian-baiting,” or “straight-baiting.” The
    only other alternative is to formally structure the group in such a
    way that the original power structure is institutionalized. This is
    not always possible. If the informal elites have been well structured
    and have exercised a fair amount of power in the past, such a task
    is feasible. These groups have a history of being somewhat politically
    effective in the past, as the tightness of the informal structure has
    proven an adequate substitute for a formal structure. Becoming Structured
    does not alter their operation much, though the institutionalization
    of the power structure does open it to formal challenge. It is those
    groups which are in greatest need of structure that are often least
    capable of creating it. Their informal structures have not been too
    well formed and adherence to the ideology of “structurelessness” makes
    them reluctant to change tactics. The more Unstructured a group is,
    the more lacking it is in informal structures, and the more it adheres
    to an ideology of “structurelessness,” the more vulnerable
    it is to being taken over by a group of political comrades.
 </p>

 <p>Since
    the movement at large is just as Unstructured as most of its constituent
    groups, it is similarly susceptible to indirect influence. But the
    phenomenon manifests itself differently. On a local level most groups
    can operate autonomously; but the only groups that can organize a national
    activity are nationally organized groups. Thus, it is often the Structured
    feminist organizations that provide national direction for feminist
    activities, and this direction is determined by the priorities of those
    organizations. Such groups as NOW, WEAL, and some leftist women’s caucuses
    are simply the only organizations capable of mounting a national campaign.
    The multitude of Unstructured women’s liberation groups can choose
    to support or not support the national campaigns, but are incapable
    of mounting their own. Thus their members become the troops under the
    leadership of the Structured organizations. The avowedly Unstructured
    groups have no way of drawing upon the movement’s vast resources to
    support its priorities. It doesn’t even have a way of deciding what
    they are.
 </p>

 <p>The
    more unstructured a movement it, the less control it has over the directions
    in which it develops and the political actions in which it engages.
    This does not mean that its ideas do not spread. Given a certain amount
    of interest by the media and the appropriateness of social conditions,
    the ideas will still be diffused widely. But diffusion of ideas does
    not mean they are implemented; it only means they are talked about.
    Insofar as they can be applied individually they may be acted on; insofar
    as they require coordinated political power to be implemented, they
    will not be.
 </p>

 <p>As
    long as the women’s liberation movement stays dedicated to a form of
    organization which stresses small, inactive discussion groups among
    friends, the worst problems of Unstructuredness will not be felt. But
    this style of organization has its limits; it is politically inefficacious,
    exclusive, and discriminatory against those women who are not or cannot
    be tied into the friendship networks. Those who do not fit into what
    already exists because of class, race, occupation, education, parental
    or marital status, personality, etc., will inevitably be discouraged
    from trying to participate. Those who do fit in will develop vested
    interests in maintaining things as they are.
 </p>

 <p>The
    informal groups’ vested interests will be sustained by the informal
    structures which exist, and the movement will have no way of determining
    who shall exercise power within it. If the movement continues deliberately
    to not select who shall exercise power, it does not thereby abolish
    power. All it does is abdicate the right to demand that those who do
    exercise power and influence be responsible for it. If the movement
    continues to keep power as diffuse as possible because it knows it
    cannot demand responsibility from those who have it, it does prevent
    any group or person from totally dominating. But it simultaneously
    insures that the movement is as ineffective as possible. Some middle
    ground between domination and ineffectiveness can and must be found.
 </p>

 <p>These
    problems are coming to a head at this time because the nature of the
    movement is necessarily changing. Consciousness-raising as the main
    function of the women’s liberation movement is becoming obsolete. Due
    to the intense press publicity of the last two years and the numerous
    overground books and articles now being circulated, women’s liberation
    has become a household word. Its issues are discussed and informal
    rap groups are formed by people who have no explicit connection with
    any movement group. The movement must go on to other tasks. It now
    needs to establish its priorities, articulate its goals, and pursue
    its objectives in a coordinated fashion. To do this it must get organized
 -- locally, regionally, and nationally.</p>

 <h2>PRINCIPLES OF DEMOCRATIC STRUCTURING</h2>

 <p>Once 
  the movement no longer clings tenaciously to the ideology of “structurelessness,” 
  it is free to develop those forms of organization best suited to its healthy 
  functioning. This does not mean that we should go to the other extreme 
  and blindly imitate the traditional forms of organization. But neither 
  should we blindly reject them all. Some of the traditional techniques 
  will prove useful, albeit not perfect; some will give us insights into 
  what we should and should not do to obtain certain ends with minimal costs 
  to the individuals in the movement. Mostly, we will have to experiment 
  with different kinds of structuring and develop a variety of techniques 
  to use for different situations. The Lot System is one such idea which 
  has emerged from the movement. It is not applicable to all situations, 
  but is useful in some. Other ideas for structuring are needed. But before 
  we can proceed to experiment intelligently, we must accept the idea that 
  there is nothing inherently bad about structure itself -- only its excess 
  use.
 </p>
 </article>


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--- a/cache/2020/542585b2d85213911f91b498a643e010/index.md
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 title: The Tyranny of Stuctureless
 url: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
 hash_url: 542585b2d85213911f91b498a643e010

 <p><em>The
 earliest version of this article was given as a talk at a conference
 called by the Southern Female Rights Union, held in Beulah, Mississippi
 in May 1970. It was written up for <u>Notes from the Third Year</u> (1971),
 but the editors did not use it. It was then submitted to several movement
 publications, but only one asked permission to publish it; others did
 so without permission. The first official place of publication was
 in Vol. 2, No. 1 of <u>The Second Wave</u> (1972). This early version
 in movement publications was authored by Joreen. Different versions
 were published in the <u>Berkeley Journal of Sociology</u>, Vol. 17,
 1972-73, pp. 151-165, and <u>Ms.</u> magazine, July 1973, pp. 76-78,
 86-89, authored by Jo Freeman. This piece spread all over the world.
 Numerous people have edited, reprinted, cut, and translated “Tyranny” for
 magazines, books and web sites, usually without the permission or knowledge
 of the author. The version below is a blend of the three cited here. 
 </em></p>

 <hr>

 <p>During 
  the years in which the women’s liberation movement has been taking shape, 
  a great emphasis has been placed on what are called leaderless, structureless 
  groups as the main -- if not sole -- organizational form of the movement. 
  The source of this idea was a natural reaction against the over-structured 
  society in which most of us found ourselves, and the inevitable control 
  this gave others over our lives, and the continual elitism of the Left 
  and similar groups among those who were supposedly fighting this overstructuredness.
 </p>
 <p>The 
  idea of “structurelessness,” however, has moved from a healthy 
  counter to those tendencies to becoming a goddess in its own right. The 
  idea is as little examined as the term is much used, but it has become 
  an intrinsic and unquestioned part of women’s liberation ideology. For 
  the early development of the movement this did not much matter. It early 
  defined its main goal, and its main method, as consciousness-raising, 
  and the “structureless” rap group was an excellent means to 
  this end. The looseness and informality of it encouraged participation 
  in discussion, and its often supportive atmosphere elicited personal insight. 
  If nothing more concrete than personal insight ever resulted from these 
  groups, that did not much matter, because their purpose did not really 
  extend beyond this.
 </p>
 <p>The
    basic problems didn’t appear until individual rap groups exhausted
    the virtues of consciousness-raising and decided they wanted to do
    something more specific. At this point they usually foundered because
    most groups were unwilling to change their structure when they changed
    their tasks. Women had thoroughly accepted the idea of “structurelessness” without
    realizing the limitations of its uses. People would try to use the “structureless” group
    and the informal conference for purposes for which they were unsuitable
    out of a blind belief that no other means could possibly be anything
    but oppressive.
 </p>
 <p>If
    the movement is to grow beyond these elementary stages of development,
    it will have to disabuse itself of some of its prejudices about organization
    and structure. There is nothing inherently bad about either of these.
    They can be and often are misused, but to reject them out of hand because
    they are misused is to deny ourselves the necessary tools to further
    development. We need to understand why “structurelessness” does
 not work.</p>

 <h2>FORMAL AND INFORMAL STRUCTURES</h2>

 <p>Contrary 
  to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless 
  group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for 
  any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in 
  some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it 
  may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the 
  members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, 
  personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that 
  we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds 
  makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any 
  basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is 
  not the nature of a human group.
 </p>
 <p>This 
  means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, 
  as to aim at an “objective” news story, “value-free” 
  social science, or a “free” economy. A “laissez faire” 
  group is about as realistic as a “laissez faire” society; the 
  idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned 
  hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because 
  the idea of “structurelessness” does not prevent the formation 
  of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly “laissez faire” 
  philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing 
  control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented 
  the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of 
  masking power, and within the women’s movement is usually most strongly 
  advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious 
  of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, 
  the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness 
  of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know 
  the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, 
  or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which 
  they are not quite aware.
 </p>

 <p>For
    everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and
    to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not
    implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to
    everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized. This is
    not to say that formalization of a structure of a group will destroy
    the informal structure. It usually doesn’t. But it does hinder the
    informal structure from having predominant control and make available
    some means of attacking it if the people involved are not at least
    responsible to the needs of the group at large. “Structurelessness” is
    organizationally impossible. We cannot decide whether to have a structured
    or structureless group, only whether or not to have a formally structured
    one. Therefore the word will not be used any longer except to refer
    to the idea it represents. Unstructured will refer to those groups
    which have not been deliberately structured in a particular manner.
    Structured will refer to those which have. A Structured group always
    has formal structure, and may also have an informal, or covert, structure.
    It is this informal structure, particularly in Unstructured groups,
    which forms the basis for elites.</p>

 <h2>THE NATURE OF ELITISM</h2>

 <p>“Elitist” 
  is probably the most abused word in the women’s liberation movement. It 
  is used as frequently, and for the same reasons, as “pinko” 
  was used in the fifties. It is rarely used correctly. Within the movement 
  it commonly refers to individuals, though the personal characteristics 
  and activities of those to whom it is directed may differ widely: An individual, 
  as an individual can never be an elitist, because the only proper application 
  of the term “elite” is to groups. Any individual, regardless 
  of how well-known that person may be, can never be an elite.
 </p>
 <p>Correctly, 
  an elite refers to a small group of people who have power over a larger 
  group of which they are part, usually without direct responsibility to 
  that larger group, and often without their knowledge or consent. A person 
  becomes an elitist by being part of, or advocating the rule by, such a 
  small group, whether or not that individual is well known or not known 
  at all. Notoriety is not a definition of an elitist. The most insidious 
  elites are usually run by people not known to the larger public at all. 
  Intelligent elitists are usually smart enough not to allow themselves 
  to become well known; when they become known, they are watched, and the 
  mask over their power is no longer firmly lodged.
 </p>
 <p>Elites 
  are not conspiracies. Very seldom does a small group of people get together 
  and deliberately try to take over a larger group for its own ends. Elites 
  are nothing more, and nothing less, than groups of friends who also happen 
  to participate in the same political activities. They would probably maintain 
  their friendship whether or not they were involved in political activities; 
  they would probably be involved in political activities whether or not 
  they maintained their friendships. It is the coincidence of these two 
  phenomena which creates elites in any group and makes them so difficult 
  to break.
 </p>
 <p>These 
  friendship groups function as networks of communication outside any regular 
  channels for such communication that may have been set up by a group. 
  If no channels are set up, they function as the only networks of communication. 
  Because people are friends, because they usually share the same values 
  and orientations, because they talk to each other socially and consult 
  with each other when common decisions have to be made, the people involved 
  in these networks have more power in the group than those who don’t. And 
  it is a rare group that does not establish some informal networks of communication 
  through the friends that are made in it.
 </p>
 <p>Some 
  groups, depending on their size, may have more than one such informal 
  communications network. Networks may even overlap. When only one such 
  network exists, it is the elite of an otherwise Unstructured group, whether 
  the participants in it want to be elitists or not. If it is the only such 
  network in a Structured group it may or may not be an elite depending 
  on its composition and the nature of the formal Structure. If there are 
  two or more such networks of friends, they may compete for power within 
  the group, thus forming factions, or one may deliberately opt out of the 
  competition, leaving the other as the elite. In a Structured group, two 
  or more such friendship networks usually compete with each other for formal 
  power. This is often the healthiest situation, as the other members are 
  in a position to arbitrate between the two competitors for power and thus 
  to make demands on those to whom they give their temporary allegiance.
 </p>
 <p>The 
  inevitably elitist and exclusive nature of informal communication networks 
  of friends is neither a new phenomenon characteristic of the women’s movement 
  nor a phenomenon new to women. Such informal relationships have excluded 
  women for centuries from participating in integrated groups of which they 
  were a part. In any profession or organization these networks have created 
  the “locker room” mentality and the “old school” ties 
  which have effectively prevented women as a group (as well as some men 
  individually) from having equal access to the sources of power or social 
  reward. Much of the energy of past women’s movements has been directed 
  to having the structures of decision-making and the selection processes 
  formalized so that the exclusion of women could be confronted directly. 
  As we well know, these efforts have not prevented the informal male-only 
  networks from discriminating against women, but they have made it more 
  difficult.
 </p>
 <p>Because 
  elites are informal does not mean they are invisible. At any small group 
  meeting anyone with a sharp eye and an acute ear can tell who is influencing 
  whom. The members of a friendship group will relate more to each other 
  than to other people. They listen more attentively, and interrupt less; 
  they repeat each other’s points and give in amiably; they tend to ignore 
  or grapple with the “outs” whose approval is not necessary for 
  making a decision. But it is necessary for the “outs” to stay 
  on good terms with the “ins.” Of course the lines are not as 
  sharp as I have drawn them. They are nuances of interaction, not prewritten 
  scripts. But they are discernible, and they do have their effect. Once 
  one knows with whom it is important to check before a decision is made, 
  and whose approval is the stamp of acceptance, one knows who is running 
  things.
 </p>
 <p>Since 
  movement groups have made no concrete decisions about who shall exercise 
  power within them, many different criteria are used around the country. 
  Most criteria are along the lines of traditional female characteristics. 
  For instance, in the early days of the movement, marriage was usually 
  a prerequisite for participation in the informal elite. As women have 
  been traditionally taught, married women relate primarily to each other, 
  and look upon single women as too threatening to have as close friends. 
  In many cities, this criterion was further refined to include only those 
  women married to New Left men. This standard had more than tradition behind 
  it, however, because New Left men often had access to resources needed 
  by the movement -- such as mailing lists, printing presses, contacts, 
  and information -- and women were used to getting what they needed through 
  men rather than independently. As the movement has charged through time, 
  marriage has become a less universal criterion for effective participation, 
  but all informal elites establish standards by which only women who possess 
  certain material or personal characteristics may join. They frequently 
  include: middle-class background (despite all the rhetoric about relating 
  to the working class); being married; not being married but living with 
  someone; being or pretending to be a lesbian; being between the ages of 
  twenty and thirty; being college educated or at least having some college 
  background; being “hip”; not being too “hip”; holding 
  a certain political line or identification as a “radical”; having 
  children or at least liking them; not having children; having certain 
  “feminine” personality characteristics such as being “nice”; 
  dressing right (whether in the traditional style or the antitraditional 
  style); etc. There are also some characteristics which will almost always 
  tag one as a “deviant” who should not be related to. They include: 
  being too old; working full time, particularly if one is actively committed 
  to a “career”; not being “nice”; and being avowedly 
  single (i.e., neither actively heterosexual nor homosexual).
 </p>
 <p>Other 
  criteria could be included, but they all have common themes. The characteristics 
  prerequisite for participating in the informal elites of the movement, 
  and thus for exercising power, concern one’s background, personality, 
  or allocation of time. They do not include one’s competence, dedication 
  to feminism, talents, or potential contribution to the movement. The former 
  are the criteria one usually uses in determining one’s friends. The latter 
  are what any movement or organization has to use if it is going to be 
  politically effective.
 </p>
 <p>The 
  criteria of participation may differ from group to group, but the means 
  of becoming a member of the informal elite if one meets those criteria 
  are pretty much the same. The only main difference depends on whether 
  one is in a group from the beginning, or joins it after it has begun. 
  If involved from the beginning it is important to have as many of one’s 
  personal friends as possible also join. If no one knows anyone else very 
  well, then one must deliberately form friendships with a select number 
  and establish the informal interaction patterns crucial to the creation 
  of an informal structure. Once the informal patterns are formed they act 
  to maintain themselves, and one of the most successful tactics of maintenance 
  is to continuously recruit new people who “fit in.” One joins 
  such an elite much the same way one pledges a sorority. If perceived as 
  a potential addition, one is “rushed” by the members of the 
  informal structure and eventually either dropped or initiated. If the 
  sorority is not politically aware enough to actively engage in this process 
  itself it can be started by the outsider pretty much the same way one 
  joins any private club. Find a sponsor, i.e., pick some member of the 
  elite who appears to be well respected within it, and actively cultivate 
  that person’s friendship. Eventually, she will most likely bring you into 
  the inner circle.
 </p>

 <p>All
    of these procedures take time. So if one works full time or has a similar
    major commitment, it is usually impossible to join simply because there
    are not enough hours left to go to all the meetings and cultivate the
    personal relationship necessary to have a voice in the decision-making.
    That is why formal structures of decision making are a boon to the
    overworked person. Having an established process for decision-making
    ensures that everyone can participate in it to some extent.
 </p>
 <p>Although
    this dissection of the process of elite formation within small groups
    has been critical in perspective, it is not made in the belief that
    these informal structures are inevitably bad -- merely inevitable.
    All groups create informal structures as a result of interaction patterns
    among the members of the group. Such informal structures can do very
    useful things But only Unstructured groups are totally governed by
    them. When informal elites are combined with a myth of “structurelessness,” there
    can be no attempt to put limits on the use of power. It becomes capricious.
 </p>
 <p>This
    has two potentially negative consequences of which we should be aware.
    The first is that the informal structure of decision-making will be
    much like a sorority -- one in which people listen to others because
    they like them and not because they say significant things. As long
    as the movement does not do significant things this does not much matter.
    But if its development is not to be arrested at this preliminary stage,
    it will have to alter this trend. The second is that informal structures
    have no obligation to be responsible to the group at large. Their power
    was not given to them; it cannot be taken away. Their influence is
    not based on what they do for the group; therefore they cannot be directly
    influenced by the group. This does not necessarily make informal structures
    irresponsible. Those who are concerned with maintaining their influence
    will usually try to be responsible. The group simply cannot compel
 such responsibility; it is dependent on the interests of the elite.</p>

 <h2>THE “STAR” SYSTEM</h2>

 <p>The 
  idea of “structurelessness” has created the “star” 
  system. We live in a society which expects political groups to make decisions 
  and to select people to articulate those decisions to the public at large. 
  The press and the public do not know how to listen seriously to individual 
  women as women; they want to know how the group feels. Only three techniques 
  have ever been developed for establishing mass group opinion: the vote 
  or referendum, the public opinion survey questionnaire, and the selection 
  of group spokespeople at an appropriate meeting. The women’s liberation 
  movement has used none of these to communicate with the public. Neither 
  the movement as a whole nor most of the multitudinous groups within it 
  have established a means of explaining their position on various issues. 
  But the public is conditioned to look for spokespeople.
 </p>
 <p>While 
  it has consciously not chosen spokespeople, the movement has thrown up 
  many women who have caught the public eye for varying reasons. These women 
  represent no particular group or established opinion; they know this and 
  usually say so. But because there are no official spokespeople nor any 
  decision-making body that the press can query when it wants to know the 
  movement’s position on a subject, these women are perceived as the spokespeople. 
  Thus, whether they want to or not, whether the movement likes it or not, 
  women of public note are put in the role of spokespeople by default.
 </p>
 <p>This 
  is one main source of the ire that is often felt toward the women who 
  are labeled “stars.” Because they were not selected by the women 
  in the movement to represent the movement’s views, they are resented when 
  the press presumes that they speak for the movement. But as long as the 
  movement does not select its own spokeswomen, such women will be placed 
  in that role by the press and the public, regardless of their own desires.
 </p>
 <p>This 
  has several negative consequences for both the movement and the women 
  labeled “stars.” First, because the movement didn’t put them 
  in the role of spokesperson, the movement cannot remove them. The press 
  put them there and only the press can choose not to listen. The press 
  will continue to look to “stars” as spokeswomen as long as it 
  has no official alternatives to go to for authoritative statements from 
  the movement. The movement has no control in the selection of its representatives 
  to the public as long as it believes that it should have no representatives 
  at all. Second, women put in this position often find themselves viciously 
  attacked by their sisters. This achieves nothing for the movement and 
  is painfully destructive to the individuals involved. Such attacks only 
  result in either the woman leaving the movement entirely-often bitterly 
  alienated -- or in her ceasing to feel responsible to her “sisters.” 
  She may maintain some loyalty to the movement, vaguely defined, but she 
  is no longer susceptible to pressures from other women in it. One cannot 
  feel responsible to people who have been the source of such pain without 
  being a masochist, and these women are usually too strong to bow to that 
  kind of personal pressure. Thus the backlash to the “star” system 
  in effect encourages the very kind of individualistic nonresponsibility 
  that the movement condemns. By purging a sister as a “star,” 
  the movement loses whatever control it may have had over the person who 
  then becomes free to commit all of the individualistic sins of which she 
 has been accused.</p>

 <h2>POLITICAL IMPOTENCE</h2>

 <p>Unstructured 
  groups may be very effective in getting women to talk about their lives; 
  they aren’t very good for getting things done. It is when people get tired 
  of “just talking” and want to do something more that the groups 
  flounder, unless they change the nature of their operation. Occasionally, 
  the developed informal structure of the group coincides with an available 
  need that the group can fill in such a way as to give the appearance that 
  an Unstructured group “works.” That is, the group has fortuitously 
  developed precisely the kind of structure best suited for engaging in 
  a particular project. 
 </p>
 <p>While working in this kind of group is a very heady experience, it is also rare 
  and very hard to replicate. There are almost inevitably four conditions 
  found in such a group:
 </p>
 <ol>
 <li><em> It is task oriented</em>. Its function is very narrow and very specific, 
  like putting on a conference or putting out a newspaper. It is the task 
  that basically structures the group. The task determines what needs to 
  be done and when it needs to be done. It provides a guide by which people 
  can judge their actions and make plans for future activity.
 </li>
 <li><em>It is relatively small and homogeneous</em>. Homogeneity is necessary 
  to insure that participants have a “common language” for interaction. 
  People from widely different backgrounds may provide richness to a consciousness-raising 
  group where each can learn from the others’ experience, but too great 
  a diversity among members of a task-oriented group means only that they 
  continually misunderstand each other. Such diverse people interpret words 
  and actions differently. They have different expectations about each other’s 
  behavior and judge the results according to different criteria. If everyone 
  knows everyone else well enough to understand the nuances, these can be 
  accommodated. Usually, they only lead to confusion and endless hours spent 
  straightening out conflicts no one ever thought would arise.
 </li>
 <li><em>There is a high degree of communication</em>. Information must be passed 
  on to everyone, opinions checked, work divided up, and participation assured 
  in the relevant decisions. This is only possible if the group is small 
  and people practically live together for the most crucial phases of the 
  task. Needless to say, the number of interactions necessary to involve 
  everybody increases geometrically with the number of participants. This 
  inevitably limits group participants to about five, or excludes some from 
  some of the decisions. Successful groups can be as large as 10 or 15, 
  but only when they are in fact composed of several smaller subgroups which 
  perform specific parts of the task, and whose members overlap with each 
  other so that knowledge of what the different subgroups are doing can 
  be passed around easily.
 </li>
 <li><em>There is a low degree of skill specialization</em>. Not everyone has 
  to be able to do everything, but everything must be able to be done by 
  more than one person. Thus no one is indispensable. To a certain extent, 
  people become interchangeable parts.
 </li>
 </ol>
 <p>While 
  these conditions can occur serendipitously in small groups, this is not 
  possible in large ones. Consequently, because the larger movement in most 
  cities is as unstructured as individual rap groups, it is not too much 
  more effective than the separate groups at specific tasks. The informal 
  structure is rarely together enough or in touch enough with the people 
  to be able to operate effectively. So the movement generates much motion 
  and few results. Unfortunately, the consequences of all this motion are 
  not as innocuous as the results’ and their victim is the movement itself.
 </p>
 <p>Some 
  groups have formed themselves into local action projects if they do not 
  involve many people and work on a small scale. But this form restricts 
  movement activity to the local level; it cannot be done on the regional 
  or national. Also, to function well the groups must usually pare themselves 
  down to that informal group of friends who were running things in the 
  first place. This excludes many women from participating. As long as the 
  only way women can participate in the movement is through membership in 
  a small group, the nongregarious are at a distinct disadvantage. As long 
  as friendship groups are the main means of organizational activity, elitism 
  becomes institutionalized.
 </p>
 <p>For 
  those groups which cannot find a local project to which to devote themselves, 
  the mere act of staying together becomes the reason for their staying 
  together. When a group has no specific task (and consciousness raising 
  is a task), the people in it turn their energies to controlling others 
  in the group. This is not done so much out of a malicious desire to manipulate 
  others (though sometimes it is) as out of a lack of anything better to 
  do with their talents. Able people with time on their hands and a need 
  to justify their coming together put their efforts into personal control, 
  and spend their time criticizing the personalities of the other members 
  in the group. Infighting and personal power games rule the day. When a 
  group is involved in a task, people learn to get along with others as 
  they are and to subsume personal dislikes for the sake of the larger goal. 
  There are limits placed on the compulsion to remold every person in our 
  image of what they should be.
 </p>

 <p>The
    end of consciousness-raising leaves people with no place to go, and
    the lack of structure leaves them with no way of getting there. The
    women the movement either turn in on themselves and their sisters or
    seek other alternatives of action. There are few that are available.
    Some women just “do their own thing.” This can lead to a
    great deal of individual creativity, much of which is useful for the
    movement, but it is not a viable alternative for most women and certainly
    does not foster a spirit of cooperative group effort. Other women drift
    out of the movement entirely because they don’t want to develop an
    individual project and they have found no way of discovering, joining,
    or starting group projects that interest them.
 </p>
 <p>Many
    turn to other political organizations to give them the kind of structured,
    effective activity that they have not been able to find in the women’s
    movement. Those political organizations which see women’s liberation
    as only one of many issues to which women should devote their time
    thus find the movement a vast recruiting ground for new members. There
    is no need for such organizations to “infiltrate” (though
    this is not precluded). The desire for meaningful political activity
    generated in women by their becoming part of the women’s liberation
    movement is sufficient to make them eager to join other organizations
    when the movement itself provides no outlets for their new ideas and
    energies. Those women who join other political organizations while
    remaining within the women’s liberation movement, or who join women’s
    liberation while remaining in other political organizations, in turn
    become the framework for new informal structures. These friendship
    networks are based upon their common nonfeminist politics rather than
    the characteristics discussed earlier, but operate in much the same
    way. Because these women share common values, ideas, and political
    orientations, they too become informal, unplanned, unselected, unresponsible
    elites -- whether they intend to be so or not.
 </p>
 <p>These
    new informal elites are often perceived as threats by the old informal
    elites previously developed within different movement groups. This
    is a correct perception. Such politically oriented networks are rarely
    willing to be merely “sororities” as many of the old ones
    were, and want to proselytize their political as well as their feminist
    ideas. This is only natural, but its implications for women’s liberation
    have never been adequately discussed. The old elites are rarely willing
    to bring such differences of opinion out into the open because it would
    involve exposing the nature of the informal structure of the group.
 </p>
 <p>Many
    of these informal elites have been hiding under the banner of “anti-elitism” and “structurelessness.” To
    effectively counter the competition from another informal structure,
    they would have to become “public,” and this possibility
    is fraught with many dangerous implications. Thus, to maintain its
    own power, it is easier to rationalize the exclusion of the members
    of the other informal structure by such means as “red-baiting,” “reformist-baiting,” “lesbian-baiting,” or “straight-baiting.” The
    only other alternative is to formally structure the group in such a
    way that the original power structure is institutionalized. This is
    not always possible. If the informal elites have been well structured
    and have exercised a fair amount of power in the past, such a task
    is feasible. These groups have a history of being somewhat politically
    effective in the past, as the tightness of the informal structure has
    proven an adequate substitute for a formal structure. Becoming Structured
    does not alter their operation much, though the institutionalization
    of the power structure does open it to formal challenge. It is those
    groups which are in greatest need of structure that are often least
    capable of creating it. Their informal structures have not been too
    well formed and adherence to the ideology of “structurelessness” makes
    them reluctant to change tactics. The more Unstructured a group is,
    the more lacking it is in informal structures, and the more it adheres
    to an ideology of “structurelessness,” the more vulnerable
    it is to being taken over by a group of political comrades.
 </p>
 <p>Since
    the movement at large is just as Unstructured as most of its constituent
    groups, it is similarly susceptible to indirect influence. But the
    phenomenon manifests itself differently. On a local level most groups
    can operate autonomously; but the only groups that can organize a national
    activity are nationally organized groups. Thus, it is often the Structured
    feminist organizations that provide national direction for feminist
    activities, and this direction is determined by the priorities of those
    organizations. Such groups as NOW, WEAL, and some leftist women’s caucuses
    are simply the only organizations capable of mounting a national campaign.
    The multitude of Unstructured women’s liberation groups can choose
    to support or not support the national campaigns, but are incapable
    of mounting their own. Thus their members become the troops under the
    leadership of the Structured organizations. The avowedly Unstructured
    groups have no way of drawing upon the movement’s vast resources to
    support its priorities. It doesn’t even have a way of deciding what
    they are.
 </p>
 <p>The
    more unstructured a movement it, the less control it has over the directions
    in which it develops and the political actions in which it engages.
    This does not mean that its ideas do not spread. Given a certain amount
    of interest by the media and the appropriateness of social conditions,
    the ideas will still be diffused widely. But diffusion of ideas does
    not mean they are implemented; it only means they are talked about.
    Insofar as they can be applied individually they may be acted on; insofar
    as they require coordinated political power to be implemented, they
    will not be.
 </p>
 <p>As
    long as the women’s liberation movement stays dedicated to a form of
    organization which stresses small, inactive discussion groups among
    friends, the worst problems of Unstructuredness will not be felt. But
    this style of organization has its limits; it is politically inefficacious,
    exclusive, and discriminatory against those women who are not or cannot
    be tied into the friendship networks. Those who do not fit into what
    already exists because of class, race, occupation, education, parental
    or marital status, personality, etc., will inevitably be discouraged
    from trying to participate. Those who do fit in will develop vested
    interests in maintaining things as they are.
 </p>
 <p>The
    informal groups’ vested interests will be sustained by the informal
    structures which exist, and the movement will have no way of determining
    who shall exercise power within it. If the movement continues deliberately
    to not select who shall exercise power, it does not thereby abolish
    power. All it does is abdicate the right to demand that those who do
    exercise power and influence be responsible for it. If the movement
    continues to keep power as diffuse as possible because it knows it
    cannot demand responsibility from those who have it, it does prevent
    any group or person from totally dominating. But it simultaneously
    insures that the movement is as ineffective as possible. Some middle
    ground between domination and ineffectiveness can and must be found.
 </p>
 <p>These
    problems are coming to a head at this time because the nature of the
    movement is necessarily changing. Consciousness-raising as the main
    function of the women’s liberation movement is becoming obsolete. Due
    to the intense press publicity of the last two years and the numerous
    overground books and articles now being circulated, women’s liberation
    has become a household word. Its issues are discussed and informal
    rap groups are formed by people who have no explicit connection with
    any movement group. The movement must go on to other tasks. It now
    needs to establish its priorities, articulate its goals, and pursue
    its objectives in a coordinated fashion. To do this it must get organized
 -- locally, regionally, and nationally.</p>

 <h2>PRINCIPLES OF DEMOCRATIC STRUCTURING</h2>

 <p>Once 
  the movement no longer clings tenaciously to the ideology of “structurelessness,” 
  it is free to develop those forms of organization best suited to its healthy 
  functioning. This does not mean that we should go to the other extreme 
  and blindly imitate the traditional forms of organization. But neither 
  should we blindly reject them all. Some of the traditional techniques 
  will prove useful, albeit not perfect; some will give us insights into 
  what we should and should not do to obtain certain ends with minimal costs 
  to the individuals in the movement. Mostly, we will have to experiment 
  with different kinds of structuring and develop a variety of techniques 
  to use for different situations. The Lot System is one such idea which 
  has emerged from the movement. It is not applicable to all situations, 
  but is useful in some. Other ideas for structuring are needed. But before 
  we can proceed to experiment intelligently, we must accept the idea that 
  there is nothing inherently bad about structure itself -- only its excess 
  use.
 </p>
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        <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/542585b2d85213911f91b498a643e010/" title="Accès à l'article caché">The Tyranny of Stuctureless</a> (<a href="https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li>
      
        <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/47f2c0c2984a00e8a6041232f4e87e1f/" title="Accès à l'article caché">L’humain du futur</a> (<a href="https://www.hypothermia.fr/2020/01/lhumain-du-futur/" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li>
      
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        <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/bfce8545a2d7c8d51d3af19f61208134/" title="Accès à l'article caché">On Pair Programming</a> (<a href="https://martinfowler.com/articles/on-pair-programming.html" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li>
      
        <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/59dac1925636ebf6358c3a598bf834f9/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Un pédophile est un client Apple comme les autres.</a> (<a href="https://www.affordance.info/mon_weblog/2020/01/pedophile-client-apple.html" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li>
      
        <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/a1ba10f6326b0ed4c9ca343a214f671d/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Végétarien carnivore</a> (<a href="https://oncletom.io/2020/01/12/vegetarien-carnivore/" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li>
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