Less importantly, I also feel less confident coordination benefits would mean impact per member goes up with the number of members.
I understand that the value of a social network like Facebook grows with the number of members. But many forms of coordination become much harder with the number of members.
As an analogy, it’s significantly easier for 2 people to decide where to go to dinner than for 3 people to decide. And 10 people in a group discussion can take ages to come to consensus.
Or, it’s much harder to get a new policy adopted in an organisation of 100 than an organisation of 10, because there are more stakeholders to consult and compromise with, and then more people to train in the new policy etc. And large organisations are generally way more bureaucratic than smaller ones.
I think these analogies might be closer than the analogy of Facebook.
You also get effects like in a movement of under 1000, it’s possible to have met in person most of the people, and know many of them well; while in a movement of 10,000, coordination has to be based on institutional mechanisms, which tend to involve a lot of overhead and not be as good.
Overall it seems to me that movement growth means more resources and skills, more shared knowledge, infrastructure and brand effects, but also many ways that it becomes harder to work together, and the movement becoming less nimble. I feel unsure which effect wins, but I put a fair bit of credence on the term decreasing rather than increasing.
If it were decreasing, and you also add in diminishing returns, then impact per member could be going down quite fast.
Less importantly, I also feel less confident coordination benefits would mean impact per member goes up with the number of members.
I understand that the value of a social network like Facebook grows with the number of members. But many forms of coordination become much harder with the number of members.
As an analogy, it’s significantly easier for 2 people to decide where to go to dinner than for 3 people to decide. And 10 people in a group discussion can take ages to come to consensus.
Or, it’s much harder to get a new policy adopted in an organisation of 100 than an organisation of 10, because there are more stakeholders to consult and compromise with, and then more people to train in the new policy etc. And large organisations are generally way more bureaucratic than smaller ones.
I think these analogies might be closer than the analogy of Facebook.
You also get effects like in a movement of under 1000, it’s possible to have met in person most of the people, and know many of them well; while in a movement of 10,000, coordination has to be based on institutional mechanisms, which tend to involve a lot of overhead and not be as good.
Overall it seems to me that movement growth means more resources and skills, more shared knowledge, infrastructure and brand effects, but also many ways that it becomes harder to work together, and the movement becoming less nimble. I feel unsure which effect wins, but I put a fair bit of credence on the term decreasing rather than increasing.
If it were decreasing, and you also add in diminishing returns, then impact per member could be going down quite fast.