I just discovered Reed's Law

Chris Corrigan chris at chriscorrigan.com
Wed Sep 11 11:12:14 PDT 2002


Many of you with more mathematical minds than I probably know about
Reed's Law, but for those who don't, what I discovered today when I was
reading an article on how the PR industry is trying to sell
bio-technology is:

"Dr. David P. Reed, former vice president and chief scientist for Lotus
Development Corporation, has developed the idea of Group Forming
Networks to explain the enormous power of the internet to facilitate the
formation of networked groups. These groups could include the numerous
special interest groups, which are attacking the biotech industry. The
Group Forming Law (or, Reed's Law) calculates the number of groups of
two or more people which can be formed from a single group.

For example, how many groups of two or more people can be formed with an
initial group of three? According to Reed's Law is 2N-N-1. Substituting
3 for N the answer is 4. Not a very impressive number. However, the
answer grows dramatically as N grows. For example, how many groups of
two or more people can be formed in a classroom of 20 students? The
answer? 1,048,555!!!

In another context, that means 20 anti biotech activists can come
together in more than a million combinations to attack the industry.
Clearly, it's highly improbable those 20 will actually come together in
that many combinations. Despite that, Reed's Law highlights the
unbelievable power of the internet to create and support special
interest groups."


In another conext, do the math for you next OST meeting where you client
is worried that "only" 12 people will show up.

"Ah well," you can say. "That's only 4,083 possible groups that might
form today for each session.  Do you think we need more breakout
spaces?"

Full text of the articla is here:
http://www.epublicrelations.org/Reedlaw.html

Cheers,

Chris

---
CHRIS CORRIGAN
Consultation - Facilitation
Open Space Technology

Bowen Island, BC, Canada
http://www.chriscorrigan.com
chris at chriscorrigan.com

*
*
==========================================================
OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
------------------------------
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options,
view the archives of oslist at listserv.boisestate.edu,
Visit:

http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html



More information about the OSList mailing list