The Dunbar Number and the OSLIST

[Rob]

On 5/18/05, Artur Silva <arturfsilva at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hello all:
>
>
>
> I think that Chris Allen's analysis on "The Dunbar number as a limit to
> group sizes", posted in his blog, is very interesting and can give some
> ideas about crisis points for the growing of lists, forums, etc - as well as
> to companies and other organizations. You can see it at:
>
> http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html
>
>
>
> I have reasons to believe that the special conditions of the OSLIST allow us
> to bypass those numbers without suffering too much. But I would like to
> confirm this.
>
>
>
> Can someone tell me how many members are there in the OSLIST at this moment?
> And has someone access to the statistics of evolution in the last years?
>
>
>
> I would appreciate to receive those number through the list or directly.

Hi,

Allow me to delurk, and make a comment.

Delurking itself is an important act, because it shows that there are
a lot of people who, like me, skim it from time to time, and rarely
appear to say anything.  The Dunbar number doesn't really take those
numbers into account.

Hmm... looking at those numbers, the original theory misses an
important fact about online games.  Mainly, that out of median
numbers, there will be a certain percentage of inactive members, and
another percentage of people who have two accounts (there are certain
benefits to running two characters at the same time, which is rather
irrelevant to the discussion at hand).

I should note that another game, City of Heroes, limits guilds to 75
people, for both technical reasons, and because they feel that this
number is more of a practical limit for an online community.  World of
Warcraft also aims at smaller communities.

The 7-8 break point, and the 50 person break point seems to hold true
on online game communities.  Most guilds have around 50 active,
committed people, and most people exist in play groups of around 7-12
people.

>From my own experiences, with less thn 20 people, it's very hard to
have a sustained community (and a game or BBS that survives).  Either
you have 5-12 people who are commited to something, and function as a
team on a regular basis (which, I think, can be considered to be
something different from a community), or you need about 25-50+
regular participants, who will vary in their participation.  Of
course, in order to sustain that, you would also need regular teams
within that community, performing activities to sustain interest from
everyone else.

*
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