Thursday, April 5, 2007
The theory of Twitter & of social imbalances
The theory of Twitter & of social imbalances
April 05, 2007 by Dave Winer.
Dave in this post expands on a notion that he had discussed about Twitter's change of subscription policies.
Well, from what I understand, he essentially is trying to analyse whether systems can be entirely democratic in their decision-making processes (in the piece he had written about on Twitter's policies, the system was not fully democratic). Dave feels that social systems could be perceived as being in one of the two sets - balanced and imbalanced systems. Balanced systems are perceived to be democratic and fair, and the imbalanced ones are not, put crudely.
Imbalances continue happening in social systems, and so they will in Twitter, predicts Dave - somewhat on the lines of the evolution of the A-list bloggers...but is this "imbalance" a problem? Quite on the contrary, feels Dave. Such an imbalance could be quite necessary for these systems to function, similar to similar imbalances being necessary for efficient decision making in companies (at least medium and large companies).
One can easily see the relevance of this discussion to many open source projects, and we have already heard of quite a few open source project leaders being called "dictators" at least in a humorous sense (but perhaps not always meant lightly!). But unless there exist such (hopefully) benevolent dictatorships, would the world ever see the likes of more Linuxes and Phps and Apaches? If two's company and three a crowd, just imagine what combined decision-making by dozens of geeky and strong-minded developers would add to :-). A word pops in my mind - pandemonium.
Interesting post, read the full post here @ Scripting blog
April 05, 2007 by Dave Winer.
Dave in this post expands on a notion that he had discussed about Twitter's change of subscription policies.
Well, from what I understand, he essentially is trying to analyse whether systems can be entirely democratic in their decision-making processes (in the piece he had written about on Twitter's policies, the system was not fully democratic). Dave feels that social systems could be perceived as being in one of the two sets - balanced and imbalanced systems. Balanced systems are perceived to be democratic and fair, and the imbalanced ones are not, put crudely.
Imbalances continue happening in social systems, and so they will in Twitter, predicts Dave - somewhat on the lines of the evolution of the A-list bloggers...but is this "imbalance" a problem? Quite on the contrary, feels Dave. Such an imbalance could be quite necessary for these systems to function, similar to similar imbalances being necessary for efficient decision making in companies (at least medium and large companies).
One can easily see the relevance of this discussion to many open source projects, and we have already heard of quite a few open source project leaders being called "dictators" at least in a humorous sense (but perhaps not always meant lightly!). But unless there exist such (hopefully) benevolent dictatorships, would the world ever see the likes of more Linuxes and Phps and Apaches? If two's company and three a crowd, just imagine what combined decision-making by dozens of geeky and strong-minded developers would add to :-). A word pops in my mind - pandemonium.
Interesting post, read the full post here @ Scripting blog
Labels: analysis, perspectives, problems, project-management, social-networking
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