Question
What is the upper limit on the number of participants in a group for which goals, rules, roles and so on can reasonably be negotiated?
Answer
Complicated questions. We can dismiss one wrong answer straight away: it is NOT Dunbar's number (150).
Nor will it be a single number at all (obviously) it will be a coordination complexity/group size Pareto boundary, which can be moved out to some extent based on the sophistication of the underlying coordination technology.
Structures can either amplify the coordination capabilities of a group or diminish it. See Tom Malone's Future of Work for some of the information-theoretic and coordination-theory based ideas.
It entirely depends on the nature, complexity and structure of the goals and objectives of the group itself. n hippies looking to set up an East Coast clone of Burning Man have a very different problem from n people looking to topple the Egyptian government or n people looking to start a war.
The zeroth-order analysis of the basics of this problem is of course the whole debate around wisdom of crowds. Surowiecki's book is a decent if flawed (Gladwell-style flaws) treatment of zeroth order coordination issues. Jeff Howe's book Crowdsourcing has a lot of excellent anecdotal evidence.
First-order analysis: try David Lewis, Convention to get a sense of more rigorous treatment of issues. It is a philosophical analysis where game theory is sort of used to guide the discussion, but is ultimately peripheral.
First-order on a different path is Gareth Morgan's Images of Organization. The functioning of coordination structures depends very strongly on governing organizaitonal metaphors.
That's the current state of the art. My main research interests now are in applying information structure theory and ideas about entropy to do the next level of analysis which blends formal mathematical models with the sort of metaphor-based analysis that Morgan likes.
This is one of my self-funded research projects, so I devote as many research hours to it as I can spare, given that I must pay the rent with my remaining billable hours. If some micro-MacArthur wants to sponsor me with a microGenius grant, I'll gladly ramp up my hours on this project and provide a better answer :)
I have a ton of writing on this subject on my blog, but I won't include links in case this answer gets NHed into oblivion for self-promotion.
Nor will it be a single number at all (obviously) it will be a coordination complexity/group size Pareto boundary, which can be moved out to some extent based on the sophistication of the underlying coordination technology.
Structures can either amplify the coordination capabilities of a group or diminish it. See Tom Malone's Future of Work for some of the information-theoretic and coordination-theory based ideas.
It entirely depends on the nature, complexity and structure of the goals and objectives of the group itself. n hippies looking to set up an East Coast clone of Burning Man have a very different problem from n people looking to topple the Egyptian government or n people looking to start a war.
The zeroth-order analysis of the basics of this problem is of course the whole debate around wisdom of crowds. Surowiecki's book is a decent if flawed (Gladwell-style flaws) treatment of zeroth order coordination issues. Jeff Howe's book Crowdsourcing has a lot of excellent anecdotal evidence.
First-order analysis: try David Lewis, Convention to get a sense of more rigorous treatment of issues. It is a philosophical analysis where game theory is sort of used to guide the discussion, but is ultimately peripheral.
First-order on a different path is Gareth Morgan's Images of Organization. The functioning of coordination structures depends very strongly on governing organizaitonal metaphors.
That's the current state of the art. My main research interests now are in applying information structure theory and ideas about entropy to do the next level of analysis which blends formal mathematical models with the sort of metaphor-based analysis that Morgan likes.
This is one of my self-funded research projects, so I devote as many research hours to it as I can spare, given that I must pay the rent with my remaining billable hours. If some micro-MacArthur wants to sponsor me with a microGenius grant, I'll gladly ramp up my hours on this project and provide a better answer :)
I have a ton of writing on this subject on my blog, but I won't include links in case this answer gets NHed into oblivion for self-promotion.