Clay Shirkey has another interesting piece up on how groups are their own worst enemies. He directs it at the developers that are building the net, and took psychologist W. R. Bion’s model from the book “Experiences in Groups.”

1. Thwarted by his groups covert efforts to resist change Bion asked the following questions:

Are these individuals taking action on their own? Or is this a coordinated group? His answer was; They were hopelessly committed to both.

Shirkey then uses some online examples.

So there’s this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected. And at that moment, even if it’s subconscious, you start getting group effects. And the effects that we’ve seen come up over and over and over again in online communities.

2. Bion found three patterns in group behaviour that self-defeat and create a group.

1. Sex talk.
2. Indentification and vilification of ‘external’ enemies. Someone isn’t necessarily an enemy, but in labelling them as such galvanizes the group. The most paranoid become the leaders in this area.
3. Religious veneration. It can be an icon or a set of tenents.

As Shirkey says, try interfering with the third concept. You’ll be flamed to high heaven. Bion realized that group structure was needed to defend a group from itself and keep it healthy.

Shirkey goes on to use examples such as usenet, mailing lists, wiki, blogs, IM.
So what do developers need to keep in mind?

But I can at least say some of the things it depends on. The Calvinists had a doctrine of natural grace and supernatural grace. Natural grace was “You have to do all the right things in the world to get to heaven…” and supernatural grace was “…and God has to anoint you.” And you never knew if you had supernatural grace or not. This was their way of getting around the fact that the Book of Revelations put an upper limit on the number of people who were going to heaven.

Social software is like that. You can find the same piece of code running in many, many environments. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. So there is something supernatural about groups being a run-time experience.

Social and technical issues cannot be removed from each other.
The group will define the value of the technology.
A core group of users will often trump the rights of the individual.

Interesting. I’ve stumbled on blogs where the most innocuous comment can get you roasted by a core group of readers. A lot of this makes sense.

Mad Cow
It is critical for public health officials to trace the origin of the lone cow that has crippled the Canadian beef industry. Far easier said than done. The cow was indentified as having bovine spongiform encephalopathy in May. As they trace back, it appears it may have come from the US.