Size DOES Matter: The Magic Number is Six
Marnie Webb had a post this week that resonated like a bell about how we support change. We do it through people and stories.
But size DOES matter. We don’t make communities for 1M, 100K, 10K or even 1K. The communities we make are for 6 people. Make that—share it, write it, meet with it—and let each of those spawn more communities of 6. Keep it small enough to really care about and relate to.
As humans, we can relate to smaller groups of people, stories of a size that we can internalize. As we seek to create change in our families, towns, non profits, states, countries, the world, think about who the first six you want to reach.
That’s one of the things that Mena Trott said the acquisition of LiveJournal taught her. The average number of people in a community is six. And that is a comfortable number. And one we can imagine.
Tags: community_indicators, nptech, community
posted by Nancy White at 7:49 AM
2 Comments:
In the Tipping Point, Gladwell skims over the idea that human communities work best when they have up to 150 members; beyond 150, things get a little shady.
So we have two magic numbers; the 6 and the 150. Divide 150 by 6, and you get 25. So maybe we'd be most comfortable with 25 small groups of 6 people?
There's definitely some optimal sizes out there. But numbers confuse me.
I've been thinking a lot about this -- since Mena mentioned the average size of the LiveJournal friends network.
I think that 6 lets you get personal -- even just imagining that you are blogging to six people lets you pick them out and converse with them, back and forth with them.
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