This section attempts to understand Mass Collaboration from the perspective of the individual participants.

Achieving critical mass

Recruiting was a critical issue addressed as part of the organization and a recurring theme in the research interviews. The reason – Mass Collaboration doesn’t exist until there are people. The specific numbers will vary, for example – for the Fluther.com community, 100 people appeared to be a tipping point. Critical mass was less clear for other communities.

Critical Mass has less to do with the absolute number of people, but perhaps the total energy invested in the initiative – that is to say, a few very active contributors can do much to move an initiative forward. In Jeff Jarvis’s case he listed fewer than five people by name who he deemed critical to his community for one reason or another.

Another view of critical mass, might be better defined by velocity, as was the case with Gregory Galant’s Shorty Awards – within a very short time participation ramped up, leaders emerged (as a result of votes and as a result of assumed roles in helping to organize the voting process).

Alignment of interests

Most of the organization section was dedicated to understand why people participate – from financial incentives to outcomes that matter. This is important for organizations since they have to consider outcomes and tasks that can meet these criteria. However, from the individual perspective, there must be alignment – an idea repeated by multiple interviewees.

Alignment might not mean that interests in the overall outcome are shared – for example, I might not care what happens if I get paid. Or I might not care what other questions are answered on fluther.com as long as my question is answered and I can answer questions that interest me. Ideally it seems that the sum of self interests can be used to achieve the desired outcome – understanding and monitoring this over time, appears to be one of the primary challenges of Mass Collaboration.

This is perhaps why successful Mass Collaboration makes use of multiple strategies to minimize risk – for example, WordPress celebrates contributors in multiple ways such as ratings and qualitative feedback and other opportunities exist for purely social interaction – so if some alignment is lost on one area, there are other areas which prevail.

One of the critical measures then of community health, or specifically the health of people participating in the community, is determined by the degree alignment between individuals and the outcome they are to achieve.

Contributions – Value in the eye of the beholder

Contributions can be measured in a number of ways. From a general level of participation – i.e. how many people make each type of contribution? Or what is the quality of the contributions, as judged by the community (or subset of the community). Forrester research described a range of different types participation in groundswell, from creators through critics, collectors, joiners, spectators and inactives. Classifying types of contributions is a useful for step to understand the types of value that people can and will make.

The 90-9-1 Rule

These numbers are often misunderstood. As an idea, they loosely describe the level of participation of different groups in a hypothetical community. The 1 represents the people who do most of the work – writing software, designing t-shirts, taking photos or submitting ideas. These are the most valuable people right? Wrong. This is one type of value, but there are many tasks they can't or won't do.

The 9 represent a different type of participant, who provides varying degrees of explicit feedback. In the Linux development model, this group is a critical group because they provide feedback about what is working and what is not. As Von Hippel describes it, these users may not fix a problem or improve the solution. However, they have the advantage of knowing what they are trying to achieve and often this makes them very valuable.

I think about these roles as being similar to critics or collectors in the Groundswell model. They are in fact voting and highlighting what they like and want. And this has value too. Finally, there is the 90, often demeaned as the “passive massive”. But it depends on your perspective – for example, let's look at someone like Amazon.com recommendations? These are powered by the passive - but how? Well Amazon lets you know what people ultimately purchased, so the passive massive don’t need to share their recommendations or upload photos, but their simple act of purchasing helps the community decide.

A healthy community can track the types of contributions to get an overall sense for the level of participation. Ideally you can encourage more participation in each category with a view to getting more from (and for) the community.

Free revealing (again)

As discussed previously, in product development Von Hippel describes a process of free revealing, whereby community members show how they have solved problems or improved products. Some might refer to this as the gift economy (Jenkins, 2009) and this likely has to do with a difference in value perceived by the individual person and those that receive the gift (that might keep on giving under the Inverse Commons idea discussed in Error: Reference source not found.

In this work, the limits of free revealing were not explored. For example, there are some well understood fairness guidelines –although free revealing takes place, there is some benefit that comes back to the person, at some point. However what happens if people begin to feel that organizations benefit disproportionately from their efforts? Of course, they have the choice not to participate or to change the terms of participation, assuming others don’t simply step forward and commoditize their contributions. Perhaps this demarcates a point at which organizations employ or pay participants because there simply is no other way to obtain the contribution.

Emergence – Organizing Without Organizations

In his book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations (Shirky, 2008), Clay Shirky explores a number of examples where people organize around a shared desired outcome independently of any organization. Since the book was published, it seems that almost weekly, new examples appear.

For example following the Iran Elections on Saturday June 13, 2009, messages began appearing on Twitter describing how the election had been a fraud. What followed were a variety of actions much like the events that have unfolded on Twitter in the past around events like the Mumbai terrorist attacks. Somehow people naturally gravitate to different roles – some act as traditional information sources, others act as aggregators, still others as filters trying to identify government actors attempting to spread disinformation. Some people are professional news people, others are on the ground in Iran, participating in demonstrations. But many people, who would normally have been reading the news are now helping to “make it” and they are somehow finding ways to play a role.

Figure Snapshot of Twitter feed for search of conversation referencing “#iranelection” on June 21 2009

Emergence as a sign of community strength?

In strong communities it seems that the community naturally moves to take on certain organizational responsibilities. Like activist shareholders, communities can sometimes demand new roles in determining the future of organizations where they make significant contributions. Facebook found this out as they tried to amend their terms of service in February 2009 only to receive a strong response which ultimately resulted in a number of changes in the role that the community would play in the future of the organization, beginning with a Statement of Right and Responsibilities, shown below.

As communities take over more responsibilities from organizations, it increases their investment in the organization, too. While it might appear as a loss of control to the formal organization, what they get in return is more investment – it is not too dissimilar to a public company listing to access additional funding. As part of the process of gaining investors, you lose some control. The difference now, is that investment is being made via participation – time, energy, ideas, feedback, etc.

Communities earn equity

It is not entirely clear how this is to be measured. However it does appear to be a hallmark of the most successful Mass Collaborations and the communities that form to make them possible. In simple terms, as I commit to a community, I value it more. Similarly, as organizations give more responsibilities to their community participants they become stronger – as Jeff Jarvis put it (Jarvis, 2009) :

You win when you lose control.

It might not be losing control, as much as a sharing of responsibilities for tighter alignment of interests. As we pointed out at the beginning of this section, this is one of the main challenges for successful Mass Collaboration. Community Equity appears to be a good transaction to align interests and ultimately a positive indicator of the health of the community.