2c. Self-organizing Groups

Eric Raymond

“The Brooks’s Law analysis (and the resulting fear of large numbers in development groups) rests on a hidden assumption: that the communications structure of the project is necessarily a complete graph, that everybody talks to everybody else. But on open-source projects, the halo developers work on what are in effect separable parallel subtasks and interact with each other very little; code changes and bug reports stream through the core group, and only within within that small core group do we pay the full Brooksian overhead.” (Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” 2000)

Clay Shirky

Shirky points out the organizations have been traditionally limited in their ability to harness the collective ideas and benefits of groups. As more groups are defined and as they grow in size, they become more difficult to manage, However new tools, specifically those made available due to the development of the Internet have removed many of those obstacles. (Shirky, “Here Comes Everybody,” 2008)

James Surowiecki

“Wise crowds need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions.” (Surowiecki, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” 2005)

“under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.” (Surowiecki, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” 2005)

“Groups do not need to be dominated by exceptionally intelligent people in order to be smart.” (Surowiecki, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” 2005)

Decentralization (self-organizing teams) allows people, or more generally, components of a system, to act freely and independently of one another, and still interact to produce coordinated results. (Surowiecki, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” 2005)

“The idea of the wisdom of crowds also takes decentralization as a given and a good, since it implies that if you set a crowd of self-interested, independent people working in a decentralized way on the same problem, instead of trying to direct their efforts from the top-down, their collective solution is likely to be better than any other solution you could come up with.” (Surowiecki, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” 2005)