May 20, 2007
Standing on Five Legs
This continues our look at the book, The Starfish and the Spider.
According to the authors of The Starfish and the Spider, a decentralized organization stands on five legs. Like the starfish, it can loose a leg or two and still survive. But when all the legs are working together, a decentralized organization can take off.
The Five Legs are the circles, the catalysts, ideology, the preexisting network and the champion. We will first look at the Circles. (Below are adapted excerpts from the section on circles, pgs. 88-91)
Circles are important to nearly every decentralized organization. The Apaches, for example, lived in many small, non hierarchical groups spread across the Southwest. Though they shared a common heritage and tradition, each group maintained its own particular habits and norms. Each Apache group resembled a circle: independent and autonomous.
Once you join a circle, you’re an equal. It’s then up to you to contribute to the best of your ability. Until the internet age, circles were confined to a physical location. The Internet has allowed circles to be virtual: members join from their computers without ever leaving home. Joining circles is so easy and seamless, in fact, that most of us, whether we realize it or not, are members of a decentralized circle of one kind or another.
As they’ve become virtual, circles have also become more amorphous and difficult to identify. There aren’t groups of Wikipedia users meeting together in rooms somewhere. Instead, a Wikipedia circle is made up of individuals contributing to a particular entry. Some members write the article, others edit it, still others beautify it. Membership becomes highly fluid. Unlike Apache circles, whose members lived together 24/7, virtual circles can be very fleeting. Because participants aren’t spending every moment together, their bond isn’t as strong.
The circle can have a nearly unlimited number of participants. But there’s a trade-off. On the one hand, it’s easy to join, and with numbers you get diversity. On the other hand, when circles take on more than fourteen or so members, the bond breaks down. Members become more anonymous, and that opens the door to destructive behavior. No longer does everyone have to pull their weight.
Because circles don’t have hierarchy and structure, it’s hard to maintain rules within them; no one really has the power to enforce them. But circles aren’t lawless. Instead of rules, they depend on norms. The norms, in fact, become the backbone of the circle. Because they realize that if they don’t enforce the norms no one will, members enforce the norms,with one another. In doing so, members begin to own and embrace the norms as their own. As a result of this self-enforcement, norms can be even more powerful than rules. Rules are someone else’s idea of what you should do. If you break a rule, just don’t get caught and you’ll be okay. But with norms, it’s about you as a member have signed up for, and what you’ve created.
As the norms of a circle develop, and as members spend more time together, they begin to trust each other. Though virtual circles have become more anonymous, they are still based on trust.
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