Clay Shirky on social software

[David]

I asked:
> > what is forking?

Rita replied:
> Someone else can give the technical UNIX definition of forking a 
> process. As far as us stupid users are concerned, it's named after 
a 
> fork in the road. In the document, when he spoke of trying to fork 
a 
> discussion into seperate 'social' and 'technical' discussions, he 
was 
> referring to what HPfGU did when it forked into separate Main List 
and 
> OT discussions.

Yes, I got that bit (though IMO both OT and the main list 
are 'social'; the 'technical' side is conducted off-list by the 
admin team).  It's this part near the end I didn't understand:

"Sometimes you can do soft forking. Live Journal does the best soft 
forking of any software I've ever seen, where the concepts of "you" 
and "your group" are pretty much intertwingled. The average size of 
a Live Journal group is about a dozen people. And the median size is 
around five."

As far as I can tell from the context, 'forking' means 'breaking the 
big group up into manageable little groups' and be 'good' forking he 
means 'breaking the big group up in a way that means you don't lose 
the benefits of the big group'.  But I'm not absolutely sure, and I 
certainly don't understand what it means in the context of Live 
Journal.  It sounds as if somehow LJ allows you to define a 
personal 'inner ring' without being exclusive about it, presumably 
because each person's ring can overlap with but does not need to be 
identical with another's.

I think this topic is fascinating in its own right, but it is also 
of obvious practical significance for HPFGU as our membership 
approaches the 10,000 mark.  How can we:

- continue to allow access by any member to the conversation of any 
other member, while

- permitting intimacy of scale so that access still is personal?

You can argue that some of the post-reading strategies recently 
discussed can achieve much of that, in effect by selecting posts by 
author rather than topic, but I'm not sure it works for everyone.

In fact I think for many people the above two goals are directly 
incompatible, because for them an essential component of a small-
group conversation is that outsiders *can't* listen in.

I know many here are LJ users - I am not (life is too short), but 
I'd like to hear, offlist if you prefer, how you think it works well 
for you and what it is about LJ that makes it work well.

Rita, thank you for answering my other questions.  I definitely like 
the Wikipedia idea.   IMO, in subjects like philosophy that are not 
driven by large collective investments (particle accelerators, 
telescopes and the like), a site such as Wikipedia should achieve 
near-optimum efficiency as a real-time academy, so the articles 
should in fact be the most advanced exposition to be found anywhere 
in the world.

David