Therefore, we must answer the following questions:
NathanielThurston: Sunir, I'm curious about your assertion that "Meatball is unscalable". Why is this, and what would you do if Meatball were to come under pressure to grow larger?
SunirShah: To the casual observer, Meatball is incredibly obscure, insular, navel-gazing, obtuse, and not very helpful. Our model requires a ridiculous up front investment of time and energy. I don't understand the pressure to scale Meatball either. What's the objective?
HelmutLeitner: I think I understand the motivation of Fridemar and Nathaniel and it comes very natural: to turn the social capital and potential of Meatball into real capital.
SunirShah: We can certainly adapt Meatball to be more scalable. A first exercise is to fix StartingPoints by hand, and then enforce that in the InformationArchitecture of the site.
NathanielThurston: I think you've answered my question: It's not the "supply" that's missing (the ability to scale if required), but the "demand" (the impression to the casual observer). Regarding the proposition that we should strive to increase the demand by changing Meatball, all I would advocate at the moment is to keep discussion alive.
FridemarPache -- Sat Sep 26 12:49:27 2009
Please consider the idea of a [Meta System Transition], taking the S1,..,Sn as Sunir's wiki clones or more general as Wikis or even the platforms of CommunitiesThatScale. The "controlling" System could be a system, that uses the APIs of GoogleSideWiki or other platforms to generate automatic (bidirectional) trails in form of ConceptMaps. Usemod's TeaTime everywhere could be such a scaling wiki. However, instead of a fork, it could deliver the technology extension in combination with the rich LinkLanguage of Meatball. The same holds for all wikis, adjacent to Meatball.
Please consider the idea of a [Meta System Transition], taking the S1,..,Sn as Sunir's wiki clones or more general as Wikis or even the platforms of CommunitiesThatScale. The "controling" System could be a system, that uses the APIs of GoogleSideWiki or other platforms to generate automatic (bidirectional) trails in form of ConceptMaps. Usemod's TeaTime everywhere could be such a scaling wiki. However, instead of a fork, it could deliver the technology extension in combination with the rich LinkLanguage of Meatball. The same holds for all wikis, adjacent to Meatball.
Fridemar, I think this needs a clearer explanation for the non-mathematician. The biggest obstacle I see to using the technique I think you're proposing is MeatballWikiCopyright, which demands that any "clone" be part of Meatball. Also, I think you're not addressing the bigger issue - there does not seem to be much demand for meatball at present. However, I may well not understand what you're proposing; in which case please correct my misunderstanding.
A possibly-related idea: use the LinkLanguage implied by Meatball's page structure in non-meatball contexts, with enough contextualization of the LinkWord? to make the argument stand on its own and interest the reader in following the LinkWord? back to its home on Meatball.
If we do this, however, I would avoid making a robotic practice of making bilinks. Google search yields the complete list easily, and it would be more useful to the reader of Meatball's pages to choose only the most salient examples (positive and cautionary) of the context in which a particular LinkWord? was used.
Nathaniel, [Fridemar's Original Idea applied to Wikis in Principia Cybernetica's Meta System Transition as comment in the year 2000] is perhaps easier to understand for non-mathematicians.
In response to the question, "who is the audience", my answer would be "those with whom we wish to collaborate". I think we should address this question first, as the other question, "how do we determine what the audience demands" should be easier once the first has been answered.
In this context, we are an important part of the audience. TeaTime is an attempt to answer the first complaint about scaling that I would raise, that "it isn't possible to scale without destroying the character of the community we have already established". I've convinced myself that this complaint is without merit, but others may be more skeptical.
Helmut, I disagree with your conclusion in CommunitiesThatScale/Talk that only 50K people worldwide have a need for Meatball's product. Meatball was originally about online community, but it's far from clear to me that this the only realm in which our findings about community are applicable. In particular, it seems possible that Meatball's findings about community are also applicable to traditional brick-and-mortar communities, and possibly also to for-profit communities (i.e., corporations)
For example, I've read that America's mega-churches thrive by providing the much-needed UniversalProduct of community to their church-goers.
Destroy is a poorly used word. Necessarily if a community grows from 10 people to 100000 it will be different possibly radically so. That requires destruction but only in order to create something else. All creation requires destruction.
Sunir, what I meant about "destroying character" is that it's possible to avoid the growth issues present in all of the ScaledCommunities? I know about. The patterns I would hope to avoid:
In summary, my conclusion was that SoftSecurity can scale effectively.