Thanks for that. Things I always try to keep in mind (that are covered in the article) are:

1 – lurkers can learn

2 – lurkers are potential active participants

3 – if the management system tracks log-ins and other activities the lurkers may be enticed to participate.

Ka kite ano

I’m in an online networking community with over 25,000 members called Ask Liz Ryan. The traffic is usually 25-30 messages a day, which is quite manageable. If even 1% of that group posted every day though, the amount of information would be overwhelming. This is a group where most people lurk; they read the information, and perhaps they contact a few individuals privately, but they don’t post publicly. I lurk much of the time; I might go weeks without replying to anything if the discussions aren’t of interest to me or aren’t anything where I can add to the discussion.

With 25,000 people in the main group, plus a few dozen local groups, one woman (Liz Ryan) is able to manage and moderate everything that is posted. If asked, I doubt most of us would say that we could manage an online group of thousands, but it works here specifically because of the high number of lurkers. This is a drastically different upper limit than what we’d aim for in a learning community or an online course.

The “soft upper limit” depends on the particulars of each individual group. We can generalize, but I don’t think we can set a flat maximum number for the number of people in a group.

Your findings about community size and manageability interest me. I like your use of ‘soft upper limit’ to describe the uncertainty associated with putting an exact number on it.

Some years ago I had a little experience with managing online learning groups in year 10 Science. There were a few other teachers who managed similar sized groups at earlier levels in primary education. Our findings were much in agreement, give or take the usual variations expected between groups in different disciplines.

In the main, with a lively group (that may have taken several weeks to nurture and grow) the manageable-with-comfort size limit was between 10 and 15 active students. Obviously there were variations. Some groups became almost unmanageable before they reached that range in size. Others could be handled quite comfortably at around 20.

Of course, with a larger, manageable group, the tendency is for the teacher to apply strategies to encourage participation by those who tended to take a back seat. The paradox with this technique is that the activity of the group starts tending towards the unmanageable zone and eventually has to be divided into smaller groups.

Much like what you said, group dynamics plays a big part in the maximum comfortable size, not just numbers.

Ka kite
from Middle-earth

@Suz, “Manage” could be pretty broad. To me, it seems like “manage” is “how many connections can you handle before you lose your mind.” A really large network, like some people have on Twitter, can be managed by people who ignore or filter out a lot of what comes in. You don’t invest nearly as much in each tweet as you do a forum post in Ning or a blog comment, so you can let it pass by you more easily. What you describe for Ning groups sounds like Britt’s summary of Shirky’s ideas: small groups with shared interests within a larger network. Suz, I think you and I both see that larger network as a “group” that is manageable in its own way.

@Bonnie, you’re always welcome to comment here, and I’m very glad you found your way to my blog! It’s easy to just stay within that “small world” where’s we’re comfortable, but these challenges can help us get out of our mental ruts. I think, especially within the education community, many people blog for their own lifelong learning. We learn more when we push ourselves a little further. I agree with Suz that in something like Ning, larger is better, partly because it makes it easier for us to go outside of our normal contacts.