Thanks, Chris Brogan for dropping by to comment on “Not Free Agents. Guild Members!”
This is great! It’s exciting to see the conversation carry on. I’m interested in the number six part of the discussion. I can’t disagree, but am wondering why that number works.
I happened to read Chris’ original post and one over on BlogHer on the same day. They seemed to fit together to me. Nancy White quotes Marnie Webb in a post called “Size DOES Matter: The Magic Number is Six“:
We don’t make communities for 1M, 100K, 10K or even 1K. The communities we make are for 6 people. Make that—share it, write it, meet with it—and let each of those spawn more communities of 6. Keep it small enough to really care about and relate to.
That’s one of the things that Mena Trott said the acquisition of LiveJournal taught her. The average number of people in a community is six. And that is a comfortable number. And one we can imagine.
Nancy continued:
As humans, we can relate to smaller groups of people, stories of a size that we can internalize. As we seek to create change in our families, towns, non profits, states, countries, the world, think about who the first six you want to reach.
Rural and Small Town folks often lament that we have STP, the Same Ten People or even Same Two or Three, doing everything. That is not necessarily a disadvantage. Another thought drummed into us is, if you can’t do something big, it doesn’t count. That’s wrong, too.
The secret is that there is more magic in the smaller group. Six is a magic number; you plus five makes a very effective group. So be proud of your Small Town’s small activist group. Gather up no more than five friends and change the world! That’s what we are doing here.
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I find that the internet, especially the blogosphere helps open rural areas up to more outside influence. Though “where” still matters, it’s interesting that we can overlay ideas and friends and outside influences with our small town realities, and open things up to new possibilities.
This is such a timely idea, especially the basic pretext of your blog. I believe small businesses that are looking for force multipliers, or ways to improve beyond the scope of what traditionally was possible, MUST involve “virtual Chamber of Commerce” members, or guild members, as per our other discussion, outside the locale. It’s a must.
This has been a great discussion.
Becky, I wandered and found your link and enjoyed how you have intepreted this idea in the context of rural communities. I found myself vigorously nodding at my computer screen. The other interesting idea is when these small communities network, with their power of small, dense relationship connections, to the wider network. Lots of magic there!