Social Software and the Politics of Groups (2003)

After this, he gave a much longer, more detailed talk about social software and small group theory, "A Group is its Own Worst Enemy": http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

The talk is an accurate and accessible adaptation of 50 years of sociological research by Bion and others in "small group research" and "group dynamics."

If this sort of thing interests you, you might also like social interaction designer Xianhang Zhang's compelling anecdotes: http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...

And my own essay on the Austin design community, with hypotheses about how communities work at the end: http://distance.cc/issues/01/01c-Vitorio-Miliano.html

There are about 150 footnotes in the essay, but I pulled out all the references into a separate PDF, and linked to all of the papers and talks that are available online or out-of-copyright, which would be a good starter kit for anyone looking to do social software correctly: http://distance.cc/issues/01/vitorio-colophon.pdf

( I follow up that essay with another one, talking about professionalism in design and the future of design practices, and Distance is on clearance now for $5 if you want to read it: http://distance.cc/ )

After I wrote my essay, a couple scholars produced a book called "Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design." I haven't read it cover-to-cover, but the parts I did read were very good, lots of well-researched advice for new social systems. http://successfulonlinecommunities.com/