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 ===== Community Types: Me, We, and It =====
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+//"I, we, and it. That's simple enough."//
+</box|– Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything>
 When enabling online communities, it is easy to become confused evaluating which tools and technologies to use when we should instead be considering social dynamics and structures. For the last five years or so, I’ve been using a taxonomy called //Me/We/It// to first sort out the primary social contexts in all communities, and only then looking at the tools and technologies and how they interact.
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 //We// based communities are generally small collections of people, where the members of the group are more important than the topic of their interaction. Each member knows and/or cares about all of the others and the loss of a specific member is seen as a significant loss to the group as a whole. These are truly social groups and, as such, the members moderate themselves and each other through purely non-technical social methods, such as scolding, ignoring, shunning, and personal confrontation. In fact, technical solutions (such as voting and banning) to problems in //We// communities are seen as heavy handed and are generally disliked.  //We// groups are most often created by a Motivator, such as the current trendy research type Chief Household Officer – who bootstraps the community and makes all the initial connections.
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+The //Me/We/It// community types were identified in 2003-2004 while I was Community Strategic Analyst at Yahoo! and are primarily the work of James Seivert, Scott Derringer, and myself.
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 The //We// group exists as a means to support people who want to belong to a group. That sense of belonging is what holds the group together. Examples include Family mailing lists, strong social networks (like Facebook), and local/congregational groups. There is probably a practical upper limit to the size of a strong //We// group, and that is probably about 150 ([[Dunbar’s number]]) - a theoretical approximate maximum of the number of people that you can know well enough to call a close friend. My experience supports an upper bound in this range as well, because at more than 100 people, messaging systems like Groups often become too chatty/spammy, causing the groups to split into smaller ones.