A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

(This essay is a lightly edited version of a talk, "A Group Is Its Own
Worst Enemy", about persistent patterns in the design and operation of
large-scale and long-lived online groups. I gave this talk at the
O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference in April of 2003.)

This talk is in three parts.  The best explanation I have found for
the kinds of things that happen when groups of humans interact is
psychological research that predates the Internet, so the first part
is going to be about W.R. Bion's research, which I will talk about in
a moment, research that I believe explains how and why a group is its
own worst enemy.

The second part is: Why now?  What's going on now that makes this
worth thinking about?  I think we're seeing a revolution in social
software in the current environment that's really interesting.

And third, I want to identify some things, about half a dozen things,
in fact, that I think are core to any software that supports larger,
long-lived groups.