Will size be the demise of your community?

I have my academic hat back on and am doing research for the social media class I will teach this next semester. One of the areas I have been spending a lot of time on is the actual design of a community and how it should look in relationship to specific goals and objectives for an organization or initiative. Unfortunately there aren't any templates for this, just as there are no templates for traditional, physical communities. In my opinion, specified goals and objectives set the stage for the determination of what a community should look like.

One of the greatest values of social media is the collaborative nature and the ability to aggregate a collective knowledge in one place. In my Utopian academic world every social media initiative would include an effort to harness the power/knowledge of their members. If two heads are better than one, surly 18,634 are better than two - or at least you would think - I know I did.

Size matters, up to a point
Metcalfe's Law (named after Robert Metcalfe, PhD.) states a network's value grows as the square of the number of users. Whether or not you have heard of this law, it just makes sense. To be fair, there is a saturation point at which the size of your community actually becomes detrimental to your efforts. Some would also point to Dunbar's Law (named after Anthropoligits Robin Dunbar, PhD) which limits the number of relationships a person can have to 150. The bottom line, if your community gets too large it will self destruct.

If the goal is to grow the size of your community will the true sign of success be the demise of your community?
So how do you protect your community. The answer, as far as I can tell, isn't to limit the size. After all, who are you to say who gets in and who doesn't? It seems Reed's Law (named after David Reed, PhD.) may just be your saving grace. Read more...