

Data Mining Reveals How Social Coding Succeeds and Fails - denzil_correa
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/530511/data-mining-reveals-how-social-coding-succeeds-and-fails/

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alialkhatib
This is really neat. It's a shame that they didn't take a look at this through
an anthropological lens (even in their conclusion), because "Dunbar's number"
[0] would have given some perspective on the limits of small groups, where a
community of 30-50 seems to be a well-established grouping size (and ~100-250
seems to be the limit for a "small" group).

For that matter, this seems relevant to the anthro theory that communities
fall into one of four types of organization (families/bands, tribes/clans,
chiefdoms, and states) [1]. In this context, it looks like the authors have
identified the emergence of these groupings of organization, especially
through their metric of "efficiency" and how bands and tribes differ.

0:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number)

1:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociopolitical_typology](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociopolitical_typology)

