After this, he gave a much longer, more detailed talk about social software and small group theory, "A Group is its Own Worst Enemy": <a href="http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html</a><p>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."<p>If this sort of thing interests you, you might also like social interaction designer Xianhang Zhang's compelling anecdotes: <a href="http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...</a><p>And my own essay on the Austin design community, with hypotheses about how communities work at the end: <a href="http://distance.cc/issues/01/01c-Vitorio-Miliano.html" rel="nofollow">http://distance.cc/issues/01/01c-Vitorio-Miliano.html</a><p>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: <a href="http://distance.cc/issues/01/vitorio-colophon.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://distance.cc/issues/01/vitorio-colophon.pdf</a><p>( 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: <a href="http://distance.cc/" rel="nofollow">http://distance.cc/</a> )<p>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. <a href="http://successfulonlinecommunities.com/" rel="nofollow">http://successfulonlinecommunities.com/</a>