Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Critical Mass of a Community

The holy grail of the Agile Ventures community, and perhaps any community, is to achieve "Critical Mass".  That's the point at which the community becomes self-sustaining and activity proceeds without relying on any one particular individual to keep it going.  "Critical Mass" is a term from physics which describes the threshold weight of nuclear material required to create a nuclear explosion.



In nuclear material it's the movement of particles called "neutrons" that cause individual atoms (in particular the atomic nuclei) to split apart, or undergo what's called Nuclear Fission. What makes a nuclear explosion possible is that this process of fission releases additional neutrons, which can go on and cause other atoms to split apart.  If you have a large enough amount of the right material it's almost inevitable that each neutron generated will collide with another atom as it travels through the material, which generates more neutrons which collide with other atoms and so on.  This is called a chain reaction.  Have too little material and the neutrons will be leave the material without having hit other atoms, and the chain reaction dies out.

Let's explore the analogy with a community, in particular a pair programming community.  Each pairing session could be considered an atom.  Assuming the you have one pairing session take place (and it goes reasonably well), you'll end up with two people who are interested in pairing again.  They'll then be searching for other pairing sessions, but if there are none available, or none that they happen to be interested in (wrong programming language or platform) then it's likely these two will drift off and perhaps not try to pair in the same community again.  However if these two do find other pairing sessions, you can see how the single successful pairing event can lead to two more.  Assuming those sessions go well, you have four people now looking to pair and so on.

Under the right conditions you can get a chain reaction.  It requires a critical mass of people taking part in pairing sessions.  Ideally whenever anyone wants to find a pair, there is always someone there ready to go.  Of course all this depends on people being able to find and join pairing sessions and also for them to go well.

Too few people and there's just not that many opportunities for pairing; but lots of people is not enough.  Imagine that lots of people are trying to pair but that problems with the interface mean that people trying to join a pairing session end up in the wrong location.  No pair partner, no pairing.  Michael and I uncovered one problem with the AgileVentures interface last week.  Hangouts that had people in them were being reported as "not live" after 4 minutes.  This meant that on a fair number of occasions people attempting to join a hangout for pairing or for a meeting would find themselves on their own in a separate hangout.



We've just rolled out a fix for this and hopefully this will be another step towards achieving critical mass in the community.  It's unlikely to be the only step required as having a good pairing experience is more complex than nuclear fission.  We also want to adjust our user experience to maximise the chances of a good pairing experience for everyone.  It's not clear the best way to do that but clearly getting two people into the same hangout at the same time is an important pre-requisite.  Things that we're exploring include adding automated "pair rotation" timers to the hangout itself; having users rate their pairing experience; reflecting pairing activity through user profiles and so on.

We need to carefully monitor the changes and fixes we just made to see how the proportion of pairing event participation changes, and continue our Agile iterative process of making small changes and reflecting on their effect.  Making it more obvious which events are live might lead to more disruption in pairing events, or it might make observing ongoing pairing events easier, and that might make people more or less inclined to initiate their own pairing events.  It's not simple, but with careful measurement hopefully we can find that sequence of changes to the user experience that will lead to critical mass!

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