From Mark Pesce’s Hyperpeople blog:Earlier this year, I was privileged to go “on tour” with Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, the founder and public face of Wikipedia, as we crisscrossed the nation, talking to educators in Adelaide, Perth, Sydney and Melbourne. Everywhere we went, people asked the same question: why is Wikipedia such a success, while my wiki languishes? What do you need to achieve critical mass? The answer, Jimmy said, is five people. Five individuals dedicated to an altruistic sharing of collective intelligence should be enough to produce a flowering similar to Wikipedia. Jimbo has learned, through experience, that the “minor” language versions of Wikipedia (languages with less than 10 million native speakers), need at least five steady contributors to become self-sustaining. In the many wikis Jimbo oversees through his commercial arm, Wikia, he’s noted the same phenomenon time and again. Five people mark the tipping point between a hobby and a nascent hyperintelligence.
I suspect this observation applies to a much wider array of networked activity than just wikis…
[From JOURNAL: The Rule of Five]
Yes, there is a whole world of numbers or more to the point, group sizes, that could be better known. One hundred fifty is another.
150 is the number of faces that we recognize and know well. Any school principal can tell you its possible to know more, but as I understood it, 150 is the average size of a primate troop and the bigger brains of primates are all about facial recognition, knowing who is a member of the extended family and who isn’t.
As the linked article also points out, this number also comes into play in hunter-gather settlements, military units, and manufacturing teams.