My intuition is: That line represents the point at which people start thinking “This bureaucratic structure is too cumbersome to get anything done with this many people; we therefore need strong leaders who can act through personal authority rather than merely bureaucratically-delegated authority.” I.e., the guild starts turning into a cult.
I wonder how often it would work better for guilds that grow too large to explicitly split apart. My intuition is that there should be a norm that growing guilds should split apart (and, where applicable, appoint representatives to a higher level org. to coordinate—initially a clique but later a guild if the number of base level guilds increases).
Splitting a guild in half may be difficult because some number of close 1:1 connections are going to be broken no matter where the line is drawn. Instead what may end up happening is that the guild undermines its own unifying principle and shatters into dozens of small cliques, and now there are 0 guilds.
The unfortunate reality (and what motivated me to write this post) is that sometimes an organization will find itself constrained by its past choices, with no viable way forward. A guild of 200 may wish it could’ve been two guilds of 100 instead, but the time to make that decision was when they were contemplating adding their 101st member, not now. (Similarly, a group of 60 may find itself in “embarrassed cult” territory and wish it could become a guild, but really they should’ve done that a long time ago.)
Maybe the ideal setup for a large community would be something like the “colleges within a university” system, where the university has a rule that each college may not grow beyond a certain size. So, as the existing colleges fill up, there will be a growing population of unaffiliated hangers-on who will eventually be able to form their own college.
(Again, I’m only speculating here since I have no personal experience with groups this large.)
I wonder how often it would work better for guilds that grow too large to explicitly split apart. My intuition is that there should be a norm that growing guilds should split apart (and, where applicable, appoint representatives to a higher level org. to coordinate—initially a clique but later a guild if the number of base level guilds increases).
Splitting a guild in half may be difficult because some number of close 1:1 connections are going to be broken no matter where the line is drawn. Instead what may end up happening is that the guild undermines its own unifying principle and shatters into dozens of small cliques, and now there are 0 guilds.
The unfortunate reality (and what motivated me to write this post) is that sometimes an organization will find itself constrained by its past choices, with no viable way forward. A guild of 200 may wish it could’ve been two guilds of 100 instead, but the time to make that decision was when they were contemplating adding their 101st member, not now. (Similarly, a group of 60 may find itself in “embarrassed cult” territory and wish it could become a guild, but really they should’ve done that a long time ago.)
Maybe the ideal setup for a large community would be something like the “colleges within a university” system, where the university has a rule that each college may not grow beyond a certain size. So, as the existing colleges fill up, there will be a growing population of unaffiliated hangers-on who will eventually be able to form their own college.
(Again, I’m only speculating here since I have no personal experience with groups this large.)