I have training in population modeling... so a troubling thought occurred to me. I think it deserves some more rigorous discussion than the "Too Small" debate usually gets.
The problem:
The risks of being too small.
My aims for this discussion:
- - Discover if we are in the danger zone
- Decide what we can do to exit/stay away from the danger zone.
To explain, a crash course in population science!
Every population has two features (among others):
- a minimum viable population size (mvp). Below this you enter a death spiral and crash to extinction.
- random fluctuations in size. e.g. + or - 100 individuals every year.
For small populations this results in a huge danger:
The risk of unpredictable spontaneous extinction.
You feel safe. Then you die.
A graph to illustrate:
This is a population which is too close to it's minimum size (50). Although it seems to be doing fine, it is at risk. A run of bad luck can make it go below mvp. Death spiral. Extinction.
Spoiler
=IF(B2>50,B2 + RANDBETWEEN(-10,10),0)
That is, the initial population (B2) gets randomly changed up or down by 10 with each time step. If it goes below 50 the population crashes to zero.
Playing with this gives you a very good feel for the effects of randomness... sometimes the population grows, sometimes it instantly crashes, but in all cases the risk remains - unless it escapes the danger zone.
On a related point:
Collaborative projects like ours work by self-organization. As I learnt making my Self-organizing Systems mods, these mechanisms work better with larger numbers (we are a bit like the Eusocial Bot in Ecobots). It's a minimum size thing: too small and the self-organization become dysfunctional... breaks down... potentially goes extinct.
The difficult part:
- mvp is unknown (we might be able to make a good guess of it though)
- Randomness is also unknown. In fact we can never know what the biggest run of bad (or good) luck could be. People forget that surprises are surprising!
The moral of the story:
Step the hell away from that cliff edge!
The smaller we are the bigger the risk.
Questions
1) Have we got the data? How many active participants do we have? What are the trends, the fluctuations etc?
2) Is our self-organization working at our current scale? Would it work better with more people?
3) What might out minimum viable size be?
4) How close to the minimum are we? Are we in the danger zone?
5) What are some potential disasters we face? Would we survive them?
6) What are we going to do to avoid the dangers of being too small?
Let's figure this out!