Number of users in a group

Well there is a feature that could help to manage larger group decisions and it is the possibility to rank comments and those ranked highly could be on top of the rest, just like this software http://www.question2answer.org/sites.php that could help to manage larger groups. Also the autojoin (no registering process needed) will help to broaden the groups.

IMHO. The tool should handle this. Providing a good exhibition.

In a discussion with limit of participant can limit all the discussion, because the fast guys will participate instead other with better ideas.

My English is sux, I know that :)

Interesting that at the moment group engagement is very good in the largest groups we have. I agree that we should be working on features that make larger groups more effective though

In the next couple of days I was going to run a model on optimum group size and other factors which correlate with engagement. I'll report back to this discussion on my findings.
But to restate Vivien's point, the largest groups have the best engagement. I think this is because there's a critical mass of activity to 'pull 'people in, but I agree that this can be overwhelming.

I wonder how the number of subgroups a group has affects engagement?

I'm not sure (maybe @simontegg can verify) but I suspect Loomio users activity follows a power law distribution, where a small percentage of users represent most of the activity.

It's interesting to keep in mind that there are different types of "engagement" - some more obvious than others. For example, the user who rarely comments, but often reads the discussions and chimes in at key moments with important ideas. Or the user who never comments but notices when things are getting heated and speaks to people personally behind the scenes (on or offline) and brokers compromises. Or someone who doesn't enter most discussions, but is very active on the subject matter where they are an expert. It's not only the "loudest" people that make valuable contributions.

In order to have a diversity of personality types and perspectives, sometimes it's better to have a large group, even if only a small percentage are very active in an obvious way.

I think it is our role to make conversations with a lot of people possible. At a time when thousands of people can Occupy a place and make decisions together, I think Loomio should enable even more people to do so.

The challenge is to develop the software so that the discussions is still possible with that many people (when it usually fails in large real-life public gatherings)

When you have a big group with just a few very active people, you've got BUROCRACY. Just very active people can follow the arguments. Big groups need liquid democracy.

@yagoabati I wonder if you can explain what is the problem you've seen on Loomio that makes you think limits are necessary? And/or what are the qualities you think liquid democracy (i.e. vote delegation) would contribute to the platform?