Tag Archive for group dynamics

Ethnographic & User Data, Newsletter

Generational Wealth in the Animal Kingdom

by Olga Werby • February 12, 2026

What other species of animals accumulate wealth over several generations? The other day, my husband and I were watching birds and squirrels dig around in our garden. “They are just trying to make a living,” my husband said. And it got me thinking — squirrels and birds have to find food and shelter everyday to survive. If they don’t find food, they go hungry. If they don’t find shelter, they suffer the elements and predators. Humans used to live the same day-to-day existence in our distant past. But now, we work hard to pass on the fruits of our labor to the next generation. But are there other animals that do the same? The largest known colony of ants is Linepithema humile, the Argentine ant. It has a contiguous colony from Northern Italy to South of France to the coast of the Atlantic in Spain — about 3,700 miles. It’s been around in Europe for about eighty years and is believed to have started in South America some 100 years ago. If there’s power in numbers and years, these 2 millimeter ants have it is spades. [https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/largest-colony-of-ants] The largest colony of termites, another social insect, is over four thousand years…

Us and Them

by Olga Werby • September 1, 2017

Of Doctors, Babies, Kings, and Zombies Before starting my journey as science fiction writer, I got a few degrees under my belt — astrophysics, mathematics, cognitive science, education, etc. It took a few decades (I’ve gotten married and had a family in there somewhere), but I got my doctorate and have used and still use it to help people think through complicated problems, mostly in product design. How is this relevant to writing, you might ask? Well, in addition to witnessing and surviving some amazing situations — always a good experience for a writer — I’ve acquired a few tools on how to think about situations and people. I would like to share one such tool with you: Us versus Them, a cognitive perspective. What people (and other animals) are very good at is dividing themselves into Us’es and Them’s. It’s a useful tool when we live in a divided world — how else do we keep clear of our allegiances to countries, sports teams, and political parties? But these divisions have neurological and psychological underpinnings. Consider a four square graph that charts competency versus likability (emotional warmth and approachability): We perceive (our) doctors as warm, personable, and able. We…

LinkedIn Groups

by Olga Werby • July 19, 2015

I’ve started a discussion (or I hoped I did) the other day — it was about LinkedIn algorithms for auto moderating. These algorithms don’t work well. As an example, I invoked a group discussion I’ve started in a group where I am a moderator that was moved to “jobs” because LinkedIn didn’t understand the content. The article I shared was on the psychology of criminal sentencing research. It had nothing to do with jobs. Then when I looked around, I found other articles that people shared that ended up under “promotions” and “jobs” tabs. Different groups have different purposes. Some groups are about sharing information — I welcome people sharing articles about relevant topics. Such groups become magazines, news papers for narrow subject areas and self-selected audiences. That is very useful. Sometimes, there are discussion around these articles, sometimes not. That’s okay — that’s the kind of group it might be. When groups start, they are a potentiality — something wonderful might happen…or might not. It takes at least 500 group members to start the group moving and propagating. (I did a bit of research on this a few years ago.) Before that number, it is a lot of work…

Matters of Trust

by Olga Werby • April 15, 2014

In the last few months I’ve started several new relationships. One was with BlueShiled of California — a relationship that was forced on me by the changing health insurance laws. The other came about from trying to find a place to stay in United Kingdom for our family vacation. I didn’t actively want these relationships, but here I am. And I am not very happy. The basic problem comes from the flow of trust. I’ve never heard of anyone else talk about the directionally of trust, but it is a very important concept to understand for any customer service oriented company. I will illustrate the idea using my new relationships. BlueShield Customer Service Failure! Let me start by saying that I wasn’t overly fond of my previous insurance company. In fact, that relationship was very much like this new one with BlueShield — antagonistic. My story begins in October of 2013, when I created a spreadsheet of all my family doctors versus possible new health insurance companies. I wanted to make sure that which ever insurance I picked, my family doctors would take it. I spent the afternoon making phones calls and ended up with BlueShield of California as my…

Building and Sustaining Online Communities

by Olga Werby • January 23, 2014

Pope Francis said an interesting and insightful commentary on online social media: “The Internet, in particular, offers immense possibilities for encounter and solidarity… The speed with which information is communicated exceeds our capacity for reflection and judgement, and this does not make for more balanced and proper forms of self-expression. … The variety of opinions being aired can be seen as helpful, but it also enables people to barricade themselves behind sources of information which only confirm their own wishes and ideas, or political and economic interests.” In other words, communities have the power to limit the range of views to only those that they seems culturally appropriate — a small subset of active users can completely change the group dynamics of a community. The responsibility of the managers to find their way to create and sustain healthy communities. I’ve been building and supporting communities for a while. It happened organically — I needed to help a client start a project and build a following around it; then another client needed something similar; after a dozen years (or more), I’ve found myself creating guidelines for communities and the people who help manage them. Below is some of my “wisdoms” from…

User Roles and Governance

by Olga Werby • June 12, 2013

2013-06-09 Role vs Governance Diagram for NIH Citizen Engagement Think Tank

One of the areas of discussion at the NIH Citizen Science Engagement Think Tank meeting last month was how to categorize the roles (and thus rules of engagement) for citizen scientists. There was a continuous pressure to call individuals who “donate” their medical data to scientific research patients. Let me start by saying that I find that unacceptable — aside from the fact that every human being on Earth has been or will be a patient at some point in their lives; the label patient implies a lower level on the hierarchy than doctor or scientist. The whole point of citizen science initiative is to break down the barriers to entry — we are ALL scientists! Being a scientist is not measured by the number of years in school or diplomas on the wall. It is the willingness to do science that is key. Thus we can all be scientists. With that said, what follows is the discussion on group dynamics — how do people work in groups and how we can support productive scientific endeavors through good design and social engineering. Think Different Collective Groups of people are not made up of homogeneous people — we are all idiosyncratically…

Social Media Prayer Wheels

by Olga Werby • September 11, 2012

I run several groups on LinkedIn, some for my clients, some to support the work I do, and one for my students. After several years of managing these communities and observing others that I belong to, I have some insights. First, it takes effort! A lot of effort. A group is a community that tries to generate a sense of membership by creating topics of conversations, sharing of information and news, and supporting each others professional efforts. A real community requires participation. It requires a nucleus of idea about which people can come together. It needs some passion as well as intellectual involvement. And members need to feel like they belong and have a say in the movement and evolution of their groups. In short, LinkedIn groups are no different from other communities, it’s just that they mainly focus on professional topics. That said, there are a lot of differences from one community to the next, and one LinkedIn group to the next. Some communities form to support a real world activity like a conference. One of my groups, ICT & Human Rights, was formed for such a purpose. The original core of the group were people who were attending…

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