The Shapes of Participation

A few months ago, I went down a research rabbit hole on shapes in the natural world. The kind of rabbit hole that starts with a passing curiosity and turns into something I could not stop thinking about, because the question it raised seemed to apply to everything I work on.

The question I could not stop turning over in my mind was this: Why does the natural world reuse so few structural forms?

A river system, a tree, and the bronchial network inside your lungs share a branching pattern that was never designed in common. Spirals show up in galaxies, in nautilus shells, in the way water drains from a basin. Hexagons appear in honeycomb, in basalt columns, in the compound eyes of insects, and in the lattice of certain crystals. Lattices, helices, fractals, vortices. The same handful of forms keep appearing across scales and substrates that have no obvious relationship to each other.

Biologists have a name for this. They call it morphology, from the Greek word for shape. Morphology is the discipline of structural form, separate from function. Two organisms with completely different functions can share a morphology. Two organisms with identical functions can have completely different morphologies. The form is its own variable, with its own logic and its own consequences.

The reason the natural world reuses so few forms is roughly this: Forms are constrained by underlying rules. The way fluids minimize resistance produces branching. The way materials distribute load produces hexagons. The way certain growth processes unfold produces spirals. Nature doesn’t have infinite stable configurations to choose from. There are only a few that satisfy the constraints. Once a form has been found that works, it gets used everywhere those same constraints apply.

It’s a simple truth explaining how the physical world is built.

The Same Question, Asked of Participation

Morphology. The study of form. Once I had the word, I could not stop applying it.

Then I applied it to my own body of work.

Participation is what I study. I have spent the last several years building a way of thinking about how human beings show up for things together, and an atlas of cases that documents how participation actually shows up in the world. The atlas has now grown to a few thousand cases, drawn from civic life, brand campaigns, cultural movements, religious practice, software communities, governance experiments, sports, education, organizing, and art. Almost every domain where humans participate in something larger than themselves.

So I dived into the Atlas cases with morphology in mind.

I did not know the answer when I started. But I had been noticing for a while that cases in the Atlas, which looked unrelated on the surface, seemed to behave in similar ways structurally. A beer campaign and a democratic governance platform. A fan community and an open-source software project. A religious pilgrimage and a viral hashtag. The activities had nothing in common. The behavior of the participation around them had quite a lot in common. I had been writing it off as a coincidence. Once I started thinking morphologically, it stopped looking like a coincidence.

So I went looking for the shapes.

The Primary Forms Emerge

What follows are my findings so far. I want to be careful about how I describe this, because the work is genuinely in progress and the patterns are still being tested. But I find it interesting enough to share what I am seeing revealed.

Eight recurring shapes have emerged from the data with enough consistency that I have started treating them as primary forms. They are not categories I imposed. They are structures observed and named after the fact, when the same configurations had already shown up enough times to demand naming. The original identification happened across the human-classified cases in the atlas. Since then, we have added shape as a classification criterion for the most recent 2,500 cases loaded, and it will be a criterion for every case going forward.

I do not know yet whether the eight will hold. I suspect some will sharpen. Some may merge. New ones may emerge as the atlas keeps expanding into corners of human participation it has not yet reached. What I know for sure is that participation has shapes, the shapes have rules, and the rules tell you something about the participation that no other measurement can.

Here are the eight as they currently stand.

The Eight Shapes

Hub. A central node radiates outward. The organizing entity controls the flow. Invitations go out from the center, responses come back to the center, and the center decides what gets seen. Old Spice’s response day was a Hub. Apple keynotes are Hubs. Reddit AMAs are Hubs. Most branded social media participation is a Hub. The brand or the celebrity is the sun, and everyone else orbits. Hubs can generate enormous short-term energy. They are also entirely dependent on the center continuing to invest. Remove the center, and the structure collapses, because there is no structure without it.

Swarm. Decentralized agents follow simple rules and produce emergent global behavior. No one is in charge. The rules are the architecture. The Ice Bucket Challenge was a Swarm. Wordle sharing was a Swarm. The Arab Spring, at its most generative, was a Swarm. The mechanics in each case were simple enough that millions of people could execute them independently without coordination. Swarms can achieve massive scale with almost no central investment. They are also almost impossible to sustain, because the simplicity that makes them spreadable makes them structurally thin. There is nothing left to belong to once the moment passes.

Loop. The output of participation becomes the next input. The system feeds itself. Dell IdeaStorm ran as a Loop: customer ideas fed product development, which fed new ideas, which fed more customer investment. LEGO Ideas runs as a Loop too, with customer designs becoming real products that drive more customers to submit. Loyalty programs at their best are Loops. Any system where contributing makes the thing better, and the thing being better attracts more contributing, has Loop architecture. Loops can be extraordinarily durable. They can also calcify. The same voices come to dominate, the feedback becomes self-referential, and the system starts optimizing for its own continuation rather than genuine openness.

Mesh. Every node is simultaneously a producer and a consumer. There is no distinction between the people who make the thing and the people who use it. Wikipedia is a Mesh. Linux is a Mesh. A functional DAO is a Mesh. The Mesh is the most democratic of the structures and the hardest to build, because it requires every participant to shift from consumer identity to contributor identity. Most attempts at Mesh participation quietly collapse back into Hub or Loop dynamics, either because the people at the center cannot actually let go, or because most participants prefer consuming to contributing.

Cluster. Dense local participation with loose connections between active groups. Fan communities are Clusters. Local civic groups are Clusters. A neighborhood mutual aid network is a Cluster. The internal density creates genuine belonging. People know each other, share history, and develop norms. The loose inter-cluster connections prevent insularity and let the broader movement grow. Clusters are among the most humanly satisfying participation structures, because the scale is right for actual relationship-building. They are also vulnerable to fragmentation. The loose connections can fray, and isolated pockets can quietly lose momentum.

Branch. Hierarchical cascading from a central stem. Participation is structured and sequential. You earn your way from one level to the next, and each level carries different rights and responsibilities. Franchise models are Branches. Martial arts belt systems are Branches. Most membership organizations with tiered structures are Branches. Branch participation is legible. People always know where they stand and what comes next. The risk is rigidity. The hierarchy that makes a Branch legible can also make it slow and hostile to the lateral energy that produces genuine innovation.

Constellation. Independent nodes organized by shared identity with no center. The diaspora is a Constellation. Distributed protest movements are Constellations. The global network of people who identify as surfers, or practitioners of a martial art, or adherents of a philosophy, with no central organizing entity holding them together. Distance does not weaken the bond in a Constellation the way it does in other shapes. A jiu jitsu practitioner in Chicago feels a line of connection to another practitioner in Cape Town or Kyoto, two people who may never meet but who recognize each other through what they share. A Cluster needs proximity. A Constellation does not. What holds a Constellation together is identity rather than architecture. People participate because of who they understand themselves to be. Constellations are extraordinarily resilient and almost impossible to direct. There is no center to defund, no structure to shut down. You cannot tell a Constellation where to go. You can at most create conditions that make certain directions more resonant.

Ritual. The most temporal of the eight shapes. The other seven have spatial form you can see at any moment. Ritual has a form that only exists across time. A community dog walk at 5 pm, a 7 am Sunday mass, and the annual Thanksgiving table where the same people sit in the same chairs across decades. Each individual occurrence traces a circle, a closed path that starts and ends in the same place. What turns repetition into a Ritual is what builds up across many circles stacked through time. Year ten of any practice is not year one. The participants have changed, and so has everything around them. The same form of participation returns, but the position has shifted along an axis that the participants couldn’t access when they started. That cumulative structure is a spiral. Hajj makes this literal: the Tawaf around the Kaaba traces a spiraling path, repeated seven times by every pilgrim. The shape of one instance is a circle. The shape of the practice is a spiral. The value is not what gets produced. It is what gets renewed: identity, belonging, continuity. Rituals score highest on identity because the activity becomes part of how people describe themselves. They are also the most resistant to optimization. The moment you try to make a Ritual more efficient, you have subverted what it is for.

Hybrid by Default

Most interesting participation is hybridized. The Swarm that becomes a Cluster over time. The Loop that develops Ritual properties as it matures. Other combinations show up constantly across the atlas, and the most useful classification names the dominant structure and the direction of drift, rather than forcing the case into a single box.

This is true of forms in nature, too. Trees are not pure branches. They are branches with a hexagonal cellular structure inside the bark and helical growth in the pith. The pure forms are useful as analytical primitives. The actual organisms are always combinations.

Moving Forward

What I am working out, in real time and with the help of an atlas that keeps expanding, is something close to this: Participation behaves more like the natural world than the dashboard culture of modern marketing has been able to display. It has structure. It has form. The forms have rules, and the rules determine behaviors.

The brands and institutions that build participation systems without understanding the morphology might be missing an opportunity.

The morphology itself is asymmetric in ways that may turn out to matter. Seven of the eight shapes are spatial structures you can diagram at a single moment. Ritual is the exception: a form that exists only across time. That asymmetry is honest about what the data shows, and it may turn out to be the most interesting thing about the taxonomy. The eight shapes may not all be the same kind of thing.

The next question I am following up on is one that the morphology has not yet answered. The shapes explain a lot about how participation behaves. They do not fully explain why some examples of the same shape persist for decades, and others collapse in a season. A Hub can be brittle or surprisingly enduring. A Cluster can fragment quickly or hold together for generations. The shape sets the conditions for what is possible. Something else determines whether the participation keeps turning.

I have a working hypothesis. The shape that turns participation into something self-sustaining is itself a shape, and the engineering of that shape is the spine of Wired to Participate, which releases in October.

For now, what I can say with reasonable confidence is that participation has shapes, the shapes are real, and that a new layer for participatory design might be in the process of revealing itself.