David Weinberger makes a number of important counter points to Clay Shirky’s talk on groups.

Clay often does a clever bit of dialectic busting by simultanously enjoying the new, emerging, innovative, that disrupts the vested interests while at the same time demanding that people stay grounded in the lessons of the past and admit to the enivitable, necessary emergance of hubs, formal structures, centers of excelence, or dare we say vested interests.

Dave, on the otherhand recognizes the violence inherent in forcing things that are implicit to become explicit. That when you write the governing constitution for your group you reduce a picture worth a thousand words and compress it into a few dozen bare statements. A lot dies in the process.

Shortly after writing the rules, making explicit a tiny bit of what was once implicit, people show up who recognize that rules imply a game. People who enjoy the process of playing games and writing rules. People blind to all that is implicit.