There is a group of people that meet at a conference every year. For the past couple of years, it has been facilitated a certain set of people. This year, the conference organizers have selected someone else to facilitate the group. I know some of the people in the group. They are smart people who like to think about group processes, and recently they got into an interesting question about who owns the group.

Is the group owned by the organization that sponsors the conference? By the group facilitators? By the members of the group? What does a change in group facilitation do to the group? I thought it might be interesting and expand it a little bit.

First off, we are all members of many groups. Some are very informally organized. Others are very formally organized. There are the group of people who are reading this blog post. This group has subgroups, people who come to the site, and people who read it through some sort of feed reader. Each of these groups can be broken down into further subgroups such as what browser or what feed reader is being used, or how you found the site in the first place. These grouping are very informal. People in the group may not know one another or communicate with one another. As such, these groupings are less interesting to me, at least for this blog post.

On the other hand, on a site like MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog, people can identify themselves as readers of this blog. On MyBlogLog, I can send messages to everyone who has identified themselves as a reader of my blog. Others can see who is in the community and read their blogs. Does MyBlogLog own that group? Do I? Do the members of the group?

In a similar sort of way, there are various people that gather to watch movies together because of some shared interest. The same questions apply about whether the organizers or members own the group. Yet in this case there is another possible owner of the group, the producers of the films being viewed. I like thinking about this because it perhaps brings us closer to one of the reasons why this is an important question. Ownership and leadership of groups affects the way communications take place and perhaps more importantly, the collective thoughts that emerge out of the group.

This might seem like a lot of theoretical words right now, but it can have some pretty immediate application. As an example, I was a member of a mailing list back in 2003, of people supporting Howard Dean for President. This group also met face to face from time to time. Who owned that group? The Dean campaign? They stayed away from any aspects of ownership, particularly for campaign finance reasons. There was the person who had set up the mailing list, who from Yahoo!’s perspective owned the group. There was a woman who was very active with the face to face meetings who tried to assert some sort of ownership of the group, and then there was the group itself.

During the power struggle between a couple of the people asserting ownership, I was drawn in. There were discussions about whether or not the group owned itself, and if so, how did it handle leadership and the administrative functions of the mailing list. In the end it split into two different groups which faded away after the campaign was over.

Within political blogging today, there are many mailing lists where bloggers congregate to plan their strategies. Who owns these groups? Who owns the progressive political bloggers or ‘the netroots’? Who owns the group of people that participate in DailyKos or are going to YearlyKos?

How do these ideas affect people stepping into the blogging? I know people who have resisted posting content online because they aren’t ‘bloggers’. They aren’t part of some group. They don’t feel qualified to join the group, or they don’t want to associate with some group.

By thinking about the nature of groups, perhaps we can learn more about what is going on around us in our blogs and mailing lists.