On ‘scaling up’ and being the right size

I regularly encounter questions along the lines of “how do we scale things up?, in particular around projects related to free knowledge, FLOSS or citizen science. It has basically started from the first citizen science effort and accompanied me through most of my volunteering work. And it’s a question that has always sat wrong with me. Mainly because of its uncritical assumption that scale should be wanted, necessary or even ‘good’. To look at this, I want to take a step back: My academic background started off in evolutionary biology, and despite not having actively done research in the field for a while, it regularly shines through: If we’ve ever met, I might have waxed about the Spandrels paper by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. Or about J.B.S. Haldane’s essay On Being the Right Size, which I’ve previously mentioned when talking about how there is no one-size-fits-all editor for OpenStreetMap. And it’s this essay that’s relevant here. In On Being the Right Size, Haldane…