Clay Shirky thinks most online groups have a hard time making collective decisions:

These are really two related questions:
- Why is it hard to make decisions online?

What is it about online forums that makes it hard for the users to make decisions? This is a question based on largely anecdotal evidence, but in my experience, only programmers have achieved any real success in participating in groups that meet mainly or solely online and still manage to get anything done. (The Open Source movement is particularly good at accomplishing things in distributed groups.)

The question is interesting to me partly because the mechanisms of decision making, whether democratic, consensus-based or some other form, are technically trivial to implement in online environments, and would seem to be a possibly useful tool for settling contentious issues or helping groups commit to a course of action. Yet groups online rarely pursue voting, or indeed any other formal and binding means of making a decision.

Even the Boy Scouts have formal procedures in their meetings. What is it about the online environment that leads to unstructured gatherings? Is asynchrony such a powerful force that it weakens the need for making decisions? Are people in online spaces so much more conscious of their individual identities and so much less conscious of group will that they never compromise? Is 'membership' in online spaces so tenuous that individuals simply refuse to enter into any sort of social contract that involves a commitment to act?

Or, taken from a working example, what characteristics let programmers actually design and build software in online groups? Do programmers have a different (and more achievement-oriented) set of expectations about collaboration? Are programming problems more easily partitioned among individuals, or more amenable to "Try both options and see what works?" types of decisions? Does the compiler act as a neutral referee, thus short-circuiting the tendency for interminable argument?

My guess is that not all distributed open source groups make decisions in an efficient manner. Its just that the ones that do it well are such visible successes. For example, in Linux's case Linus Torvalds has the final say and he commands the respect of his peers as making the right decisions enough of the time to be worth following. Also, programmers in a project like the Linux kernel are very bright and can follow complex discussions and most can come to understand the reason for a decision. When there is a greater intellectual disparity between the members of a group it is more likely that some members will not understand - or more likely will even misunderstand - the reasoning cited for any given decision.

While technical debates can be very heated it is often the case that as long as a given module ends up working many team members can afford to be neutral about what ultimate architectural decisions get made about it. There are also implementers who enjoy implementng who do not care as much exactly what the design is. It is easier to make decisions when there are few architects and were most of the non-architects do not have aspirations to be architects. Think of a large building being built. Most of the welders are indifferent to the floor layout choices. They have their jobs and they are mostly concerned only about their immediate work environment and count on the architects to make wise decisions.

Then there is also the nature of the sorts of tasks that are having decisions made about them. Try bringing a group to a consensus about some political issue where individual differences in knowledge and values are likely to be much greater than is the case with programming questions. There are just too many factors to juggle and attempts to reach online consensus for political decisions are an exercise in futility. Part of the reason its hard to come to mutually agreeable decisions on a matter of politics is that often times what is required is trading. Engineering trade-offs are not in the same league in terms of what gets traded off in politics. A fair amount of political trading has to get done non-verbally so that the various actors will leave no written record of their motives. That way each can portray to their supporters contradictory reasons for some compromise.