When I attended the Games for Change conference earlier this month, I heard about the 90-9-1 Principle, which was new to me. This idea, which Jakob Nielsen calls Participation Inequality has been around for several years. “Ant Wrangler” Jake McKee created the 90-9-1 website last fall (from which the above illustration is copied) to help develop understanding of the phenomenon.

The 90-9-1 Principle is about the behavior of (among many other things) smart mobs, and is a cousin of the 80/20 principle in the power law family. We are beginning to understand this interesting new area through the development of network theory.