The D coefficient

This is a suggestion for a "complex systems" on-line experiment, made today by JHB Deane at Surrey.

This suggestion applies ONLY to one-to-one communications, involving no lists or copies...

When you get email from your friends, or posts on Facebook etc., what proportion of them do you need to acknowledge with a reply in order to keep your friends from dumping you? Jonathan calls this the "D coefficient" and suggests that for himself, for email, it is about 0.3. That is, he finds people will keep him on their emailing list if he responds to about one in every 3 communications.

He suggests that this is empirical science, and that it needs a very large number of people to participate in taking the data in order to establish a "global D coefficient" and a range for this number.

For myself, I find that people are happier if I apply a higher D coefficient than 0.3, and that on Facebook, my D coefficient is nearer 0.1 (I dump "friends" if I get less than one response every 10 communications).