Individual users take on roles that only make sense in groups: leader, follower, peacemaker, process nazi, and so on. There are also behaviors that can only occur in groups, from consensus building to social climbing.

Actually, I've found that process nazis and social climbers can be surprisingly vigorous in these pursuits, regardless of the presence or absence of a group.

Of course, when it comes to mailing list software, a few clever, well-placed lines of code can be made to work miracles. Unfortunately, we still have a lot of face-to-face meetings.

If only we had a Real World equivalent of Perl.

Shirky: Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software