I am very interested to watch the expanding growth of OxfordFreecycle group. Right now it appears the be becoming the definitive group for freecycling around the globe. It recently broke the 20,000 member barrier and also recently broke the 5,000 posts per month barrier.

How long can growth continue. If experience is anything to go by then at some point dissatisfaction with saturation of posts will begin to hurt members and a greater percentage will become lurkers. This is what happened to London Freecycle group, which was perceived by its membership to be oversized and so related borough groups were created in a devolution process. Now it is difficult to join the London group – you have to know it exists. And therefore as an inevitable conclusion its membership and number of posts reduces over time. Just take a look at the group statistics of the number of posts on its home page.

But London’s Freecycle group never reached the dizzying heights that Oxford’s is achieving. Is this because Oxfordshire already had a strategy for devolution in place? That is it already had a Witney group, a group for Bicester and so forth. Thus people who like a big group can enjoy the benefits of that and if they don’t like it they can join a small group. In Oxfordshire many belong to both and even the contentious cross-posts are the norm on a daily basis by the “professional” poster.

What is interesting me most is how London freecyclers created a campaign voicing their opinions that the group was too large. Not so in Oxford.

My prediction is that Oxford will continue to grow. Perhaps it will break the 30,000 member barrier and perhaps it will go above the 6,000 posts per month. At the moment the brakes are off. Global interest in climate change issues will surely drive those numbers spiraling up.

Can other groups rise to this challenge, should they wish to? Other groups may be stagnating. Perhaps there are lessons to be learned from the Oxford model.