Common conditions

r/place gives communities a common task environment in which to study different ways of organizing. In the fruit-fly analogy, these are the shared conditions under which comparisons can accumulate.

What communities shared

The 2017 event lasted 72 hours on a 1,000 by 1,000 pixel canvas. Each user could change one pixel's colour every five minutes. Any user could overwrite a pixel placed by someone else. A design therefore depended on many people placing pixels and responding to changes.

The same public canvas made neighbours, agreements and competing designs part of the task. The data guide identifies the placement record, written records and artwork atlas used to reconstruct it.

What still differed

Communities entered with different histories, numbers of participants, aims and links to other groups. Some coordinated elsewhere. The common rules do not make this a controlled experiment or remove these differences. They give us a setting in which to ask what different arrangements explain.

How the instrument uses comparison

Each community is coded from its own record before the aggregator composes across cases. The population model is then returned to saved community agents, which check its fit and report departures. A shared explanation must account for those departures or state its limits.

Follow the instrument, then inspect the organizational forms and their accounts. The full contracts retain the rules behind the comparisons.

Next: follow the whole event.