In discussing ways to cultivate new No Shames, several remarks keep surfacing--the audience "owning" the show and a venue that is "self-regulating."

This brings to mind the notion of "emergence."  Emergence involves  systems in which a lower order of participants in the system operate by simple rules and function together in a bottom-up way to create a        coherent functioning of the higher order group which is more complex and adaptive than the lower order participants.  ("Higher" and "lower" are of course with reference to differing scales, not value judgments.)

The signal example is an anthill.  Contrary to popular belief, the Queen doesn't command an anthill.  No one commands anyone in the anthill.  Each ant automatically follows a very rudimentary set of rules about what to do when faced with a specific set of stimuli, each one thinking not about the overall organization of the anthill but only about the       micro-motives of her own responses to these stimuli in her own very   immediate surroundings, and the result is an anthill that distributes tasks and resources, builds a nest, procures food, and manages procreation all with an amazing elegance.  The anthill is in a very real way a functioning organism of its own, made up of ants but really existing on an order of scale removed from the individual ants. 

Put another way, the Iowa City No Shame displays many of the structural
principles of an emergent system, which perhaps has allowed it to     function like a self-regulating organism.   It might be helpful for new  organizers to consider those structural principles as they try to incubate its spores in a different climate.  As articulated by writer Steven Johnson, those principles are:

1. More is Different.
The nature of an emergent system requires a critical mass of participants for the group to generate any kind of cohesive statistical variation. (Five tosses of a coin are utterly random, with results too wildly variable for any systematic process.  Five million tosses follow laws of statistical  distribution so well that casinos can on that scale predict with razor sharp accuracy the win-loss ratio of a game of chance.)  We don't know how many No Shame participants are necessary for global behavior to        develop, but clearly this is critical in a way that goes beyond the old "bums in seats" imperative.  Also, this can be promoted by blurring or