Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Stigmergy for Self-Organizing Collaboration

Patrick Gibbs of Gaia University just pointed me to this explanation of the fascinating bio-psycho-social process called Stigmergy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy).
Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. It produces complex, apparently intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even communication between the agents. (Source: Wikipedia)


I especially like the part where it says Stigmergy "supports efficient collaboration between extremely simple agents, who lack any memory, intelligence or even awareness of each other." -- Sounds like me sometimes! Especially when personal distress patterns have occluded my free intelligence.

But I think this is an extremely important concept, in a way much of Social Networking and Agile Project Management function similarly. Wow, Swarm Intelligence & Open Source, too! From Wikipedia:

Stigmergy is not restricted to eusocial creatures, or even to physical systems. On the Internet there are many emergent phenomena that arise from users interacting only by modifying local parts of their shared virtual environment. Wikipedia is an example of this. The massive structure of information available in a wiki,[4] or an open source software project such as the Linux kernel[4] could be compared to a termite nest; one initial user leaves a seed of an idea (a mudball) which attracts other users who then build upon and modify this initial concept, eventually constructing an elaborate structure of connected thoughts.[5][6]

Friday, November 14, 2008

economics as collaboration

What if we defined economics as the study of how we coordinate and collaborate on a large scale to share resources to meet needs? 

With this  perspective we can see how things like open-source methodologies ( which are a way of doing mass collaborations ) may be laying down the framework for a new type of economic system.