Group items tagged

In his article [1], Mark Elliot, says that small groups depend on negotiation and social mediation, but that such energy-intensive endeavours would be counterproductive for large-scale collaboration projects such as Wikipedia and Open Source projects.

Mark Elliot further insists that such stigmergic collaboration is distinct from co-authorship:

"From the perspective of individual sites of work within a stigmergic collaboration (effectively Web pages in the context of a wiki), the activity may appear to be identical to that of co-authoring—with the exception that the process is augmented by a few key elements. The most prominent of these elements is the aforementioned lack of discourse required to initiate and partake in collaboration. The use of stigmergic communication to sidestep social negotiation effectively fast-tracks the creative gestation period, removes social boundaries and as a consequence lowers the ‘costs’ of contribution by eliminating the need to become acquainted with and maintain relationships with fellow contributors.

Key thesis: "A new system of governance or collaboration that does not follow a competitive hierarchical model will need to employ stigmergy in most of its action based systems. I

"Stigmergy is a mechanism of indirect coordination between agents or actions. The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a next action, by the same or a different agent. In that way, subsequent actions tend to reinforce and build on each other, leading to the spontaneous emergence of coherent, apparently systematic activity. Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. It produces complex, seemingly intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even direct communication between the agents. – Wikipedia

Stigmergy is neither competitive nor traditionally collaborative.

With stigmergy, an initial idea is freely given, and the project is driven by the idea, not by a personality or group of personalities. No individual needs permission (competitive) or consensus (cooperative) to propose an idea or initiate a project. There is no need to discuss or vote on the idea, if an idea is exciting or necessary it will attract interest. The interest attracted will be from people actively involved in the system and willing to put effort into carrying the project further, not empty votes from people with little interest or involvement. Since the project is supported or rejected based on contributed effort, not empty votes, input from people with more commitment to the idea will have greater weight. Stigmergy also puts individuals in control over their own work, they do not need group permission to tell them what system to work on or what part to contribute.

The person with the initial idea may or may not carry the task further. Evangelizing the idea is voluntary, by a group that is excited by the idea; they may or may not be the ones to carry it out. It is unnecessary to seek start up funding and supporters; if an idea is good it will receive the support required.

Stigmergy provides little scope for agent provocateurs as only the needs of the system are considered. Anyone working against the system’s functionality is much easier to see and prevent than someone blocking progress with endless discussion and creation of personality conflicts. Because the system is owned by all, there is also no one leader to target."

In ants, choices about how to nest or feed also seem democratic, though a few experts influence the process. Some ants just know more than others.

One aspect of the honeybee royal lifestyle Tarpy studies is mating behavior. He is fascinated by promiscuity, at least in honeybees. Honeybee queens mate multiple times and store sperm in a special internal appendage. They can then allocate the sperm to produce their offspring. Tarpy has shown that more promiscuous queens produce colonies that are more genetically diverse and are less at risk of disease.

Tarpy also studies how queens are elected. A queen is not a president (the president is not in charge of literally birthing the next generation, for example), yet honeybees do choose their leader.