StumbleUpon | MarkElliott's web site reviews and blog. Surf Tail. The home of stigmergic system. The Individual as Collective: stimulated by the performance one. The content of this post has been collaboratively developed with Elizabeth Presa. I ended a past post, Some General Off-the-Cuff Reflections on Stigmergy with the reflection: "as I paste all this jabber into my private wiki, I realized that stigmergy doesn’t have to be social, that is, the communication can be with oneself…" This got me thinking about the use of the process of stigmergy by and for the individual. I post to my own wiki (behind a firewall) for the purposes of archiving, but more so in order to further develop my ideas for the eventual compilation of my PhD dissertation. By doing work in my wiki which I can then reflect on in the future, I am able to stigmergically communicate with myself. I got to discussing this issue with my PhD supervisor, Elizabeth Presa, and we quickly realised that there are some fundamental connections between 'auto stigmergy' and the creative/artistic process.
These realisations prompted many more... This brings us to serendipity (thanks Julen!). Stigmergic collaboration. Below are some general thoughts inspired by Samuel Rose's response to my article, Stigmergic Collaboration. * Agents of a stigmergic system don't communicate directly, but rather via the stigmergic medium. The nature of this communication would thus not be one of turn-taking conversation, but rather, “I encounter something in the system that provokes x response from me”.
However turn-taking conversation would accompany such efforts: "hey Joe, check out my wiki... can you contribute x" etc, and of course discussion relating to contributions. (Have you ever watched ants when they meet each other on the trail? They almost always stop and touch antennas.) * The local is the domain of the individual agent, while the system wide level likely to be beyond the individual's comprehension (or ability to conceptualize at any given moment)
. * Filtering... hmm, seems like that is what stigmergy kind of does naturally. M/C Journal: "Stigmergic Collaboration: The Evolution of Gr. Introduction 1The steady rise of Wikipedia.org and the Open Source software movement has been one of the big surprises of the 21st century, threatening stalwarts such as Microsoft and Britannica, while simultaneously offering insights into the emergence of large-scale peer production and the growth of gift economies. 2Many questions arise when confronted with the streamlined efficacy and apparent lack of organisation and motivation of these new global enterprises, not least “how does this work?”
Stigmergic collaboration provides a hypothesis as to how the collaborative process could jump from being untenable with numbers above 25 people, towards becoming a new driver in global society with numbers well over 25,000. Stigmergic Collaboration 3Pierre-Paul Grasse first coined the term stigmergy in the 1950s in conjunction with his research on termites. Collaboration is dependent upon communication, and communication is a network phenomenon. 1. 2. 3. 4. Non-Textual Mass Collaboration Conclusion.