Stigmergic self-organization and the improvisation of Ushahidi Here are some excerpts from Janet’s fascinating paper. In late 2007 in Kenya, US educated Kenyan journalist Ory Okolloh had become one of the main sources of information about the election and the violence that broke out soon after. Because of the government‟s ban on live reporting and censorship of the mainstream media, Okolloh solicited information about incidents of violence from ordinary people in the form of comments posted on her personal blog. The mainstream media was not reporting on the violence because of the government ban, and Okolloh was quickly overwhelmed by the numbers of emails and messages that she received. In order to focus on the “immediate need to get the information out”, in early January Okolloh posted a request on her blog for help to develop a website where people could post anonymously online or via mobile phone text messages, the most accessible type of communications technology in Kenya.
Just How Trustworthy Are Agricultural Statistics? Suppose you were curious to know more about farming in Phillips County, a flat, sparsely populated stretch of alluvial plain in eastern Arkansas, heavily planted in row crops and notable as the birthplace of Levon Helm of The Band. So you turn to the USDA Census of Agriculture – as you should any time you want to know anything about farming anywhere in the United States – and you pull up a great little overview on Phillips County’s profile. You see that that total sales from its 282 farms came in at just under $248 million in 2012. You see that Phillips County is the soybean capital of Arkansas, and ranks in the top 1 percent of all 2,162 soybean-producing counties in the U.S.
Stigmergy Kind people have stigmergically translated this article into German, French, and Spanish. This article is part of a series now incorporated into : ‘Binding Chaos’. 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.
Genetically modified crops: an open letter to Europe Europe is also an efficient way of supporting applied research in poorer countries. We are concerned that Europe will have serious problems in reaching its ambitions of Horizon 2020: to “tackle societal challenges” and “to ensure Europe produces world-class science, removes barriers to innovation and makes it easier for the public and private sectors to work together in delivering innovation” and see three outstanding issues for decision makers to address. First, to provide solutions to the societal challenges outlined in Horizon 2020 funding for fundamental and applied plant science should be maintained or, if possible, be increased.
The Stigmergic Revolution It was long believed that the queen played a central role in the complex social order of an ant colony, through the exercise of direct command and control over her subjects. Not so. Biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse coined the term “stigmergy” for the anthill’s social organization There is no central coordination, no hierarchy, no administrative mechanism. Each ant’s behavior is entirely spontaneous and self-directed, as it responds independently to the chemical trail markers left by other ants. Mark Elliot, whose doctoral dissertation is probably the best study on the subject to date, applied the term “stigmergy” to any form of human socialization in which coordination is achieved not by social negotiation or administration or consensus, but entirely by independent individual action against the background of a common social medium.
5 Tools to Help Social Intrapreneurs drive positive change within large organisations 5 Tools to Help Social Intrapreneurs drive positive change within large organisations We’ve saved the most experiential workshop of the Intrapreneurship Conference for last. Before closing the event, Maggie De Pree and Heidi Kikoler will help you start applying the rich learnings you’ve gained from the conference, and during your careers, to real world scenarios some intrapreneurs are facing today. They’ll share with the group the Cubicle Warrior’s Toolkit created by the League using input from countless global experts, and then in true collaborative workshop fashion turn it over to the audience to work through the scenarios and share how they would address them using their intrapreneurial skills and mindset Here is what Maggie has to share about the Cubicle Warriot’s Toolkit:
Biological system design From the CD-ROM "Concepts and strategies" by Peter Small Modular route to complexity The Dairy Barn, Redesigned Cornell's new barn makes cows (and humans) happy By Gregory Cerio on September 30, 2013 Photography by Mark Mahaney Nothing puts a sparkle in a young woman’s eyes like plowing up loads of liquid manure. Acta Astronautica - Stigmergy based behavioural coordination for satellite clusters Abstract Multi-platform swarm/cluster missions are an attractive prospect for improved science return as they provide a natural capability for temporal, spatial and signal separation with further engineering and economic advantages. As spacecraft numbers increase and/or the round-trip communications delay from Earth lengthens, the traditional “remote-control” approach begins to break down. It is therefore essential to push control into space; to make spacecraft more autonomous. An autonomous group of spacecraft requires coordination, but standard terrestrial paradigms such as negotiation, require high levels of inter-spacecraft communication, which is nontrivial in space.
Ashden Awards, sustainable and renewable energy in the UK and developing world Our vision is of a world where there is sustainable energy for all. But today 1.3 billion people lack access to modern forms of electricity. Some 3 billion – more than a third of the world’s population – cook on smoky inefficient stoves and fires, causing dangerous indoor air pollution which causes 4.3 million premature deaths every year. Stigmergic Cognition All things stigmergy Special Issue of Cognitive Systems Research Join the Linkedin Stigmergy group: biologist and computer scientist discover the 'anternet' A collaboration between a Stanford ant biologist and a computer scientist has revealed that the behavior of harvester ants as they forage for food mirrors the protocols that control traffic on the Internet. On the surface, ants and the Internet don't seem to have much in common. But two Stanford researchers have discovered that a species of harvester ants determine how many foragers to send out of the nest in much the same way that Internet protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for the transfer of data.
M/C Journal: "Stigmergic Collaboration: The Evolution of Group Work" 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.