Stigmergy

Stigmergy = environmental mechanisms to coordinate the work of independent actors

Stigmergic collaboration is essential to the success of large-scale online collaboration projects.

URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy

Definition

"Stigmergy is a term used in biology (from the work of french biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse) to describe environmental mechanisms for coordinating the work of independent actors (for example, ants use pheromones to create trails and people use weblog links to establish information paths, for others to follow). The term is derived from the greek words stigma ("sign") and ergon ("to act"). Stigmergy can be used as a mechanism to understand underlying patterns in swarming activity." (Global Guerilla weblog)

Background

By Mark Elliott at http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/03-elliott.php

"Pierre-Paul Grasse first coined the term stigmergy in the 1950s in conjunction with his research on termites. Grasse showed that a particular configuration of a termite’s environment (as in the case of building and maintaining a nest) triggered a response in a termite to modify its environment, with the resulting modification in turn stimulating the response of the original or a second worker to further transform its environment. Thus the regulation and coordination of the building and maintaining of a nest was dependent upon stimulation provided by the nest, as opposed to an inherent knowledge of nest building on the individual termite’s part. A highly complex nest simply self-organises due to the collective input of large numbers of individual termites performing extraordinarily simple actions in response to their local environment. Since Grasse’s research, stigmergy has been applied to the self-organisation of ants, artificial life, swarm intelligence and more recently, the Internet itself." (http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/03-elliott.php)

Stigmergy and the Web

"The World-Wide Web is the first stigmergic communication medium for humans.

The telephone and email don't count as stigmeric communication since they are only readable by the people on either end of the phone call, or the e-mail. In order for an environment to support stigmeric communciation the messages must be readable by everyone. Radio and TV don't count since they are a read-only medium as far as most people are concerned. In order for an environment to support sitgmery everyone has to be able to not only read it but to be able to write into it also.

Oh sure, we have had books and newspapers, but for the vast majority of people the only avenue they have to 'write-back' into that environment is in the 'letter-to-the-editors' department. Now we have groups.yahoo.com, K5, Slashdot, and weblogs. All avenues for anyone to enter into the conversation. Avenues for anyone to place a mub ball here or an ant corpse there. Yes, I know, not everyone has access to the internet, and it certainly isn't free for most folks, but the point is that it is the most accessible system yet and prices are falling and more people are getting on everyday.

Note that some other internet based communciation forms have moved onto the internet. Many mailing lists now have web accessible archives. Groups.yahoo.com takes it even further and allows posting from the web to the list as well. Another notable migration has been of usenet newsgroups onto the web via the much lauded groups.google.com. In both of these cases the mailing list and newsgroups were enhanced from being able to be searched and linked to from the web.

Now that we know web is a stigmeric communciation medium and that we've seen some of the power that nature has gotten out of stigmergy the answers to our earlier questions become rather easy.

Weblogs: Why does communicating through a weblog work? Stigmergy. Using a weblog is communcicating through stigmergy. Just like an ant, as I blog I leave a trail of information and links to other information I find interesting.

Google: Why is Google's PageRank algorithm so good? It is just following the Ant Trails. If links represent a dropping of pheremone then Google is just following the trails laid down to the tastiest morsels." (http://bitworking.org/news/Stigmergy)

Stigmergy and Massive Online Collaboration

In his article [1], Mark Elliot, says that small groups depends 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.

"Although social mediation is an inherent part of collaboration, when applied in traditional face-to-face collaboration social mediation can provide a barrier to the rapid and seamless integration of contributions that characterises projects such as Wikipedia.org and the Open Source software movement. It may be that there is simply so much complex information to be negotiated when people communicate directly that the negotiations of the many collapse under their own weight without the mediation of an administrative/stigmergic system.

This is not to say that social negotiation does not take place in stigmergic collaborative contexts—it may even be essential to developing the collaborative community—but rather that negotiation takes a back seat in terms of the creative drafting process. Most (if not all) stigmergic wiki collaborations have discussions associated with the content being developed, but it is possible to contribute (to Wikipedia.org, for instance) without discussing what you are contributing to or creating. Conversely, it is also possible to take part in discussion without editing an article." (http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/03-elliott.php)

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. This is not to say that developing and maintaining relationships with co-authors isn’t a valuable thing to do, or that it isn’t possible during a stigmergic collaboration, but rather that it isn’t a fundamental part of this collaborative process, whereas it is in traditional co-authorship." (http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/03-elliott.php)

More information

Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy

Stigmergic Systems, research portal at http://www.stigmergicsystems.com/

Stigmergic Collaboration: The Evolution of Group Work, by Mark Elliot, at http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/03-elliott.php

Mark Elliot has a blog [2], where he further elaborates and defines Stigmergic Collaboration, see http://stigmergiccollaboration.blogspot.com/2006/05/defining-stigmergy-part-1.html