Stephen wrote: If you haven't checked out Peters site [http://www.stigmergicsystems.com], you should. He describes in detail his theories around stigmergic systems and their applications for the web. Most of it is pretty high-brow and somewhat hard to read, but it is certainly interesting.
Tim: I spent some time reading through this yesterday...rather fascinating. I do see one problem with one of his unstated assumptions, however - that humans will serve community before they serve themselves. I don't think that's necessarily true. His example of a bookmark pool built by unrelated people assumes that the people involved will perceive that the pool is valuable to them and worth contributing high-quality information. IOW, I don't think you'll get quality bookmarks submitted unless the submittors (sp?) are motivated to do so - and if they're motivated, I'm thinking they're just as likely to start their own little pool instead of contributing to the general pool, and then charge admission for their higher quality bookmarks. For example, I point to the several web development resource sites that only 2-3 years ago used to be free and open to the public. As they were building content, the content was classified and the not-so-good stuff tossed out...now they have fairly good articles and archives but they also now charge to access their content. This has happened to several sites I used to frequent. I'll use myself as another example - while I consider myself to be a reasonably decent programmer, I still buy books. The value of someone else's collected wisdom is worth more than the few dollars I spend on it (and it usually generates some time savings as well). Some people are self-employed because they perceive the benefits to themselves to outweigh the benefits of working for someone else. Some people work for others for the opposite reason. In either case, the intellectual property generated is their meal ticket - their edge in the market, if you will. Few people work for free because it's nice to go to bed at night with a full belly. Even in the case of open-source software, developers really aren't contributing for free - there is name recognition and peer group support as benefits (among other probable returns). I think open-source could only be truly organic in Peter's sense if it was all done anonymously (i.e. we wouldn't know about Linus Torvald). Oddly enough eastern cultures like China, which are usually predispositioned to value the collective over the individual, are jumping on the western economic bandwagon. Ever look at McDonald's Happy Meal toys? They're all made in China - well-made, I might add - and those toys don't benefit the manufacturing individuals in any other way other than monetarily. The people aren't working for free, even though they value contributing to the bigger picture more than western mindsets do. Don't get me wrong. On the whole, I think people that are generally happy and well-fed will be occasionally selfless and contribute to community goals (i.e. advance the quality of the organism). Strangely enough, I also see "survival of the fittest" - i.e. self-preservation at the individual level - as being one of the strongest opponents to "survival of the organism" - i.e. the group. It wasn't so long ago we had enough nuclear arsenals to blow ourselves up many times over...the "fittest" would have survived, but most likely the "fittest" would have been agrarian rural peasants far away from the blast zones. :-) It doesn't do Tarzan any good to survive the jungle if he has no mate. To bring it all home, I continue reading and contributing to this list because I value the collective wisdom and knowledge of the other participants. If you all weren't as smart and nice, I'd probably go away. LOL Cool stuff. If you're still reading this, I'm surprised. :-) Tim ____ • The WDVL Discussion List from WDVL.COM • ____ To Join wdvltalk, Send An Email To: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Send Your Posts To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To set a personal password send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the words: "set WDVLTALK pw=yourpassword" in the body of the email. To change subscription settings to the wdvltalk digest version: http://wdvl.internet.com/WDVL/Forum/#sub ________________ http://www.wdvl.com _______________________ You are currently subscribed to wdvltalk as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe via postal mail, please contact us at: Jupitermedia Corp. Attn: Discussion List Management 475 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10016 Please include the email address which you have been contacted with.
