It’s no surprise to me that people are usually afraid of self-organizing behaviour. This video of typical traffic on a street in India shows why self-organization can be scary. But the other thing to also notice is how well it works. In the comments on the video, someone remarks that 230 people a day die on Indian roads. But in a population of 1 billion people, this has to be close to or lower than the rate in Canada. And considering what this video shows – the near misses and cars driving the worng way and pedestrians weave through traffic, …
At WorldChanging you will find a link to an amazing site of visualizations of complex networks. What is especially interesting to me about these maps is how many of them are actually hierarchical. Many of these maps show complex relationships, but they do so in a flattened way. For example, this diagram (at right) is a radial representation of an organizational map from 1924. On the face of it it looks radically different, but in fact it is a relatively well formed hierarchy with single reporting relationships and only a cursory acknowledgment of horizontal organizational structure in management. Non-hierarchical, emergent …
I’m reposting this list holus bolus from Peter Levine’s blog. It’s an excellent summary of what we can expect from volunteer networks, and very top of mind for me at the moment: 1) Volunteers will plan and run meetings and conferences, even doing hard, detailed work on invitation lists, agendas, and menus. But they will not reliably write up the results of meetings for public distribution. After a meeting, writing feels like a chore, and there’s usually no specific deadline. Therefore, many meetings leave no tangible public record.2) Volunteers will write grant proposals, because proposals are plans that determine the …
Submitted for your consideration, as they used to say on The Twilight Zone… I am a newcomer to the notion of “morphogenetic fields” – basically fields that contain information whereby social or biological structures take shape (see more at Wikipedia)- but whether they exist or not I’m keenly aware of something like that happening in working with groups. Yesterday I was working with a small group and we saw something happen that surprised me. The field within which we are working is philanthropy and we are designing a program that will help Aboriginal non-profits develop capacity. This work is supported …
Before I took off to the Evolutionary Salon last week I blogged about Sarvodaya. Today I have been scouring recent postings at the Sarvodaya blog and I find this, from Deepak Chopra’s comments to a Sarvodaya Peace dialogue: Today we are shifting from the industrial age to the information age. Today wealth and power come from Information Technology. And Information Technology has become very powerful today. In a few years it will become even more powerful. It will be possible for anyone to have this kind of computer in their pocket and interfere with air traffic. It will be possible …