I noted earlier the paradox between a group of independent individuals and the social web: the social aspect of human interaction, sets influence between the group members as a standard. The structure of the network itself can assist in avoiding this paradox.
Decentralization and the collective intelligence
The notion of collective intelligence takes decentralization as a prerequisite. When the community consists of a diverse and independent set of people, who all work together on the same problem, then no central control is required. The community can evolve on its own, powered only by the initiatives of its contributors.
In parallel, self organization fosters specialization – specialization of interests, of attention, of labor. Each member of the group can concentrate on a specific subject, according to its interests and knowledge. Apart from the fact, that specialization increases efficiency and productivity it also encourages diversity of opinions. Dividing a subject in subcategories and appointing users to work on them, will cultivate concentration and increment of knowledge.
The strength of self organization
The strength of self organization is that it allows people to be close to the actual problem and coordinate their activities, while each one concentrates on a special topic. But remember: the purpose of the community is to aggregate information; to take the specialized, local knowledge and make them collectively and globally useful.
The emergence of self organization
Just like Google’s search engine collects local information of millions of websites to make the search quicker or like the linux operating system collects user submitted information and bugs for improvement, so a community needs an administrator to take over this responsibility.
In both Google’s and Linux’s cases – and actually in every emergent system – we are talking about a network, which has the ability to adapt to new data. In typical emergent systems, this happens with a higher-level intelligence, which is aggregating the local knowledge to adjust the global system to fresh information. It transforms the microbehavior of the agents to a macrobehavior. Perhaps, this view finds an application when we are dealing with software (Google’s search robots), but in social structures the term ‘higher intelligence’ sounds exaggerated.
In the social web, groups do not need someone who will make the final decision. Instead they require an administrator who will moderate the whole process, who will indirectly control the community.
Values and self-organization is an interesting entry about the subject. Also Alex Iskold wrote an article about the digg effect and its self-organized structure.
