Kevin Kelly on the meaning of Wikipedia, from Edge.org The bottom-up hive mind will always take us much further that seems possible. It keeps surprising us. In this regard, the Wikipedia truly is exhibit A, impure as it is, because it is something that is impossible in theory, and only possible in practice. It proves the dumb thing is smarter than we think. At that same time, the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end goal. We are too impatient. So we add design and top down control to get where we want to go. That is …
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Here are a number of bits and pieces that have been waiting around for ages to get posted: Donella Meadows on being a global citizen and dancing with systems. From Bill Harris at Making Sense with Facilitated Systems. Getting Started with Action Learning, also from Bill. Dave Pollard on indigenous capacities for learning and discovery: The word indigenous* means ‘born into and part of’, and by inference ‘inseparably connected to’. We are all, I think, indigenous at birth, born into the Earth-organism and connected in a profound and primal way to all life on the planet, even if we are …
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Sun and clouds above the Strait of Georgia I was listening to this podcast this morning, a conversation between Krista Tippet and John Polkinghorne regarding the marriage of quantum physics and religion (which incidently is a subject Ken Wilber has also taken on recently in a podcast). It is an excellent conversation and I found myself grooving along with the theme of the universe as both predictable to some extent and unpredictable at the same time. Polkinhorne makes the analogy with clocks and clouds, saying that the sun rises and sets and we can predict when that will happen using …
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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, …
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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 …