Years ago I read a beautiful book, written by Steven Johnson, titled “Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software”
I found it very insightful, with some ideas of what are now common modern day concepts (such as crowdsourcing or collective intelligence) being explained in a clear and documented way. The main concept was the following, taken from Wikipedia:
Emergence refers to the ability of low-level components of a system or community to self-organize into a higher-level system of sophistication and awareness. Johnson notes that this self-reorganizing stems from the bottom up rather than directed by an external control factor. Johnson gives examples of feedback, self-organization and adaptive learning.
Sometimes, when thinking of how Italy is managing the overall Open Government process, I’m convinced that we are a good example of a chaotic emergence system (yes, I know, I’m optimistic). There are some good signals, but only a few.
Continua a leggere