About this website

This UK website is a reworked version of the stigmergicsystems.com site that was set up in 2001 to provide a record of the thinking behind the development of several projects which explored the use of stigmergy and other biological strategies for the purpose of sharing and organising information on the Internet.

The theory and ideas that have resulted in the current "Crowd-sourced Info Towns" project are detailed and explored within the multiple pages of that earlier website (ideas developed over a period of nearly thirty years) .

This UK website version extracts the most relevant pages from that website and adds notes to explain how they relate to the development of the current 2018 project.

Development work on this current project, "Crowd-sourced Info Towns", began in 2015 and was launched in September 2018.

(Please make allowances for the design and any mis-functioning of parts of the site as its origin was first created many years ago).

Understanding Stigmergic Systems

Stigmergy is the name given to the inexplicit, mystical process by which ants and other social insects can create highly complex physical, social and communication structures without any apparent central planning or organisation.

Systems based upon stigmergy are known as stigmergic systems.

Look at the side panel first

Over the course of many different projects and seventeen years this site had become increasingly difficult to follow, so, the quickest and best way to understand stigmergy (and how it can be used) is to look at the details of our current project (see the side panel "Latest Project").

The side panel includes links to a concise explanation of stigmergy and stigmergic systems, together with links to many relevant books and other useful resources relating to information system architecture based upon biological systems.

The rest of the site should be viewed as a collection of various ideas, projects and conceptual frameworks that over the years have led to the understanding of not only stigmergy but a whole range of biological strategies and systems found in nature.