Decentralised control

It seems that stigmergy is a powerful way to coordinate activity over both time and space in a variety of different systems. It requires no planning, no leadership, no direct communication between participants. It is self organising. This sets it apart from the conventional organisational methods usually associated with human cooperative activity. Let's see how this maps across to a system of organisation for an e-business environment.

The main features of a stigmergic system are:

Individuals do not rely upon instructions.

Each individual gathers information itself and decides for itself what it should do.

Information is gathered from a shared environment.

There is no centralised decision making.

Individuals need only a few elementary rules

In an ant colony, the ants will lay down a trail of pheromones. They will have receptors to recognise the pheromones of other ants. There will be a decision function that activates appropriate ant behaviour when it encounters pheromone trails. The components used by the ants are genetic; the genes being supplied to each worker by the queen ant.

Translating this to the system of clone agents and people space as described in the previous chapter:

The queen ant would be represented by a business that would create a questionnaire based upon the needs of people who would benefit by being able to be put in contact with each other. The questions would equate with the genes that a queen ant passes on to the worker ants, which enable them to create pheromones. The pattern of pheromones laid down by the ants would equate with the digitised answers that a client would produce when completing the questionnaire. These records would be deposited in a people space in a way analogous to an ant laying a pheromone trail.

Ants can sense the pheromones laid down by other ants and this would equate with individual bots detecting the records deposited in the people space by other individuals. The ants will be equipped – through genes provided by the queen ant – a computing mechanism to interpret the pheromones of other ants. This would equate with the cafe software – provided by the business – that would allow an individual to identify suitably interesting contacts from the many records that would be deposited in the people space.

When translating this into human activity, the most difficult concept to grasp is that such a system is not organised or controlled from a central source. Every individual acts independently. The information provided does not come directly from the business but from the environment of records created by the individuals making use of the service. This is far outside of the concepts covered by conventional business strategies. It can only happen in the unique environment of the Internet.

You do not have to look hard to see this process of stigmergy already taking place on the Internet. News groups and discussion forums manifest in this same way, where people find places of interest where they discover messages that are useful to them. The messages prompt other people to respond, by adding their own messages. People will move from one group to another, choosing to participate only in those where the messages are of specific interest them.

There has been no centralised, organising body to create the tens of thousands of news groups and discussion forums that have spontaneously birthed on the Internet. Organisations do not provide content. People do not collude with each other as to what messages will be sent. The whole system has evolved organically and is driven by people acting independently.

It is this strange phenomenon of stigmergy that is now becoming of increasing interest to e-businesses. It can be employed to create self organising databases that cost little to build and maintain, yet, provide a service and efficiency that far outstrips anything that can be created through rational design and control.

Two prime examples of stigmergic systems, growing and evolving without central control or organisation, are The Open Source Movement and Napster. Both of these phenomena appeared almost spontaneously; growing to such power and influence, they out compete the industry giants.

Even with its vast organisation and huge financial resources, Microsoft is no match against the cumulative efforts of tens of thousands of independent programmers in the battle for supremacy in the server market. Building upon each other's efforts, the unorganised, independent programmers have created a free and highly flexible system known as "Linux" which has consistently held Microsoft at bay in providing the server of choice for ISPs and maintaining UNIX as the preferred operating system.

Similarly with Napster, a simple system devised by students, evolved into a people space that created a distributed database spread over hundreds of thousands of private computers. The combined efforts of the whole of the music industry had to resort to legal action to stop the free distribution of its copyright protected, musical assets. Even so, the system adapted and evolved into new forms that had no central control for the legal injunctions to aim at.

This demonstrates the enormous potential of stigmergic systems. However, these systems have one vital omission that puts them a step behind the stigmergic systems of the insects: the ability to automatically update, to rid themselves of duplication, redundancy and out of date information. This essential feature is provided in the insect world by evaporation.