If one ant goes out to get some food for the colony, how does he know there is a need? Did he just count all food available, all the ants in the colony, did some math and then figured it was time to go get some more food?
There is no need for that. Extremely simplified; if the ant doesn’t see an ant carrying food for a long time, he figures he might as well start carrying some. The ant takes local actions based on it’s local situation. A set of simple rules applied by many ‘individuals’ on a local scale, can make for complex behaviour on a global scale. This process is called emergence.
Stay with me here, I’ll get to the charity part in a second..
For emergence to come about you only need to have a few conditions:
more- The group needs to be larger then a critical size. (Two ants can’t run a colony)
- Individual elements need to be able to receive and accept positive and negative feedback (Are other ants carrying food or not?).
- Positive feedback leading to more activity (getting food)
and negative feedback leading to less activity (not getting food).
These are the basic rules for emergence. In the book Emergence, Steven Johnson explains how emergence works in detail. If want to know more about the theory, you need to go and get the book or at least check this online interview at oreillynet.com. Here is a small piece of the interview, where Johnson explains emergence in his own words.
“Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts. It’s what happens when you have a system of relatively simple-minded component parts — often there are thousands or millions of them — and they interact in relatively simple ways. And yet somehow out of all this interaction some higher level structure or intelligence appears, usually without any master planner calling the shots. These kinds of systems tend to evolve from the ground up.
The book spends a lot of time with the ants as a great example of this. Colonies having this miraculous ability to pull off complex engineering feats or resource management feats without an actual leadership dictating what any ants should be doing at any time. They just follow a lot of local rules, and through those rules the intelligence of the colony comes into being.”
So how can we use this knowledge in making a better charity website?
What we like to see emerging is high level of quality. This means lots of individuals acting on the quality of local situations, creating an overall global quality assessment.
If users are being influenced by what they experience as a positive or negative signal, they should be able to send out the corresponding feedback.
This means letting go of central power. It’s not in our nature to let go of control and expect things to improve ‘by themselves’. Thankfully we have this great example of Wikipedia, so we already know the theory can be brought to practice. Who’s in charge of the Wikipedia quality? The community is, and all users of the site can be a part of the community.
As always it’s important to keep focus, so let’s get back to our main goal; facilitating people to change the world for the better. To make this happen I’ve defined a more specific goal; It should be possible for anyone to easily find a charity that corresponds to their intentions and that they are willing to trust. Therefor people can be most effective in realising their own goals of changing the world for the better.
This means that every charity in the world should be available online and that a system must be set in place to make it easy for people to judge if they can trust these charities. This means quality assessments for every charity in the world. This can only be done by the rules of emergence. So those are the rules I’ll use in designing the charity website.
