Walter Bender lays out key principles for exponentially evolving creative
service networks, re OLPC: Rich Murray 2008.05.25
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rmforall/message/75 for full 144.5 KB text
The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group<friam at redfish.com>
www.SFComplex.org/wordpress
Dear fellow Friams,
In an unplanned way, today I find myself, owning a barely used OLPC XO-1 for
two months, fascinated by cogent, passionate posts about the involvement of
MicroSoft with OLPC, so decided to make them conveniently available to Santa
Fe Complex, as I feel inspired.
I especially like the remarkable historical summary on evolution of all
thought from printing in 1540 AD for the 600 years to now, in comment by
Ruben Safir, April 26, 2008 @ 1:05 pm .
In his interview with Wade Roush 4/24/08, Walter Bender lays out key
principles for exponentially evolving creative service networks -- I see as
the essential revolutionary paradigm now pioneered by Santa Fe Complex:
"WB: I had a student named Cameron Marlow, who was at Yahoo last I knew.
[He's now at Facebook. -- eds.] His thesis was about the "rule of many."
You have this Gaussian distribution of efficiency,
where after 150 people or so, an organization gets too big
and you peak in terms of the most efficient size.
What Cameron studied was what happens if you follow the tail out really far
[to larger and larger numbers]. Sometimes you get a lift again -- a new kind
of efficiency. That's the rule of many. He studied it in the context of the
blogosphere, but there are lots of examples -- Wikipedia is probably the
poster child.
But he didn't just observe the rule of many; he tried to understand what are
the mechanisms that determine whether the rule of many is going to be
applicable.
He didn't come up with a definitive list, but he did identify certain
criteria.
One is obviously that you have a large number of people.
Second is that these people share a common goal.
And a third is maintaining independence, so that each agent has the ability
to act independently.
I think in the case of Sugar and support for Sugar, I want to use this rule
of many approach.
And part of that is ensuring this freedom of agency on behalf of the
participants.
You don't want to try to control it.
You want to build the discussion around common goals, but not be
deterministic in terms of needs.
You have to let the independent agents determine their own needs.
Exactly how this will manifest itself, I don't know.
But I do know that part of it has to do with being open about communication,
and letting the community engage in the dialogue.
Transparency is also really important."
In mutual service, Rich Murray rmforall at comcast.net 505-501-2298
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