Stigmergy, community building, and social media

On Monday my colleague Naumi Haque sent me a link to an interesting article by Professor Francis Heylighen titled “Why is Open Access Development is so successful? Stigmergic organization and the economics of information“. It provides a great overview of open access / self-organizing systems in relation to traditional economic theory, but the part I found most interesting was in relation to the two different types of stigmergy.

I will now admit that I didn’t actually know what that word meant before reading the article. According to Wikipedia, “Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. It produces complex, apparently intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even communication between the agents. As such it supports efficient collaboration between extremely simple agents, who lack any memory, intelligence or even awareness of each other.” More simply, Heylighen says “a process is stigmergic if the work done by one agent provides a stimulus that entices other agents to continue the job.”

You can start seeing the link between stigmergy, community building, and social media from that description. But to highlight the difference between direct and indirect stigmergy, Heylighen used termite and ant examples.

Direct stigmergy: exemplified by termite hill-building, it is the “work-in-progress” itself that directs subsequent contributions.

Indirect stigmergy: exemplified by the way ants create trails of pheremones that direct other ants to food sources. The trails are left as “side effects” of the actual work being performed.

I thought about these differences, and how they might relate to companies in terms of community building and social media strategies. It occurred to me that building a community is primarily driven by direct stigmergy, while the use of social media is the indirect stigmergy that draws people to you.

The reason is simple. In the termite (direct) example, the little critters go around dropping bits of mud randomly, and where the heaps are formed stimulate other termites to add to them – causing them to grow and grow. By definition, the termite can’t add to the heap without being there. So while no centrally controlled plan is needed, the community must already be there. In an organizational context, the company /moderators start by dropping little heaps of information here and there, hopefully others do to, and where the heaps “pile up” emerge as the key focal point.

The challenge (from an organization context) is, obviously, that this approach doesn’t work if you don’t have a critical mass of termites. You can drop all the heaps you want, but if no one else is there, they’re not going to grow. This is where the indirect stigmergy / social media tie comes in. Using platforms like Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, etc., organizations (and early contributors) leave “trails” that direct people back to the (in the ant case) the “food source”.

So it’s obviously a little bit awkward trying to elegantly merge the termite and ant examples together – right now I’d end up with a bunch of ants piling in to eat the Termite hills. But if you squint a bit I think you’ll see what I’m saying. Organizations need to think about direct stigmergy principles in order to build up their own community from within, and indirect stigmergy principles in order to draw people to them. It’s a subtle, but important, distinction.

Tagged as: community, economics, Heylighen, open access, self-organization, social media, stigmergy