Meeting 2 Notes

Co-ordinator = Patrick Humphreys

PARTICIPANTS

• The Syntegration protocol forces people to interact by following certain rules so one may expect that at the end of the process some properties would emerge at the level of the group. This could be seen as an opposite strategy of a collective that spontaneously start to interact, engage in a network of recurrent interactions that, in turn, form relations that may produce the structure of an emergent system. 
• We can have different avenues to study these emergent forms. One is by studying particular instances and from them try to generalise, another is by starting with a more general theory that offer an understanding of these processes and we test it in several practical cases and the other avenue is a combination of the bottom-up and top-down approaches just mentioned.
• Nowadays we actually assume that any social process is based on two or three dimensions such that you get immediate access to information. That is a major aspect in evolution because nowadays we expect any social process to be much more informed when it is needed (e.g. in committee meeting).
• Going back to the syntegration we are doing now, it could be a good opportunity to learn how we could stabilise the relations that would emerge during the process. Notice that the pre-syntegration (to build the agenda) was mediated through ICT and the post-syntegration may be supported by ICT as well.
• There was a time in Amsterdam when we used to have the opportunity to express our political will (e.g., I want to have a metro or I do not want to have a metro). Nowadays this has changed, we have information from the municipality over the Internet about minutes of meetings, plans and so on. Information about plans that have been accepted but after you read them you realised that, in fact, you haven't accepted them. So ICT is making difficult form me to actually express my political will.
• If we go back to the example of hierarchies that we mentioned in the last meeting, we can see that some stable emergent forms of organisations have been the outcome of some sort of imposition from people that have access to certain resources. This is, of course, a form of violence through the control of resources, which trigger the question about the need to centralise resources. When and which resources, in a given situation, need to be centralised in order to remain in control and when and how they can be decentralised?
• I suspect that the more you look for a traditional form, the more you are stabilising some kind of central control.

CRITICS

• In terms of identifying emergent forms of organisations perhaps you could see some of the "dot com" companies that have emerged with the use of ICT like Amazon.com. Then you could try to understand the resources and values that are within them, this could be a nice research project.
• I think that identification is a theoretical problem and not a methodological one. The methodological problem is the indication, how do you know that a particular form has emerged? How can anyone isolate something without a theory? So can you please specify your theory?
• The other question is about the co-evolution of ICT and social processes. Why we expect ICT and social processes to co-evolve? Why don't we expect them to intermix? There are many social processes that are not informed by ICT so there cannot be co-evolution in those cases. Is co-evolution the right term? In summary, the hypothesis of this group is that forms emerge from the co-evolution of ICT and social processes and I think that is not true.
• You have also been talking about the emergence of stable forms of interaction but what about unstable forms that may also emerge?
• Another point is that I would say that any social interaction will produce a social form and of course we do not need ICT for this to happen.
• Regarding the identification of forms it seems also important to identify the environments where these forms can actually emerge.
• Can you make a distinction between the imposition of some social forms and the emergence of social forms?

PARTICIPANTS

• We still think that we can identify some social forms from basic concepts and definitions and afterwards we can identify some theories to explain them.
• History shows that there has been a driven force for richer forms of communication ICT is in this direction, as writing was, which made possible to communicate and transfer information more easily.
• Digitalisation has made society more complex; it is allowing to have now new forms of work. This and others are some instances of the co-evolution between social processes and technology.
• The question about empirical research appears to have a simple answer: the search for statements, which are unique. We have developed the technology to actually create forms of social processes such that the outcome is always a unique statement. Sometimes we do not realise that this is a particular type of communication system that it has developed its own linguistic structure and that is has developed its own technology and from it derives the control paradigm of hierarchical organisations.
• Nowadays it seems that we are looking for a different type of social processes, some which can produce and manage different meanings, that accepts ambiguity and uncertainty.
• We are looking for something that allows us to create collectives such that in the collectives jobs are being made. That means that there is a reservoir of extra variety such that there is no policing necessary except on the local basis. So the communication system is such that anything that threatens the existence of the collective is immediately forward it to other places within the system so that you can organise your defence.
• I think that we still need not only simply to identify what kind of processes of self-organisation are we looking for but we need something entirely different. We need to develop a social system that allows generating a viable social system at a major scale.
• I think that the point of handling ambiguity and uncertainty is crucial for our discussion. We are taking about the need to create a lot of ambiguity in packs, in forms that actually allows this ambiguity to maintain the co-ordination of our actions as human beings in the society, then we are moving towards the emergence of these new organisational forms.

CRITICS

• Perhaps you need to distinguish between generating new organisational forms (like Amazon.com) and the emergence of new organisational forms. These are two different processes.