Group 4 --//OnlineEnvironment=Height+Decay

Team 4:

• Krishna Patel -- 200112494

• Todd Baylis -- 200111805

• Woojin Cho -- 200119471

• Ricky Cheung -- 200122241

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Mission

• Contextualize emergence and complexity in a self-organizing system and choose an online environment

• Propose a method to combat the emerging patterns (height and decay) of online communities

• From analysis of the life cycles of online communities, we will propose a level of order vs. disorder that is analogous to the "edge of chaos" (Taylor, M., 2001).

Project:

• Self-adaptive online community that emerges from clustering/coping

• An example would be a karma system in which ratings procure based on relevant interaction and content

• The individual social groups would be self-regulating but members of higher karma would have a higher admin status

• Success depends on the balance between order and chaos, implementing the chaos theory

• Leave structure deliberately open-ended to allow complexity to emerge and the system to adapt as a self-organized environment

• Fads lose their uniqueness and sustainability, but through emergence, and a bottom-up view, we will create a mock-up (interface) that will attempt to break this pattern.

References:

Taylor, M. (2001). The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. Retrieved September 19, 2006 from

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/791173.html

IAT 401 TA, Vicki Moulder, Comments 09/28/06

Maybe take a look at Will Wright & Clay Shirky's work?

• Will Wright, creator of the video games "Sim City," "The Sims," and the forthcoming "Spore," http://discuss.longnow.org/viewtopic.php?t=122

• Clay Shirky, Making Digital Durable What Time Does to Categories http://discuss.longnow.org/viewtopic.php?t=39

IAT 401 Niranjan Rajah, Comments 10/03/06

This is well conceived in that the calibration of a self organizing system must be made in terms of a balance of what is structured and what is open to chance. You have set the goals and methods up very clearly except for the fact that you do not develop the argument or model of how you would track the life cycle of the system – perhaps you need to articulate the intuition that such systems reach a maturation and then decay. You could contrast this with the idea that the system may be limited from the start to a clustering organization (like Howard Dean’s campaign as explained by Johnson).