Self-Organization

Self-organization is central to all Almende activities.

The world around us is made up of many complex processes and structures. Most of these structures arise without a central force guiding them or imposing external rules upon them.

Look at the way our ecosystem keeps itself in balance, flocks of birds fly without colliding, or molecules self-assemble. These are all examples of self-organizing systems. Each entity acts upon a local set of rules and information, yet together they form a very successful and adaptive collective.

Self-organization in Society
In human society, self-organization has proven to be very successful, too. In fact, for thousands of years, small communities were able to completely manage their own lives in a self-organized manner. With the foundation of larger cities, however, a new form of centralized management became necessary. Countries, cities and businesses resorted to hierarchies in which a small group of people determined how the majority should live and work.

With the rise of ICT, people are again able to organize their own communities and activities. Communication has become much quicker and people now have access to much more information and networks of people. Well-known examples of (online) self-organization are collaborative encyclopedias such as Wikipedia, the rallying power of Twitter, and even the emergence of the internet itself.

We believe that self-organization is a much better paradigm than the way our society is currently organized. Therefor, we support Stichting Zelforganisatie, which promotes the principles of self-organization in Dutch research and education, society and business.

Self-organization in ICT
Almende uses the principles of self-organization to find better ways for people to organize their personal and professional lives. We develop our software according to these ideas. This means that our solutions always follow certain basic design principles:

* scalability; networks naturally grow, ICT should accommodate for this
* distributed computing; no single point of failure, or central point that controls the entire system
* self-learning through feedback
* rapid communication between entities
* generic solutions that are evolving/adaptive