Tiberius, we once created some front-page lists that were intended to be stigmergic signals, that still exist if you scroll down on
http://nrp.sensorica.co/
Yes indeed, these are part of the stigmergic signaling.
We even presented them as stigmergic signals once in some venue that I don't remember anymore. I think "we" was you and I, but I can't remember that for sure, either.
Most probably.
Do those get used much?
I personally don't use them, which doesn't mean that they are not useful in general terms. The Mywork page also contains some.
In order for stigmergy to replace some of all the planning we need to do some more work and the design of such tools needs to be rooted in observations.
Stigmergy is the
use of the environment to leave traces that signal what has been done and what others can do next. Let's focus on
environment. Most of the collaborative work is done in a digital environment. That digital environment is made of different environments stitched together. It's like a building, with multiple rooms that have various functions (lobby, conference room, living room, dining room, kitchen, sleeping room, etc.). For stigmergy to work, these
signals must be created where the action is. So when it comes to development work (R&D) the action is in Google docs. Action will self organize based on signals that are created in this specific environment. If we put signals in the NRP when people work on docs, they don't get seen, so they have no impact. People don't perform work in the NRP environment, but currently they go there to log. While logging, they can see some signals about other things that they could do or use. So at this point in time it would make more sense to place them in the process page (
example), because this is what 99% of people see and probably the only thing they see, as almost no one wanders around the NRP environment.
Stigmergy must take place throughout the digital environment, in a coherent way, the signaling must match with the activity in a specific space.
Digging more on R&D, it happens in Google docs because that's an environment rich and flexible enough to contain this type of unscripted activity. I cannot see R&D happening on a structure of boxes, representing a planning done by someone. That would be over structured and very restrictive for the meandering nature of innovation. A Google doc is also mediarich, you can share text, photos, sketches and most importantly it is real time. It also has messaging integrated. It has recorded history (versioning). You can embed tables and graphs directly from Google Spreadsheets, actively linked to the source data. But one could use
Miro too. Wiki could be used, but it puts non-technical people away, not very user friendly.
Since these environments are rich and not too structured, some people can wander around. In doing so, they can trace new development paths that can be reinforced by other people who find their signaling and understand the value. That's not planning ahead, it's discovering and prioritizing as we go, it's stigmergy at work. A development path gets reinforced with activity not because someone said so in the beginning, but because some explorer discovered something new and other people understood the potential. That's also self-organization. But for that to happen, you need the flexibility so that some people wander around, you need an ability to make signals and stick them in the environment with some level of persistence, you need the ability to insert a new path into the main in order to draw more resources if it's worth anything, you need to be able to build / modify an activity map.
If planning is an activity map that one builds before the action starts, stigmergy-based development is a process that creates that activity map on the go.
It's never pure stignergy, as in reality it is never pure planning (plans always change in the process). So there's always a bit of planning in the beginning and there's always someone who picks us weak signals and projects into the future, and announces a new possible path before this path is reinforced organically by peers. That ability to predict can be an important advantage, as it can save a lot of resources for useless lateral exploration. That's not the same planner like we see in a traditional firm, who applies the same blueprint of development to any development project, based on some management theory, before the reality of the project has even expressed itself, i.r. before the project has become material. The planner in the stigmergic scenario is someone who amplifies weak signals, which means that he listens to the reality of the project and anticipates a move, almost like we drive a bike, we anticipate a fall and make some movements to maintain the equilibrium and stay on course. This planner has no blueprint to follow. He has a model of the dynamics of these types of situations though. The whole idea is to build tools for this guy and his peers.