Distributed systems provide a particular challenge to program. They often require us to have multiple copies of data, which need to keep synchronized. Yet we cannot rely on processing nodes working reliably, and network delays can easily lead to inconsistencies. Despite this, many organizations rely on a range of core distributed software handling data storage, messaging, system management, and compute capability. These systems face common problems which they solve with similar solutions. This article recognizes and develops these solutions as patterns, with which we can build up an understanding of how to better understand, communicate and teach distributed system design.
This Wednesday – Community of Practice – online event
Complexity, Community Development and Systems Change
Learn how experienced community development practitioner, Helen Rodd is using Wicked Lab’s complexity-informed framework and tool in her projects and evaluations.
In today’s post, I am continuing on my thoughts on stoicism through the lens of cybernetics. In Cybernetics, we call regulation the act (art) of responding to external disturbances in order to maintain selected internal variables in a range. For example, our body maintains the internal temperature in a specific range. We have internal regulations built in through evolution to ensure that this is done. In the language of cybernetics, regulation refers to the act of countering the external variety. In order to counter the external variety, we must have requisite variety. As noted in the last post, only variety can absorb variety. If the external temperature goes up or goes down, our body should have a mechanism to react so that the internal temperature is maintained in a specific range. If it is not able to do this, we will not stay viable. The goal of requisite variety in…
As a middle way between the extremes of allopoiesis (other-making) and autopoiesis (self-making), Holopoiesis designates a dynamic process by which an integrated and diversified field “creorders” (creatively re/orders) itself holonically, that is, simultaneously as whole and part, universal and particular, self and other.
Systems Thinking in Climate ChangeInteractive workshop and masterclass on different ways of thinking about climate changeDate:Tuesday, November 22, 2022Time:7:00 pm
Jessica Flack, Panos Ipeirotis, Thomas W Malone, Geoff Mulgan, Scott E Page
Collective behavior is a universal property of biological, social, and many engineered systems. However, the study of collective intelligence—roughly, the production of adaptive, wise, or clever structures and behaviors by groups—remains nascent. Despite that, it is growing in various disciplines, from biology and psychology to computer science and economics, management, and political science to mathematics, complexity science, and neuroscience. With the launch of Collective Intelligence, we aim to create a publication that transcends disciplines, methodologies, and traditional formats. We hope to help discover principles that can be useful to both basic and applied science and encourage the emergence of a unified discipline of study.
The Complex Systems Society (CSS) organizes every year a main conference (CCS) – the most important annual meeting for the complex systems research community.
The Complex Systems Society invites bids to host the edition for 2024 and 2025.
The conference is generally held in September/October of each year.
I present this as another excellent case study of perspective-taking, multiple perspectives, the long view, incommensurability in unexpected (as well as expected) forms, tides of history and their backward, and also a very enjoyable podcatt
Commonly associated with nature or ecology, the concept of environment is foundational to social systems theory. A “system is the difference between system and environment” (Luhmann, 2006), and we define as autopoietic those systems capable of maintaining the boundary between themselves and their environment. This definition applies not only to living, but also to psychic and social systems, with each of the manifold systems creating its ownenvironment. In social systems theory, there is hence no such thing astheenvironment, if by this generalised environment we understand an all-encompassing ecosystem of which all living (and perhaps other autopoietic) systems are elements. Rather, there is an ineluctable plurality of environments, for…
This is a reading diary of a naïve complexity / computational social scientist’s first encounter with F. A. Hayek + Eastern Bloc tektology & cybernetics.
You might have heard about project Cybersyn? In 1970s Chile, Salvador Allende’s socialist regime was betting on a systems-theoretical approach to the complex decision-making that’s an inevitable consequence of a planned economy. Captain Kirk would feel at home as operators were rocking the latest cybernetic algorithms. That all ended with the US-backed military coup that installed Augusto Pinochet as a dictator. But did the influence of complex-systems ideas end? Oh no! Pinochet called in economist F. A. Hayek—a vanguard of complexity economics and a firm believer in emergence and self-organization for the social good—to shape a Chilean free-market economy.
In its broadest sense, is complexity science spacious enough to support any ideology? Curious about that, I went on a weeklong tour to the…
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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