I smiled when I saw McAfee had used ant colonies as an example to illustrate emergence:
Ant colonies are similar to the Web in that they appear highly structured even though no central authority is in charge. (Enterprise 2.0, p. 66)I came to the same conclusion myself back in May: Internal Social Media Sites Are Ant Farms. The scientists who study ants have made impressive contributions to our understanding of not only insect behavior, but online communities, as well.
Emergence does not mean "emerging" as in something that's new, young or not yet mature. Rather, McAfee uses the term emergence as it is defined in complexity science:
Emergence is the appearance of global structure as the result of local interactions. It doesn't happen in most systems; what's necessary is a set of mechanisms to do critical things such as connecting the system's elements and providing feedback among them. (Enterprise 2.0, p. 66)The term McAfee has coined for the technology systems that make Enterprise 2.0 possible is emergent social software platforms (ESSPs). As he explains,
Emergent means that the software is freeform and contains mechanisms like links and tags to let the patterns and structure inherent in people's interactions become visible over time. (Enterprise 2.0, p. 69)I'll close this post by noting the key point at the end of that sentence: "over time." We've had our online community up and running for over a year now and we're still struggling with structure and "findability." While I'm not going to stop looking for ways to better manage both of those challenges, McAfee's given me some reassurance that patience is part of the solution, as well. It's going to take time for the (scientific) magic of emergence to be realized.
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