Can we provoke and conduct swarm events? There are a number of so-called self-organized events, where activities emerge in context, based on who’s there and what people desire at a particular moment, but we need to acknowledge that all these events do have a closed organizing core that secures the venue, manages a budget, takes care of central logistics. Can we make events more fluid, more decentralized? Can we provide tools that allow people to set up and crowdsource a totally emergent event, which disappears as soon as it is over, like a farmer’s market on a Sunday morning, in the middle of the town?
We tried to answer this question in practice, with COMMUNITY EVENTS, organized during the November 2020 edition of the Open Climate Collabathon. We used the Open Value Network model pioneered by Sensorica, inspired by the REA (Resources, Events, Agents) ontology, to build a rudimentary infrastructure (spreadsheets, forms, websites, wiki) to support such event.
Self-organization requires feedback mechanisms to constantly inform participants about the current state of affairs and present opportunities. The virtual environment where such an event is to be coordinated needs to be open, all participants should have access to create content and structure. Participants need access to analysis / feedback in real time, which allows them to produce rational responses based on the current reality. The best metaphor for this digital environment is a farmer’s market that appears on a Sunday morning in the middle of the town. It is an aggregate of independent and individually managed spaces that come together for a shared purpose, under a given logic. It is not a platform like a privately owned supermarket where products from different producers are displayed for sale.
We documented our process and experience in this document. If someone finds this interesting, we can work together to port this to Holochain.