Re: [Simulchaord-discuss] Artificial societies discussion on Slashdot

[Paul Fernhout]

Paul Fernhout wrote:
> I am going to post a comment about this project.
 
Here is the text of that comment, also available here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=30887&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&tid=134&mode=thread&cid=3325912

I started a project on Savannah a couple of weeks ago to create
simulations of chaordic organizations and processes under the GPL
License. 

The word "chaordic" is used as defined by Dee Hock (the person behind
VISA) at
  http://www.chaordic.org 
and in his book "Birth of the Chaordic Age", which is essentially
processes at the boundary between CHAos and ORDer and the social
implications for how to design effective and responsive organizations
for a dynamic society. The focus will be specially on computer
simulations to support part of the goal defined here
  http://www.chaordic.org/who_hist.html#FourCond 
of: "Development of visual and physical models of chaordic organizations
so that people have something to examine, experiment with, and compare
to existing organizations. The models must contain the ethical and
spiritual dimensions generally lacking in current models. In addition,
computer simulations will need to be created to allow people to quickly
see how clarity of purpose and principles allow institutions to
self-organize, evolve over decades, and link in new patterns for an
enduring constructive society." 

People are invited to join the mailing list if they want at this page
  http://mail.freesoftware.fsf.org/mailman/listinfo/simulchaord-discuss 
if you want to contribute to project related discussions or submit
snippets of code (with the understanding contributions will be archived
and can be incorporated into the project under the GPL license). I have
been posting some artificial life links there related to modelling
social systems to get things started -- one of the first was a link to
the Atlantic Monthly article discussed in this Slashdot thread. For now,
I am using use the list to record my own musings on related simulation
issues including design, architecture, and use cases. I will also be
posting my experiences as I try to create such simulations. Feel free to
lurk for a while or chime in. 

Here is a page leading to the entire mailing list archives (around
twenty messages so far):
  http://mail.freesoftware.fsf.org/pipermail/simulchaord-discuss/ 

The main project page is here:      
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/simulchaord/ 
Cooperative development of releases of code is hosted on Savannah using
CVS although I haven't yet put up any content (files or homepage)
besides what's archived in the mailing list. 

At the moment I am looking at using Swarm 
  http://www.swarm.org
as the base -- although I may just use Python instead -- or even use
both for different aspects.
  
-Paul Fernhout
Kurtz-Fernhout Software 
=========================================================
Developers of custom software and educational simulations
Creators of the Garden with Insight(TM) garden simulator
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com