Even if you already know (almost) everything about Complex Systems, don’t miss the opportunity to watch online The Secret Life of Chaos, an excellent BBC documentary.
The documentary starts from Alan Turing and his research on morphogenesis, it then explains chaos (“one of the most unwelcome discovery in science”), feedback loops, fractals, flocks, evolution, self-organization. The documentary ends with evolutionary and genetic algorithms for solving problems and designing, showing how simplicity evolves into complexity, starting from simple rules repeated over and over. After watching this documentary, it should be very clear why design could (and should) learn how to deal with complex systems, even though we should update our idea of designer:

One of the things that makes people so uncomfortable, about this idea of, if you will, spontaneous pattern formation is that somehow or other you don’t need a creator. But perhaps a really clever designer, what he would do, is to kind of treat the universe like a giant simulation where you set some initial condition and just let the whole thing spontaneously happen, in all of it’s wonder, and all of it’s beauty.

And then if you go on and read Linux: A Bazaar at the Edge of Chaos by Ko Kuwabara (and this article as well), you will understand why I think that open source is a great strategy for dealing with complex problem and systems.

(Just a note about complexity and pop culture: after watching this, I bet it is easier for you now to understand that Tron:Legacy is about the dualism chaos vs. order, and why the movie prefers the former).

After the first movie, here is another one, that maybe you have already discovered while reading the Wikipedia page of Revolution OS. It’s “The Code”, a Finnish-made documentary about Linux from 2001, featuring some of the most influential people of the free software movement. It’s in English with Finnish subtitles (and some small parts are in Finnish).

Back from the November tour and a change of server, rigth now I’m working on opening new sections in openp2pdesign.org, on redesigning the theme and the structure of the whole website and on opening openp2pdesign.org to more participants. As you may understand with this post, I will post only in English now, because it takes too much time to write also in Italian and Spanish at the same time; maybe in the future I will write in those languages again.
Meanwhile, the Twitter page, @openp2pdesign, is still a great place to get news and resources at the same time. And there is also a Facebook Fan Page, for further informations and interactions:

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So, while you wait for the new website and for new posts, I will post some videos, so you will not get too much bored.
Let’s start with “Revolution OS” a 2001 documentary film which traces the twenty-year history of GNU, Linux, open source, and the free software movement. You can watch it on Google Video or right here: