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).

via | Network Weaving

I’m very happy to share with you this documentary about Complex Networks and Network Theory. It is the firt one about complexity and networks that I have found so far, it is very well structured and narrated, and it’s nice to see
Steven Strogatz, Duncan J. Watts, Alessandro Vespignani, Albert-László Barabási after reading their papers and books.

It is called “How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer” (after the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game).
Here is the official website (and here (300 Mb) you can find the whole movie, if you don’t want to watch it on the videos below on Vimeo).

How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer – Part 1 from gephi on Vimeo.

How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer – Part 2 from gephi on Vimeo.

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Thanks to Stefano Mizzella, we have an interview with Gianandrea Giacoma about Sci(bzaar)net (in Italian) that summarizes the event’s main themes and conclusions. The interview can be found on the last number of 7thfloor magazine and here on Scribd:

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A very short report from Sci(bzaar)net, one week later.

First of all, thanks to Gian for this opportunity offered me. Participating in the organization process (even if only online, building the event’s website) and at the event was an opportunity to learn a lot about how we can make room for an open dialogue between very different personalities (researchers, bloggers, designers, creatives, psychologists, journalists, programmers)… such knowledge I hope I can put it into practice when I will be the facilitator of one of the working groups of UrbanLabs.

The event was held in the Model Lab of the Scuola Politecnica di Design, and although I had not studied there but at the Politecnico di Milano, I rediscovered the university atmosphere and especially the climate of activation and of laying the foundations for collective projects that only a Model Lab (with all its tools and work desks) could exemplify so well.

Here are the event pictures taken by me and the other participants, on Flickr:

For those who could not attend, the videos were published on the website; you can find the final text of the brainstorming here (and here the related videos). Finally, I recommend you to read the Bonaria Biancu’s post that summarize very well all the interventions placing them within a coherent overall speech.
All the videos and posts regarding individual authors can be consulted on the official website of Sci(bzaar)net, which will remain as a platform for collective discussion about the relationships between Internet, Scientific Research, Dissemination Scientific and Open Culture.

It was certainly a success and an important event: the specific organizational form (halfway between a BarCamp and more traditional conference) and the heterogeneity of the components have shown that they can give an added value to the meeting and the discussion. Rarely we can attend such meetings on these issues and it’s always a pleasure to know other bloggers or persons behind new experiments in person.

I’d like now to summarize my contribution and some brief reflections resulting from the brainstorming. As you can imagine, I have participated as an “Open Culture expert” and not about scientific research/publication. The main idea that I wanted to share with the participants is that we should think about Open Culture not as a simple set of publication practices ( “to publish a specific content with a specific license”) but as a real philosophy based on enabling complex systems. Open Culture is not just use a Creative Commons license: it means to facilitate a system that shares and reuses the information self-organizing independently. Thinking about Open initiatives in a reductionist way, just like the use of a specific license, can only lead to failure.

We can then study how to enable complex systems that follow Open Peer-to-Peer dynamics and imagine what activities of scientific research and dissemination (definition of hypothesis, definition of research, data collection, data analysis, compilation of results, publication, etc.. ) can be opened to these systems.

One of the concerns expressed most frequently during Sci(bzaar)net regards the opportunity to share the research results (under Open Access): why we should do that, when other people could take all the economic benefits and increase problems for those who carry out researches? Certainly it is true, if we consider scientific research and dissemination using pre-Open Culture parameters, that is as activities based on copyright as a means of appropriation of benefits from their information within a market economy. But now we know how Open Peer-to-Peer organisational forms range between market economies and gift economies, protection of intellectual property and information sharing. We can therefore imagine new forms of organisation capable of ensuring economic resources necessary to who performs scientific research.

In this direction, we can find countless opportunities and diversity of organizational forms: the first suggestion comes from Andrea Gaggioli who proposes a crowdfunding service for scientific research.
I hope that this direction will be studied further on the Sci(bzaar)net website.

Finally, here are my presentation and video (which are also available on the official website here):

I’m very happy to give you two important announcements…I will participate in two important events that are a mix of a conference and a more informal event like BarCamps: one will be held in Italy, and the other one in Spain. In this post I will talk about the first one.

I have been invited to the sci(bzaar)net event on 17th May 2008, organized by Gianandrea Giacoma (who runs the excellent Ibridazioni blog) in the Scuola Politecnica di Design, Milan.

It will be a closed event, in order to preserve its discussion. But all the presentations will be recorded and uploaded in the website, which will eventually become more open after the event. Let’s say that the event will provide the first source code that later an open community could form around it on the sci(bzaar)net website. So, even if you cannot be there on that day, keep watching the website for its further development and participate in it!.

The main idea of this event is to study, confront and share knowledge about how science, research and scientific publishing can change if they will adapt themselves to the Web and Open Culture. I will give a presentation about how Open Culture can be seen as a culture of Open Systems, and how scientific research could be configured as an open and peer-to-peer community-based activity.

And, by the way, I designed and developed the website (except the logo, designed by Davide Casali)…in a very short time, so please don’t expect it to be a milestone! ;-)