Emergent collectives and the Coordinated Internet

The future of the Internet is coordination.

His research topic in the Logic Group years was what he called collective work: the use of web services to create and support virtual enterprises with dynamic service integration. The public version was the World Wide Wizard, described by Stanford News in 2007: software that lets computers negotiate with each other over the Internet to complete tasks that now take human effort, watching for changes and working out what has to happen next. The POEM project with SAP, Policy-Oriented Enterprise Management, was the research vehicle.

In 2010, at the first Future Enterprise Systems workshop in Berlin, he put it as a thesis. Web 2.0 made publishing democratic. Web services could make processes democratic and just-in-time: given a goal, a process could be composed on the spot from services, respecting the enterprise's stated policies, and changed when contingencies arise. The universe does not run on workflow, he wrote, so why should enterprises?

The radical step was the Coordinated Internet: a network that actively watches what people do, correlates their activities, and notifies the right people and programs when their current task affects, or is affected by, someone else's. Conflicts, safe options, synergies, and tasks that are no longer necessary. The trick, he added, is to do it without being a big-brother paper clip.

Emergent collectives was his name for the spontaneous cooperation structures the Internet makes possible, from open source to disaster relief; his TEDxUHowest talk in 2012 was on the technology of emergent collectives for disaster relief, and his 2016 column revisited the idea for the sharing economy.

Sources: The Future of the Internet is Coordination, 2010; Stanford News, 2007; TEDxUHowest; the Peering archive. Where this page paraphrases him, the paraphrase is ours and the source is his.