Trusted Space - Nature's Rules

What is the the Live Web really all about? Is it a neat set of technology, or does it have the power to save our species and our planet?

In the 18th century, there was an explosion of work by Natural Philosophers such as Newton to discover the emergent mathematical principles that nature used to set the key relationships that held the universe together. His great work was to discover how gravity worked. Later Einstein looked at light and time. We know that if forces are real and not just the product of our fevered hopes that they must have these mathematical foundations. Nature is not messy - she is ordered.

Over the last 20 years I have been thinking about what the emergent design for human relationships may be. The question that I have asked myself is this - if wolves have packs, if whales have pods, if trees tend to have forests, if galaxies tend to organize in spirals, there is likely to be an ideal development pathway for all development. Every thing in the universe should share an ideal trajectory that can be found in a simple equation like e = mc2.

I asked myself this question because I sense that how we organize today, using machine rules, seems to drive great dysfunction. The core of humanity, the family is eroding. Our great institutions seem increasingly incapable of serving us. Those who work in them are depressed and often ill. We as a species seem bent on destroying our habitat. I think that this is happening because we have been captured by an idea that is wrong. The wrong idea is that the machine and engineering is the right metaphor. Like the Ptolemaic view of the universe, this idea worked OK so long as complexity was low. But in a highly complex world that is highly connected, it drives failure.

Only a metaphor based on nature itself can cope with our predicament.

My hypothesis is that we live also in a time of a kind of miracle. Hopefully, just in time, a new technology, the Live Web, is emerging that has the power to take us back to a more natural set of relationships between each other and between us and all parts of the planet.

I think that I have stumbled on the simple equation that describes all what many of us are living and building in the Live Web and I would appreciate your help in finding out if I am right.

Here is a link that expands on this idea - smartpei.typepad.com/trusted_space/2007/01/natures_big_ide.html
Here is a link to a post where I have done my best to aggregate much of the great material on Dunbar Numbers
smartpei.typepad.com/robert_patersons_weblog/magic_numbers/index.html
Here are links to three longer articles where I have expanded my thoughts on the topic of what is a Natural Human High Performance Organization.
Part 1 - smartpei.typepad.com/robert_patersons_weblog/2007/05/reboot9_what_wo.html
Part 2 - smartpei.typepad.com/robert_patersons_weblog/2007/05/reboot9_what_wo_1.html
Part 3 - smartpei.typepad.com/robert_patersons_weblog/2007/05/reboot9_what_wo_2.html
Here is a link to an intrview with a small software company called silverorange that I think exemplifies the current idea of a Humanm workplace
smartpei.typepad.com/robert_patersons_weblog/2006/09/the_human_workp.html
Here are my slides -
smartpei.typepad.com/robert_patersons_weblog/2007/06/reboot9_my_slid.html