Self-organization in Communicating Groups: the emergence of coordination, shared references and collective intelligence\ud

The present paper will sketch the basic ideas of the complexity paradigm, and then apply them to social systems, and in particular to groups of communicating individuals who together need to agree about how to tackle some problem or how to coordinate their actions. I will elaborate these concepts to provide an integrated foundation for a theory of self-organization, to be understood as a non-linear process of spontaneous coordination between actions. Such coordination will be shown to consist of the following components: alignment, division of labor, workflow and aggregation. I will then review some paradigmatic simulations and experiments that illustrate the alignment of references and communicative conventions between communicating agents. Finally, the paper will summarize the preliminary results of a series of experiments that I devised in order to observe the emergence of collective intelligence within a communicating group, and interpret these observations in terms of alignment, division of labor and workflow

Citizen participation and awareness raising in coastal protected areas. A case study from Italy

In this chapter, part of the research carried out within the SECOA project (www.projectsecoa.eu) is presented. Attention is devoted to methods and tools used for supporting the participatory process in a case of environmental conflict related to the definition of boundaries of a coastal protected area: the Costa Teatina National Park, in Abruzzo, central Italy. The Costa Teatina National Park was established by the National Law 93/2001. Its territory includes eight southern Abruzzo municipalities and covers a stretch of coastline of approximately 60 km. It is a coastal protected area, which incorporates land but not sea, characterized by the presence of important cultural and natural assets. The Italian Ministry of Environment (1998) defines the area as “winding and varied, with the alternation of sandy and gravel beaches, cliffs, river mouths, areas rich in indigenous vegetation and cultivated lands (mainly olives), dunes and forest trees”. The park boundaries were not defined by the law that set it up, and their determination has been postponed to a later stage of territorial negotiation that has not ended yet (Montanari and Staniscia, 2013). The definition of the park boundaries, indeed, has resulted in an intense debate between citizens and interest groups who believe that environmental protection does not conflict with economic growth and those who believe the opposite. That is why the process is still in act and a solution is far from being reached. In this chapter, the methodology and the tools used to involve the general public in active participation in decision making and to support institutional players in conflict mitigation will be presented. Those tools have also proven to be effective in the dissemination of information and transfer of knowledge. Results obtained through the use of each instrument will not be presented here since this falls outside the purpose of the present essay. The chapter is organized as follows: in the first section the importance of the theme of citizen participation in decision making will be highlighted; the focus will be on participation in the processes of ICZM, relevant to the management of coastal protected areas. In the second section a review of the most commonly used methods in social research is presented; advantages and disadvantages of each of them will be highlighted. In particular, the history and the evolution of the Delphi method and its derivatives are discussed; focus will be on the dissemination value of the logic underlying such iterative methods. In the third section the tools used in the case of the Costa Teatina National Park will be presented; strengths and weaknesses will be highlighted and proposals for their improvement will be advanced. Discussion and conclusions follow

Evaluation of e-learning web sites using fuzzy axiomatic design based approach

High quality web site has been generally recognized as a critical enabler to conduct online business. Numerous studies exist in the literature to measure the business performance in relation to web site quality. In this paper, an axiomatic design based approach for fuzzy group decision making is adopted to evaluate the quality of e-learning web sites. Another multi-criteria decision making technique, namely fuzzy TOPSIS, is applied in order to validate the outcome. The methodology proposed in this paper has the advantage of incorporating requirements and enabling reductions in the problem size, as compared to fuzzy TOPSIS. A case study focusing on Turkish e-learning websites is presented, and based on the empirical findings, managerial implications and recommendations for future research are offered

Reasons, Coherence, and Group Rationality

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView

Group disagreement: a belief aggregation perspective

The debate on the epistemology of disagreement has so far focused almost exclusively on cases of disagreement between individual persons. Yet, many social epistemologists agree that at least certain kinds of groups are equally capable of having beliefs that are open to epistemic evaluation. If so, we should expect a comprehensive epistemology of disagreement to accommodate cases of disagreement between group agents, such as juries, governments, companies, and the like. However, this raises a number of fundamental questions concerning what it means for groups to be epistemic peers and to disagree with each other. In this paper, we explore what group peer disagreement amounts to given that we think of group belief in terms of List and Pettit’s ‘belief aggregation model’. We then discuss how the so-called ‘equal weight view’ of peer disagreement is best accommodated within this framework. The account that seems most promising to us says, roughly, that the parties to a group peer disagreement should adopt the belief that results from applying the most suitable belief aggregation function for the combined group on all members of the combined group. To motivate this view, we test it against various intuitive cases, derive some of its notable implications, and discuss how it relates to the equal weight view of individual peer disagreement

On the Accuracy of Group Credences

to appear in Szabó Gendler, T. & J. Hawthorne (eds.) Oxford Studies in Epistemology volume 6 We often ask for the opinion of a group of individuals. How strongly does the scientific community believe that the rate at which sea levels are rising increased over the last 200 years? How likely does the UK Treasury think it is that there will be a recession if the country leaves the European Union? What are these group credences that such questions request? And how do they relate to the individual credences assigned by the members of the particular group in question? According to the credal judgment aggregation principle, Linear Pooling, the credence function of a group should be a weighted average or linear pool of the credence functions of the individuals in the group. In this paper, I give an argument for Linear Pooling based on considerations of accuracy. And I respond to two standard objections to the aggregation principle

The Dynamics of Political Parties’ Coalition in Indonesia:\ud The evaluation of political party elites’ opinion

During the Indonesian president election process, the coalition of parties could be shown as the dominant process beside the president campaign. The coalition could be regarded as the emergence of the parties’ preferential coherence based upon the interest and attributes of each party. The similarity and difference of parties’ preference and attributes could be depicted through of party elites’ opinions and attitude toward flowered political issues. In this paper, we use the Heider’s balance theory to construct relation network among parties by using the longitudinal news data of the party elite’s opinion that published by the media, and then analyze the dynamic of coalition formation in the Indonesian political system during the election process. We have shown that the balance of the party’s relational network move toward the larger balance index relative to the initial condition. This phenomenon has verified the structural balance hypothesis especially for the conflict situation such as the election process. Interestingly, the balance of the system is fluctuated dynamically through time following certain trajectory. This dynamics is divided into 3 phases, that is, disorder state, conflict state, and order state, as well as signed the difference of party behavior before and after the legislative election. Moreover, we also analyzed the stability two parties’ relation in particular period in order to understand specifically the dynamic of the system in triadic level

Aggregation and Representation in the European Parliament Party Groups

While members of the European Parliament are elected in national constituencies, their votes are determined by the aggregation of MEPs in multinational party groups. The uncoordinated aggregation of national party programmes in multinational EP party groups challenges theories of representation based on national parties and parliaments. This article provides a theoretical means of understanding representation by linking the aggregation of dozens of national party programmes in different EP party groups to the aggregation of groups to produce the parliamentary majority needed to enact policies. Drawing on an original data source of national party programmes, the EU Profiler, the article shows that the EP majorities created by aggregating MEP votes in party groups are best explained by cartel theories. These give priority to strengthening the EP’s collective capacity to enact policies rather than voting in accord with the programmes they were nationally elected to represent