Inverse Infrastructures: Coordination in Self-Organizing Systems

Abstract

1The paper argues that a new category of infrastructures is emerging, user-driven, selforganizing and with de-centralized control: Inverse Infrastructures (IIs) coordination mechanisms). Theoretical concepts are drawn from standardization theory, from studies on Open Source Software communities, and from theories of self-organizing systems (i.e. Complex Adaptive Systems and System-ofSystems theory). The two clusters of II cases are peer-to-peer networks (e.g. Napster, Gnutella and Joost) and wireless networks (Wireless Leiden and FON). The paper concludes that, similar to the behavior of ant colonies, II emergence can be understood as an accumulation of local attempts to optimize a situation. Complex citizen and citizen-company partnerships evolve which compete with existing infrastructure provisions and touch on public values (e.g. privacy, copyright). A policy response is needed.here is a widespread fascination among researchers of various disciplines with order that stems from chaos, with method in madness, with complexity that results from simplicity (e.g. ant colony behavior and Internet; Holland, 1995), and with the coherent, highly valued achievements that stem from self-organization 2 (Open Source Software; Perens, 1999). These examples fascinate us foremost because the outcome of self-organization would lead us to suspect that a large amount of centralized orchestration takes place, whereas the opposite seems to be the case.In the field of ICT infrastructures, a similar phenomenon is occurring. Where previously the grand design, a top-down and centralized approach, seemed imperative for harmonized infrastructure development, at present a different phenomenon is gaining ground: Inverse Infrastructures (Vree, 2003). Inverse Infrastructures (IIs) develop bottom-up, and are driven by users. Self-organization is a key element in their emergence.In the following we will argue that IIs represent a paradigm shift in infrastructure development, a shift which policy makers have difficulties to deal with. Moreover, policy makers have little knowledge and experience 1 We sincerely thank our two colleagues of the ICT section Jan van den Berg en Semir Daskapan for the interesting discussions and feedback they have given us, and the anonymous reviewers of SIIT2007 for their good comments. This work was supported in part by the Next Generation Infrastructures foundation (www.nginfra.nl). 2 Self-organization refers to 'unsupervised learning'. In the case of networks this means that there are inputs and outputs but "no feedback from the environment to say what those outputs should be or whether they are correct. The network must discover for itself patterns, features, regularities, correlations or categories in the input data and code for them in the output. The units and connections must thus display some degree of self-organization" (Hertz et al., 1991, p.197) T

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