There are times that I feel a little guilty for making off like a bandit with the ideas in an academician's article. One of the many perks of work at a university is the freeflow of new information here. Various professors and their graduate students share their ideas. If one could just glean at a library daily, one could be quite happily fed intellectually for a time.

I came across a conceptually intriguing concept in an article recently titled "Organizing a fishnet structure."

The idea is this. Various metaphors have been used to try to explain how the human brain functions. Some see it as hierarchical. Others see it as heterarchical / non-hierarchical.

Origins of the fishnet idea are described as follows by Schatten and Zugaj: "The concept of the fishnet organization, invented by Johansen and Swigart, tries to combine the modern concept of heterarchy and the usual human habit of tendency to hierarchy and order." They go on to explain: "A fisher's net if observed on some shore is fully non-hierarchical (thus the name heterarchy), but if we take one node and lift it up...we can observe a dynamically created hierarchy, where the lifted node is on top. In this way we can lift and drop nodes at will, creating new, and destroying old hierarchies" (p. 81).

The image itself looks like webs with tentpoles poking up from the bottom or a singular point pulled up from the otherwise flattened surfaces. These remind me of fractal conceptualizations, of deflated parachutes with points pulled up, and of just a really good idea.

Here lies a dynamic structure with moving and changing authorities based on people's evaluations of what others are offering. The authors describe how people may get inspired and put together virtual teams to create different nodes of information, in a Web 2.0 collaborative way.

There would be no moderators to filter the work, but there would be an "autopoietical filtering system" (can't believe I got this term into this blog), so users themselves could set up their own filtering...and top lists of moderators would then be deemed the top contributors on a particular topic. They also laud the PageRank algorithm by Larry Pge of Google as a critical part of this structure.

I still have a problem with the idealism assumed in this construct, but the idea of a flexible evolving system of shared creativity and knowledge will likely never lose its appeal. And for all the very engineering-based network diagrams and directories, it's refreshing to see one that is floppy and apparently unstructured.

Schatten, M. and Zugaj, M. (2007, June 25 - 28). Organizing a fishnet structure. Proceedings of the ITI 2007 29th Int. Conf. on Information Technology Interfaces. Cavtat, Croatia. pp. 81 - 86.