Sustainability and Scalability of Self-Organisation
(SaSSO)

The fourth SaSSO workshop explores inter-organizational self-organization to address sustainability and scalability challenges. Domains like healthcare, transportation, and food systems are all examples of complex, interdependent systems requiring multi-stakeholder coordination. This highlights a pressing need to re-consider, integrate and re-vitalise concepts of self-organisation, self-governance, sustainability, and multi-scale systems thinking in order to meet the challenges involved in shaping real-world complex systems.

The goal of this inter-disciplinary workshop is to address two contrasting pairs of inter-related research questions:

1. The sustainability of self-organisation, given the features of path dependency (where prior decisions significantly constrain present choices); the iron law of oligarchy which identifies the tendency of self-organisation to slide into oligarchy; and the avoidance of tyranny at the core of Ober’s Basic Democracy; and conversely, self-organisation for sustainability, building on the pioneering work of Ostrom’s self-governing institutions for common-pool resource management, but also considering self-sustainability, e.g. in the form of cooperative survival dilemmas.

2. The scalability of self-organisation, for example as the number of components in a system changes over time, how are structures and processes for decision-making, dispute resolution and monitoring affected by such changes, even with new ‘generations; and conversely, self-organisation for scalability, both for pro-active management of anticipated growth or contraction, but also how the values or incentives implied by self-organised rules change over time (the rule-based equivalent of concept drift).

SaSSO welcomes both applied and theoretical contributions addressing these challenges.