Binding Chaos
Action-Based Collaboration
Action based method of collaboration which follows an idea.
Expanded explanation
Action-based collaboration organizes people around a shared action rather than around a person or an institution. It is the action-based twin of idea-based collaboration, and Marsh draws its mechanism from stigmergy: people who understand and agree on a goal each keep autonomy over how or whether they work toward it, and coordination runs through the transparency of the work itself rather than through orders. Someone reads what has been done, adds the next piece and moves on, so no leader assigns roles and no membership gates who takes part. Marsh sets this against personality-based organizing, where a movement forms around a person and can be captured or destroyed by going after that person. Because an action-based effort has its goal fixed in advance and open to anyone who accepts it, there is no centre to seize.
In Heather Marsh’s words
Marsh applies the pattern from stigmergy, describing what she found in successful movements.
“the movements which had by far the widest success were action-based instead of personality-based. I started thinking of them as verbs instead of nouns”
Stigmergy
Examples
- Open-source software
- Anyone can read the code, fix a piece or add one, and the project grows through contributions rather than assignment.
- An encyclopedia anyone can edit
- No editor owns an article, and each person reads what is there and adds the next correction, so the work coordinates the workers.
- A leaderless protest wave
- Arresting an organizer does not end it, because the action, not any person, is what people have joined.
How others use it
Stigmergy, the mechanism Marsh builds on, was coined by the biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse in 1959 for how termites build without a plan, each leaving a trace that prompts the next action. Computer science took it up for swarm algorithms and ant-colony optimization, and open-source software and large wikis are the usual social examples. Marsh's contribution is the pairing of idea-based and action-based collaboration and the argument that action-based organizing lets a movement grow without giving anyone a position that can be captured.
Sources
Defined through stigmergy in the Binding Chaos series glossary, and developed at length in Stigmergy: How to Create a Mass Movement.
Recommended reading path
Then read in full: Binding Chaos; Stigmergy: How to Create a Mass Movement.
A suggested order for exploring this corner of the theory.