Across the natural world, we can see examples of nature engaging in positive sum feedback loops in which plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, water, light, and soil exchange energy and intelligence for mutual benefit. The sum total of these interactions is the “web of Life,” a nested set of relationships that form a complex adaptive system that is self-regulating, self-healing, self-reinforcing, and continuously evolving. > “The concept of stigmergy has been used to analyze self-organizing activities in an ever-widening range of domains, including social insects, robotics, web communities and human society. Yet, it is still poorly understood and as such its full power remains underappreciated. This paper… [defines] stigmergy as a mechanism of indirect coordination in which the trace left by an action in a medium stimulates subsequent actions… [Stigmergy] enables complex, coordinated activity without any need for planning, control, communication, simultaneous presence, or even mutual awareness. The resulting self-organization is driven by a combination of positive and negative feedbacks, amplifying beneficial developments while suppressing errors. Thus, stigmergy is applicable to a very broad variety of cases, from chemical reactions to bodily coordination and Internet-supported collaboration in Wikipedia.” – **Stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism I: Definition and components by Francis Heylighen** Stigmergy is a type of [swarm intelligence](https://vimeo.com/78043173) in which individual agents, taking their own actions, signal those actions to other agents in such a way that other agents can contribute in a positive sum feedback loop. Examples of stigmergy in non-human organisms include ants, termites, bees, flocks of birds, bacteria, and slime mold. In humans, we can see examples of stigmergy in Burning Man, open source software development, Wikipedia, the Occupy movement, and [various internet experiments](https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/14060/Armstrong_Ben.pdf). More akin to jazz music or an improv troupe than an institution or organization, stigmergy uses a simple set of decentralized rules to support individual agents in contributing to mutually beneficial goals. What is lost in terms of the linear clarity derived from centralized planning and control is greatly outweighed by the unplannable complexity and beauty of a swarm contributing their unique gifts towards an emergent structure. Stigmergy is made possible by the decentralized rule set that all agents choose to abide by, creating the conditions for feedback loops that reward positive sum behaviors. At Burning Man, these rules are the boundaries of the city and the grid of city streets as well as the 10 Principles that are upheld by peer accountability. In jazz, these rules are music theory, rhythm, and tuning. In Wikipedia, these rules are based around appropriate citation, grammar, and dynamic linking between related concepts. In improv comedy, these rules are “yes, and,” narrative development, and the building/release of comedic tension. In all of these instances, the positive sum feedback is mostly driven by contributions and alignment. Contributions that attract more contributions feed back on themselves. These rewards are intrinsic to participation. No one needs to direct or command them to occur. When it is clear how to contribute without stepping on someone else’s toes (literally or metaphorically), humans naturally want to converge around shared efforts in which their participation is meaningful and purposeful. This is a form of participatory commons governance in the sense that it empowers us to collectively steer the ship of a common effort through our contribution instead of through our top down control of others’ agency. Open civic systems create scaffolding for stigmergic coordination by providing open templates for agent-centric coordination. Institutional functions and all other functions of a society are ultimately based in human coordination, making open civic systems capable of achieving the same outputs as any centralized institution. Open protocols, the DNA or source code for open civic systems, function similarly to the pheromone pattern languages of ants that inform how agents communicate and stack their contributions. In this way, open civic systems integrate human social systems with the patterns of living systems. In the same way that an ant colony or bee hive can be considered a macroorganism, an emergent whole with its own form of collective agency, a human social organism is the equivalent design pattern for human coordination. Social organisms grow out of a core mission, vision, and culture that is defined in the nucleus of the social organism’s social DNA. This social DNA serves as a north star as it is encoded and reproduced by agents through means of peer accountability and empowers human agents to opt-in to social organisms with whom they align at the fundamental DNA level. This core DNA also informs the core functions, roles, flows, and membranes that are required for the social organism to achieve its purpose within its social ecology. Distinct from institutions or corporations that tend to function as a kind of “zombie” or cancerous social organism, never dying or engaging in reciprocal flows with their environment, social organisms are intended to be conceived, gestated, matured, and decomposed as the entire social ecology continues to evolve and transform to reflect the needs and desires of the many generations of agents who animate  them. While this fundamental transformation in human social behavior and structure is profound, it reflects patterns that exist all around us in the natural world. A human civilization based on these fundamental design patterns would represent a truly open civic system, able to easily adapt to changing circumstances, respond to collectively determined needs, and provide cosmo-local feedback cycles in which the collective superorganism of humanity could continuously learn and grow as peers.