e-society initiatives (of the 1990s) aimed to put people “on line”—to surf the web, access information and conduct e-business. Today, the evolving k-society (knowledge society) promises to put people “in power”. Thanks to social media (Web 2.0), the web is no longer simply a medium for people to exchange text. It is morphing into a new socioeconomic space where e-citizen and e-democracy concepts are flourishing. Social networks are forming constantly to help people promote causes and coordinate events (as small as a party and as big as the Egyptian revolution). Through the flourishing crowedsourcing, social networks are becoming a major driver for business and the knowledge economy. Beyond commenting or sharing media, Web 3.0 (intelligent web) aims to foster the realization of knowledge-empowered society, where people harness “collective intelligence” to co-develop knowledge products (Apps or analysis tools) that can be sold in the global marketplace.
In a connected, knowledge-savvy society, a scenario for a community-led decision making systems in urban infrastructure is not far-fetched. Empowered by Apps and interactive authoring tools, communities will be able to develop project ideas (technical and non-technical). They will also be able to analyze ideas by others and collaborate to bridge gaps and collate ideas. In such situation, the role (and value-added) of public officials and engineers shifts from developing/presenting project ideas to enabling and facilitating the self-organization of citizens’ ideas.
A community-led, bottom-up decision making environment is, expectedly, chaotic. The word chaos does not necessarily means unpredictable or unintelligent. It refers to complex systems that, beneath a thin crust of randomness, are built on an interesting (pattern of) order. On the surface, ants in a colony do not portray formal order in their behavior. Yet, the result of their work is an orderly and efficient sustainable, physical and social system.
