What Is Emergence and the Emergence in Community

In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors which emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole. — Wikipedia

Emergence is commonly seen in the nature. Besides, it is also commonly seen in the human society. For example, not a single one could fully control how a company or a country behave. The company and the country seem to have their own will to do something.

So does a community conference.

I have volunteered to organize a regional PyCon, PyCon Taiwan, for years. I observed some emergence raised from the community, including the organizing team and more participants. Let me talk about what I have seen and how we may "trigger" emergence.

The Gardening and the Gardener

PyCon conferences are community-led and community-focused gatherings of Python programmers around the world. — PSF PyCon Trademark Usage Policy

"By the community for the community" is a popular slogan among PyCon conferences around the world. Organizing this kind of conference, is not only running an event to serve the "bigger" community including all attendees, but also serve the "smaller" community which is the organizing team essentially.

They are both organic. It's almost impossible to organize both the "bigger" and "smaller" community and make them "grow" as what you expect or your plan want to achieve fully. It's a process like gardening. You are a gardener taking care of a garden. For example, when you plant a seed of rose, you know there will be roses (or not if they die), but you never know how the details of the roses will be: how many leaves, how large the leaves, and how height the rose is, for example. Additionally, the garden is organic and not belongs to anyone. Even more, the gardener is also a part of the garden. The only thing you know is "they will be rose".

So, I would say the first step to trigger emergence is planting the seeds, and be happy the organic process and the organic result.

More Approaches to Be the Gardener

I will talk about more approaches that I learned in the following posts. Stay tuned!