On the Impact of Fractal Organization on the Performance of Socio-technical Systems

Fractal organizations are a class of bio-inspired distributed hierarchical architectures in which control and feedback information are allowed to flow independently of the position the participating nodes have in the system hierarchy. In this paper we discuss the adoption of a fractal organization in a class of socio-technical systems characterized by a centralized architecture. We present the key architectural traits of the resulting Fractal Social Organization and put forward our conjecture that services based on the presented solution may exhibit significant improvements, e.g., in terms of scalability and performance. In order to provide elements to justify our conjecture we describe how we envision the use of the new organization in two different cases: a framework for semantic service description-and-matching and a low-cost telemonitoring service.