Self-Organization describes a type of organization in which cooperation and decision-making take place among individual entities rather than at a higher level of centralized authority. In this dynamic form of organizing, there is no top-down instruction, but rather emergent behavior by individual actors based on local rules or independent initiatives. These collective behaviors shape complex dynamical patterns that often result in the development of sophisticated structures and sophisticated emergent phenomena. Self-Organization can be observed in natural systems such as ant colonies and flocks of birds and in human systems such as markets and open source code development.

See also: emergence, edge of chaos, self-organizing, evolutionary computing