Life gets interesting when it gets complicated — and nothing complicates life so much as society. Flowing through the network of social conventions, institutions, obligations, and expectations that make civilization possible are a complex suite of individual motivations, sometimes common and sometimes conflicting, upon which tenuous alliances are formed and broken. We humans are fascinated by t...

Within this broad issue, we limit our scope to the updating of geographic data by different actors spread out over a communications network – with some data liable to change while the actor is disconnected from the network. Data is replicated on different sites and there is no server holding centralized information. Moreover, updating is conducted simultaneously by the different actors, sometim...