<i>&gt;Software structures underwent a radical change as their development teams became distributed across time and space, as shown in Figure 1b. Instead of a centrally planned, top-down, linear structure, code structure became network-like. Shortage of programmers, lower labor costs in emerging countries, and lifestyle preferences of the extreme programmer all contributed to this tectonic shift.</i><p>That paragraph is not explicit on whether he&#x27;s talking about open source collaboration vs corporate distributed teams but since his references include FLOSS and &quot;social coding&quot; on github open software, I&#x27;ll assume &quot;open source&quot; to interpret the following 2 paragrpahs:<p><i>&gt;Stigmergy ensures tasks are executed in the right order, without any need for central planning, control, or direct interaction between the actors performing the work. 
[...]
Markers make stigmergy more efficient, by more reliably focusing a programmer’s attention on the most relevant aspects of the work that needs to be done.</i><p>These are interesting ideas but I think any benefits of markers[1] are drowned out by the <i>desires</i> of programmers who are not beholden to a manager&#x27;s agenda.  Programmers volunteering to contribute often work on <i>what is interesting</i> to them.<p>It&#x27;s very unlikely for a volunteer programmer to wake up with the irresistible desire to &quot;hunt for memory allocation bugs in OpenSSL to prevent heartbleed&quot;.  On the other hand, a Microsoft manager can direct one of his programmers to add a shim to Windows Vista so Quicken 2005 is compatible and future customers upgrade without fear.  That type of work is drudgery but he&#x27;s getting paid a salary and doesn&#x27;t pick his tasks at random.<p>A stronger lever than &quot;pheromone markers&quot; in source code is <i>sponsorship</i>.  E.g. a corporate entity finds value in an open source project but there are some gaps that programmers are voluntarily working on.  The business entity pays a salary to programmers to prioritize that work higher and get them done.<p>[1]Don&#x27;t know about Tesseract but it&#x27;s probably something beyond sprinkling markers such as  &quot;&#x2F;&#x2F;TODO: optimize this function is next highest priority&quot; throughout source files or overhauling github to have a leaderboard of &quot;important things to do next&quot;