WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us

by Tim O'Reilly

Promise theory, as Burgess outlines it, is a framework for understanding how independent actors make promises to each other—the essence of that highly structured communication. Those actors can be software modules promising to respond in a certain way to an API call, or small teams promising to deliver a particular result. Burgess writes: “Imagine a set of principles that could help you to understand how parts combine to become a whole, and how each part sees the whole from its own perspective. If such principles were any good, it shouldn’t matter whether we’re talking about humans in a team, birds in a flock, computers in a datacenter, or cogs in a Swiss watch. A theory of cooperation ought to be pretty universal, so we could apply it both to technology and to the workplace.”