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Open development ecosystems

Wed, 09/08/2010 - 15:38 — Ken Coar
eco·sys·tem, noun[1]
the complex of a community of organisms and its environment functioning as an ecological unit

An ecosystem is an assemblage of interrelated, interconnected, and interdependent parts. An open development ecosystem is essentially one that produces open software -- or whose relationships are patterned after one (or more) that does.

Some characteristics of a healthy open development ecosystem:

  1. It is self-maintaining.
  2. It evolves according to the needs of its constituent participants.
  3. Activity occurs 'out loud,' in such a way that history is accessible to non-participants.
  4. Progress is often evolutionary and stigmergic[2] rather than designed or planned.
  5. Progress is frequently affected by 'software Darwinism'[3] (with 'software' replaced by a noun appropriate to the ecosystem).
  6. Individual components of the ecosystem may come and go (such as new participants joining or incumbent ones moving on to other endeavours), but the ecosystem endures.

Although it is possible (and very common) for open endeavours to consist of a single person working 'out loud' in isolation, such don't really qualify as ecosystems.

Communication is the sine qua non of an open ecosystem. Even in the most chaotic examples, where no direct focused communication may exist, nevertheless information is shared in some manner, consciously or otherwise. In fact, let's define these requirements:

An open ecosystem must:

  1. Have multiple active components (users, developers -- people, in other words);
  2. Have one or more information repositories (e.g., mailing list archives, code repositories, discussion fora, etc.);
  3. Have information flow between these components (for example, email messages or updates to code);
  4. Operate with some degree of transparency -- that is, at least some of the information and its flow needs to be visible to people outside the system.

The Reality Of Being Open

[1] Merriam-Webster
[2] Stigmergy. (Bitworking.Com)
[3] Software Darwinism (Leo Simons, Apache Software Foundation)