The Center for Architecting Socio-Technical Ecosystems will focus on accelerating understanding of socio-technical ecosystems by organizing research around certain core themes: Business Opportunities, Technical Design, Governance Regime, Collaborative Infrastructure, and Interactions and Simulations. Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and the University of Michigan (UM) are collaborating to establish the proposed center, with CMU as the lead institution.
Socio-technical ecosystems are emerging as unprecedented engines of innovation. The proposed center would examine important issues around the development and use of information technology solutions/software, right alongside with examining the structure, dynamics, and governance of the groups that create these solutions. The two universities are taking advantage of existing strengths in computer science and the social sciences surrounding technology. The problems addressed by the center are compelling and address a growing need as for-profit and non-profit entities weave their ways through a complicated collaboration and IP landscape to create new solutions, and to catalyze their adoption by users. The proposed center will enable rapid progress on theory development, empirical results, technology design, and tools for analysis and support.
The proposed center has the potential to improve the software industry. Innovation at the social technical interface has the potential to improve US industries. These new products and services could be disruptive technologies in the market place. Students and faculty members will gain valuable experience by interaction with industry partners. Both institutions have diversity plans in place and view a diverse student body and faculty as important to programmatic success.
Socio-technical ecosystems are emerging as unprecedented engines of innovation. Organizations and individuals collaborating and competing in networked production communities are a powerful new force in the digital world. Ecosystems proliferate at an accelerating pace in many technology domains, yet the design principles for successful ecosystems are currently revealed only through a slow process of trial and error. With the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and affiliated member organizations, COASTE seeks to accelerate understanding of socio-technical ecosystems. The planning meeting for the Center on Architecting Socio-Technical Ecosystems (COASTE) was a major first step toward our goal of joining leading researchers in socio-technical systems, software architecture, open source software, network science, crowdsourcing, and collaboration technologies to work with member organizations to rapidly uncover social, technical, and organizational principles to shape a new scientific perspective that will guide effective ecosystem design. Advisory board members from Google, IBM, Red Hat, Avaya, Microsoft, Bosch, Eclipse Foundation and WorldVistA endorsed a transformative research agenda for the Center: Socio-Technical Design Survey. At the heart of every ecosystem is a technical design that provides mechanisms to allow different firms and individuals to provide contributions that work together. A wide variety of such mechanisms are possible, such as plug-in architectures (e.g., Eclipse), standards-based protocols (e.g., Apache projects), shared libraries (e.g., GNOME), and open APIs (e.g., Android). Understanding what is required to organize around these mechanisms is critically important to the industry. This project will provide a knowledge base of existing technical designs, their important characteristics and variations, and their associations with collaborative infrastructure, governance, and incentives. ECO-Sim: Computational Modeling of Ecosystems. Systematic studies of existing sociotechnical systems provide a critical exploration how social groups and technical systems can be organized. However, the exploration of the full design space and the tradeoffs between these different social and technical choices, the potential impact of these choices on various outcomes (e.g., productivity, information diffusion, participation, error propagation, and system complexity) requires simulation. We will conduct computational simulations that are anchored by validation against these case studies, and provide and disseminate the simulation models. Social Networking Platform for Collaborative Infrastructure. Ecosystems are highly dynamic and generate huge amounts of information as platforms evolve, standards are adopted and updated, coordinated releases are planned, technical information is exchanged, and innovators look for new opportunities and partners. We will investigate ways of moving information around the ecosystem without creating mind-numbing information overload. In particular, we focus on environments that provide a tight integration between work environments and social media that define interest networks and foster work transparency. Ecosystems and Crowdsourcing. Crowd sourcing is becoming increasingly important in driving production and innovation in a networked world. Despite demonstrated successes such as open source software and Wikipedia, there is as yet little science to guide the organization of work so that crowd sourcing can be routinely and consistently accomplished. These challenges are exacerbated in complex work such as software coding, in which there are significant dependencies between code artifacts. Harnessing the crowd for code maintenance, documentation generation, and other tasks that promote the health of ecosystems could lead to significant benefits. The goal of our research is to develop tools and frameworks to enable complex and interdependent work such as software coding to be effectively crowdsourced. To do so we will attack the problems of coordinating complex work tasks across many people, managing the dependencies between them and maintaining quality control. Modeling Ecosystem Services, Benefits, and Risks. Participants and potential participants in Socio-Technical Ecosystems (STEs) could be greatly helped by frameworks, models, and methods to systematically describe the primary dimensions of value for this form of organizing, and ways of characterizing particular ecosystems in order to reason about tradeoffs in the many kinds of decisions that members make. This project will provide a framework for characterizing services, benefits, and risks for STEs at multiple scales, as well as conceptual models that can be used to reason about tradeoffs involved in ecosystem-level and participant-level decisions. Finally, it aims to provide a method for using the conceptual model in particular concrete decision-making contexts, which will guide information gathering, analysis and refinement of data, and the construction and evaluation of scenarios. After a successful planning meeting and formulation of an initial research agenda endorsed by the COASTE advisory board, we continue to recruit members and move toward submission of a full Center proposal. COASTE website: http://coaste.org/
