Open App Ecosystem and Collaborative Technology Alliance

If you look at the original OAE proposal, a suite of apps:

The Open App Ecosystem is a suite of integrated and open sourced apps which support transparent, democratic and decentralised organising.

And then it morphed, when lots of other people loved the idea and pushed and pulled in lots of different directions, as you can see starting to happen here:
https://www.loomio.org/d/zjURElS0/what-kind-of-culture-and-systems-do-we-want-in-this-loomio-group-

Thanks @strypey for your deeply reasoned feedback! I appreciate your push/prod to creative dialogue.

I note that Lynn's concept is quite different from that of @gregorycassel , in which the OAE is understood as a project to create a specific suite of apps, perhaps a whole software stack (apps + hosting infrastructure, Single Sign-on system etc), perhaps even a GNU-Linux distro that hosts the whole stack out-of-the-box (can you clarify the precise goal in your mind Greg?).

I reiterate that I don't want to create a specific 'suite' of apps with the name of Open App Ecosystem. I think OAE could be a good (untrademarked) name for an open source labeling standard which (1) is used without permission and (2) supports a simple, noncoercive and compassionate conflict resolution system for any apparently inappropriate uses of the label.

I note BTW that many tech standards such as http etc don't require any conflict resolution: by definition, you either observe their rules or they don't work! That's great, but I've always seen OAE and CTA goals as combining technical and ethical considerations. Ethical considerations, of course, can't be entirely coded into interoperability rules. Thus our longstanding challenges with OAE and CTA goals, although I'm confident this will eventually seem to be a brief hiccup of history.

As mentioned in my first recent comment here, even the lightweight development of an open (tech and ethical) standard "would require one or more agents to govern the development of the standard itself! " What I meant there was one or more designers or teams, which IMO always govern their own work either informally or via explicit structures. I do wish that this Loomio group would focus on developing one or more such teams. Of course I can't create that focus through personal desire-- nor can I spend much time cultivating it, because I have even more urgent goals.

BTW I am working to develop open source distributed application software stacks, and I'd eventually like for most stacks to consist entirely of apps which meet an OAE-type standard. However that work is autonomous from my interests here in developing one or more widely shared standards.

I'll add a comment in the main thread regarding the active proposal.

I reiterate that I don't want to create a specific 'suite' of apps with the name of Open App Ecosystem. I think OAE could be a good (untrademarked) name for an open source labeling standard

Thanks for these clarifications @gregorycassel . I think where I got confused was when you said:

the key concept to me is this group's (frequent) focus on a suite.

Rereading that comment in full, I can see now that you were talking about a suite of standards, but your use of the word "suite" threw me. In the context of software, "suite" has often been used to talk about swiss-army-knife apps like Open/ LibreOffice, or the original Mozilla (before Firefox and Thunderbird were spun off into separate apps Mozilla was a huge beast with a browser, email client, HTML composer, calendar etc).

If I understand correctly now, you're saying we need a set of standards for inter-operation between open apps (and suites of apps), one that can be documented and refined from practical experimentation between existing apps, and implemented by future apps that want to inter-operate. I agree! This is roughly what I mean by:

gathering knowldege about how dev teams and user groups can create Open App Ecosystems, and documenting pre-assembled toolsets that worked well for each distinct use case

Further, you see Open App Ecosystem as the name for this set of standards. This seems as good a name as any other.

What I meant there was one or more designers or teams, which IMO always govern their own work either informally or via explicit structures.

Again, if I understand you correctly, you are proposing that this Loomio group function as an informal standards incubator, with different teams using subgroups to work on different areas of inter-operation. For example, one team might work on realtime chat between apps, while another team might work on exchanging calendar data between apps. I'm guessing that most of this work would involve testing the use of existing protocols, and agreeing on standard ways of combining them for a given purpose, in order to avoid protocol proliferation.

Yep that's about where I am, although I might define a dual purpose for standards: technical and ethical interoperability. (Given that I define "interoperability" simply as mutual compatibility, and that certainly can apply to ethics as well as tech requirements.)

I'll need to come back to the rest of your comment (especially regarding the potentials of this Loomio group) later, because it deserves deeper consideration.

This is from Soumaya Ben Letaifa, a friend of Sensorica, It's about business ecosystems, but I think also might be instructive for our use of the term and our thinking about what it means, and whether we want more than one of them or already have more than one of them whether we want them or not.
https://www.academia.edu/10252910/The_uneasy_transition_from_supply_chains_to_ecosystems_The_value-creation_value-capture_dilemma

This is not meant as an argument for or against an "s". I voted to agree, but I really don't care very much.

Having finally found some time to reflect, I think my initial attachment to the OAE name (for an open interoperability & ethical standard) was reflexive and at least a little excessive. Certainly I'd agree that this group discusses a potentially unlimited number of systems, regardless of whether we use the term ecosystem for any of them. I'm currently leaning toward Open App System or Open App Standard as an alternative to OAE.

I still think that Open App Ecosystem is a better name for this group than Open App Ecosystems. For whatever it's worth however, I'm "unblocking" due to reduced personal concerns over future use of the OAE label, as well as recognition of the inclusive and respectful discussion here.

How about "open digital ecosystems"?

open digital ecosystems is more expansive than open app ecosystem(s). However if we're going to be expansive I'd probably prefer to go all the way and say "open tech".

Anyway, I'd prefer to define the precise goal of any project or team before getting picky about names/titles! I've been attached to the "open app" concept for years and I still am; however, that's a specific level of design/ organization which certainly doesn't cover everything in open technology. :)

Names are important to the degree that they sum up the goals and scope of a project. I agree with @gregorycassel that OAE works because an open ecosystem of open apps is the goal, and inter-operation between apps is the scope.

Replacing "app" with "digital" implies a much broader scope, with a corresponding need to involve a much wider cross-section of people than open app devs and users. We have a better chance of achieving practical results, as a new(ish) forum for informal standards work, if we focus on a much narrower scope than existing standards bodies like IETF or W3C.

I agree with @strypey on "digital". I came here to create open apps that could interoperate as ecosystems. I assumed they would be used, and often created, in human communities as well, and that is what seems to be happening with Communecter, DigLife, Fair Coop, and Moinho. And it looks like some of those community efforts could interconnect and share apps, as may happen soon with Communecter and Fair Coop.

I just nudged everyone who has not responded yet (but is part of this group) to vote. To me, since OAE actually has no governance doc or decision making process or constitution.... I’m not sure how valid any decision would be anyway? I think the first step towards collaboration would be to (try to?) define some of the above in order to galvanise a viable working group... ?But perhaps that’s a job for the CTA rather than OAE... because I like the way this group has existed for ages as a place to simply discuss ideas and ideals... but, that said, I do think it’s high time we sorted our s*** out and work out how to genuinely collaborate... 🤔

Hi @olisb what do you think should be sorted out and what do you want to collaborate on? (And do you think the "s" is really critical to any of that?)

As the discussion continues, I start to see a few attitudes that I think are important for an Open App Ecosystem, no matter what we call it. :)

1. An app ecosystem that is created in the context of a specific group needs to be completely open source, including documentation helpful for other groups to install it and adopt or adapt it. People should not assume that everyone should join their group or their installation, but rather see the value of freeing the software so other groups with different needs and cultures (organizational and other) can adopt it. It all should be part of the global commons because nobody can ever be completely right about what is needed for everyone. (I sense there is some disagreement on this, so I hope we can talk about it openly and figure out if we can collaborate, or if to agree to disagree for now, and see how things work out later.)

2. I think we need to make sure that we aren't thinking "monolith" in terms of an ecosystem, especially if that means more top-down. I think especially during this period of lots of experimentation and lots of unknowns, things will be very messy. And I don't know when they might start settling down. But if we all are striving to make the technology as flexible as possible in how it can connect to other apps, that can only help. An example: We have been developing ValueFlows to be a standard economic vocabulary, and most would agree that it is useful to have a standard vocabulary if you are trying to stitch together some quantity of current and future apps. But.... some apps have existing api's, some people feel they need more domain specific vocabulary (such as the food consortium people).... to the rescue, Communecter has been working on a vocabulary translator. Cool! For me, one ecosystem can be crazily networked, with many diverse centers. So it is more a question of developing bottom-up, but also looking for the connections; respecting group membranes, but not assuming any limits on where connections and interoperability might end up being useful.

The only caveat I would add is that open standards, by definition, can be implemented by proprietary apps too. Successful ones usually are, as both a result and a cause of their growing network effect.

So we had some discussion about the issue of fragmented groups of people. I pointed out that using streams of comments and replies, I believe is a primary component in creating a very expensive set of boundaries between similar organisations. Too expensive, imo, to fix without actually building an argument mapping tool that just grows out of a tool like loomio

There are some other ideas that are seminal. But the core one that was shared was to change the data architecture for everything one person in the open room at the end of the day on Friday said "thats what we are doing", I think they are part of this core group. Does anyone know who that is?

FYI @christopher7 I'd guess that your goals here are related to my "metadata-mapping" goals with some open prototypes such as Inclusive Design System and (more of a long term goal) Community Resource Description Framework.

I strongly agree that people get fragmented by, shall we say, excessive reliance on streams of comments and replies. Written discussions can be very helpful IMO, as long as they serve a limited developmental/ design role.