Ecosystem

Full Title or Meme

A collection of living and non-living components what work together in the real-world to increase the information content of the local environment.

Nature must not win the game, but she cannot lose.
And whenever the conscious mind clings to hard and fast concepts and gets caught in its own rules and regulations 
- as is unavoidable and of the essence of civilized consciousness -
nature pops up with her inescapable demands.
-- Carl Jung

Context

• The primary example of an Ecosystem is the world, which itself is broken in to smaller ecosystem that depend the existence of the world ecosystem.
• Likewise, the world is dependent on the ecosystem of the galaxy which is itself dependent on the ecosystem of the universe, which is dependent on the physical laws made known at creation.
• From the General Theory of Living Systems we know that the material components of life are matched with information components, each dependent on the other.
• From the Identity Model we learn that we humans need Identifiers (names) for anything that we wish to discuss, from other people to corporations and even computer systems.
• Existing definition: An ecological community considered together with the nonliving factors of its environment as a unit.
• Another name is Metasystem from early paper on User Centric Identity

  Information systems that co-operate to originate, control and consume identity information have been called identity systems. The evolution of the Internet requires increased interoperability of these systems. Such interoperability demands an abstract model that encompasses the characteristics of all co-operating identity systems. We call this abstract model the Identity Metasystem.

Types of Ecosystems

• The Identity Ecosystem is the primary topic of this wiki and is described in that wiki page.
• The Natural Ecosystem is all that existed prior to civilization. That does include primitive tribes which seems to be the natural state of humankind.
• The Legal Ecosystem is of interest once a strong central government is established. Prior to that the rule of law is not enforced and life is nasty, brutish and short. "The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes there has never been peace in the world. And before history began murderous strife was severe and unending."
• The Financial Ecosystem is enabled by the legal ecosystem which gives it more or laissez-faire authority to run its own affairs.

Man's Natural Ecosystem

• Humans were evolved to fit into an existing Ecosystem and so is naturally endowed to survive in a tribal society with all sorts of external variable that we not in their control.

Problems

• Everything is in flux. You cannot step twice in the same river, for it is not the same river and you are not the same person.
• We need to know the state of affairs at any given time to plot our own course in life.
• As with any General Theory of Living Systems components of the Ecosystem must be protected from threats that are also a part of the Ecosystem. For example viruses attack natural as well as identity ecosystems by inserting their own programming into components that have not been protected.

Solutions

• We create a Framework for knowledge which is purely an invention of our own collective minds about the way that existing Ecosystem functions.
• We use that Framework to build a new one about how we would like future Ecosystems to function and use that to reason about how to introduce changes that will solve known problems with the existing Ecosystem.
• The page Federated Ecosystem considers how to partition the solution into federations, which can be viewed as local ecosystems, where local is purely virtual.