Information ecology is the application of ecological concepts for modeling the information society. It considers the dynamics and properties of the increasingly dense, complex and important digital informational environment. "Information ecology" often is used as metaphor, viewing the information space as an ecosystem, the information ecosystem.
Information ecology also makes a connection to the concept of collective intelligence and knowledge ecology ( Pór 2000 ). Eddy et al. (2014) use information ecology for science-policy integration in ecosystems-based management (EBM).
In The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom , a book published in 2006 and available under a Creative Commons license on its own wikispace, [1] Yochai Benkler provides an analytic framework for the emergence of the networked information economy that draws deeply on the language and perspectives of information ecology together with observations and analyses of high-visibility examples of successful peer production processes, citing Wikipedia as a prime example.
Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day in their book "Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart," ( Nardi & O’Day 1999 ) apply the ecology metaphor to local environments, such as libraries and schools, in preference to the more common metaphors for technology as tool, text, or system.
Nardi and O’Day's book represents the first specific treatment of information ecology by anthropologists. H.E. Kuchka [2] situates information within socially-distributed cognition of cultural systems. Casagrande and Peters [3] use information ecology for an anthropological critique of Southwest US water policy. Stepp (1999) [4] published a prospectus for the anthropological study of information ecology.
Information ecology was used as book title by Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak ( Davenport & Prusak 1997 ), with a focus on the organization dimensions of information ecology. There was also an academic research project at DSTC called Information ecology, concerned with distributed information systems and online communities.
Law schools represent another area where the phrase is gaining increasing acceptance, e.g. NYU Law School Conference Towards a Free Information Ecology [5] and a lecture series on Information ecology at Duke University Law School's Center for the Study of the Public Domain.
The field of library science has seen significant adoption of the term and librarians have been described by Nardi and O'Day as a "keystone species in information ecology", [6] [7] and references to information ecology range as far afield as the Collaborative Digital Reference Service of the Library of Congress, [8] to children's library database administrator in Russia.
Eddy et al. (2014) use principles of information ecology to develop a framework for integrating scientific information in decision-making in ecosystem-based management (EBM). Using a metaphor of how a species adapts to environmental changes through information processing, they developed a 3-tiered model that differentiates primary, secondary and tertiary levels of information processing, within both the technical and human domains.
Human ecology is an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary study of the relationship between humans and their natural, social, and built environments. The philosophy and study of human ecology has a diffuse history with advancements in ecology, geography, sociology, psychology, anthropology, zoology, epidemiology, public health, and home economics, among others.
Cultural ecology is the study of human adaptations to social and physical environments. Human adaptation refers to both biological and cultural processes that enable a population to survive and reproduce within a given or changing environment. This may be carried out diachronically, or synchronically. The central argument is that the natural environment, in small scale or subsistence societies dependent in part upon it, is a major contributor to social organization and other human institutions. In the academic realm, when combined with study of political economy, the study of economies as polities, it becomes political ecology, another academic subfield. It also helps interrogate historical events like the Easter Island Syndrome.
Bonnie A. Nardi is an emeritus professor of the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, where she led the TechDec research lab in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction and computer-supported cooperative work. She is well known for her work on activity theory, interaction design, games, social media, and society and technology. She was elected to the ACM CHI academy in 2013. She retired in 2018.
Starting in the early 1990s, James F. Moore originated the strategic planning concept of a business ecosystem, now widely adopted in the high tech industry. The basic definition comes from Jim Moore's book, The Death of Competition: Leadership and Strategy in the Age of Business Ecosystems.
Applied ecology is a sub-field within ecology that considers the application of the science of ecology to real-world questions. It is also described as a scientific field that focuses on the application of concepts, theories, models, or methods of fundamental ecology to environmental problems.
Commons-based peer production (CBPP) is a term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler. It describes a model of socio-economic production in which large numbers of people work cooperatively; usually over the Internet. Commons-based projects generally have less rigid hierarchical structures than those under more traditional business models.
Ecological anthropology is a sub-field of anthropology and is defined as the "study of cultural adaptations to environments". The sub-field is also defined as, "the study of relationships between a population of humans and their biophysical environment". The focus of its research concerns "how cultural beliefs and practices helped human populations adapt to their environments, and how people used elements of their culture to maintain their ecosystems". Ecological anthropology developed from the approach of cultural ecology, and it provided a conceptual framework more suitable for scientific inquiry than the cultural ecology approach. Research pursued under this approach aims to study a wide range of human responses to environmental problems.
Yochai Benkler is an Israeli-American author and the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He is also a faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. In academia he is best known for coining the term commons-based peer production and his widely cited 2006 book The Wealth of Networks.
Ethnoecology is the scientific study of how different groups of people living in different locations understand the ecosystems around them, and their relationships with surrounding environments.
Thomas Hayes "Tom" Davenport, Jr. is an American academic and author specializing in analytics, business process innovation, knowledge management, and artificial intelligence. He is currently the President’s Distinguished Professor in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, a Fellow of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, Co-founder of the International Institute for Analytics, and a Senior Advisor to Deloitte Analytics.
The ecosystem approach is a conceptual framework for resolving ecosystem issues. The idea is to protect and manage the environment through the use of scientific reasoning. Another point of the ecosystem approach is preserving the Earth and its inhabitants from potential harm or permanent damage to the planet itself. With the preservation and management of the planet through an ecosystem approach, the future monetary and planetary gain are the by-product of sustaining and/or increasing the capacity of that particular environment. This is possible as the ecosystem approach incorporates humans, the economy, and ecology to the solution of any given problem. The initial idea for an ecosystem approach would come to light during the second meeting at the Conference of the Parties (COP) it was the central topic in implementation and framework for the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), it would further elaborate on the ecosystem approach as using varies methodologies for solving complex issues.
The idea of a knowledge ecosystem is an approach to knowledge management which claims to foster the dynamic evolution of knowledge interactions between entities to improve decision-making and innovation through improved evolutionary networks of collaboration.
The Carr–Benkler wager between Yochai Benkler and Nicholas Carr concerned the question whether the most influential sites on the Internet will be peer-produced or price-incentivized systems.
Knowledge policies provide institutional foundations for creating, managing, and using organizational knowledge as well as social foundations for balancing global competitiveness with social order and cultural values. Knowledge policies can be viewed from a number of perspectives: the necessary linkage to technological evolution, relative rates of technological and institutional change, as a control or regulatory process, obstacles posed by cyberspace, and as an organizational policy instrument.
Industrial information economy is a term coined by Harvard University Professor Yochai Benkler. Benkler discusses this term in-depth in his 2006 book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is a book by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler published by Yale University Press on April 3, 2006. The book has been recognized as one of the most influential works of its time concerning the rise and impact of the Internet on the society, particularly in the sphere of economics. It also helped popularize the term Benkler coined few years earlier, the commons-based peer production (CBPP).
A digital ecosystem is a distributed, adaptive, open socio-technical system with properties of self-organization, scalability and sustainability inspired from natural ecosystems. Digital ecosystem models are informed by knowledge of natural ecosystems, especially for aspects related to competition and collaboration among diverse entities. The term is used in the computer industry, the entertainment industry, and the World Economic Forum.
Ecosystem-based management is an environmental management approach that recognizes the full array of interactions within an ecosystem, including humans, rather than considering single issues, species, or ecosystem services in isolation. It can be applied to studies in the terrestrial and aquatic environments with challenges being attributed to both. In the marine realm, they are highly challenging to quantify due to highly migratory species as well as rapidly changing environmental and anthropogenic factors that can alter the habitat rather quickly. To be able to manage fisheries efficiently and effectively it has become increasingly more pertinent to understand not only the biological aspects of the species being studied, but also the environmental variables they are experiencing. Population abundance and structure, life history traits, competition with other species, where the stock is in the local food web, tidal fluctuations, salinity patterns and anthropogenic influences are among the variables that must be taken into account to fully understand the implementation of a "ecosystem-based management" approach. Interest in ecosystem-based management in the marine realm has developed more recently, in response to increasing recognition of the declining state of fisheries and ocean ecosystems. However, due to a lack of a clear definition and the diversity involved with the environment, the implementation has been lagging. In freshwater lake ecosystems, it has been shown that ecosystem-based habitat management is more effective for enhancing fish populations than management alternatives.
Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) describes indigenous and other traditional knowledge of local resources. As a field of study in Northern American anthropology, TEK refers to "a cumulative body of knowledge, belief, and practice, evolving by accumulation of TEK and handed down through generations through traditional songs, stories and beliefs. It is concerned with the relationship of living beings with their traditional groups and with their environment." Indigenous knowledge is not a universal concept among various societies, but is referred to a system of knowledge traditions or practices that are heavily dependent on "place". Such knowledge is used in natural resource management as a substitute for baseline environmental data in cases where there is little recorded scientific data, or may complement Western scientific methods of ecological management.
A social-ecological system consists of 'a bio-geo-physical' unit and its associated social actors and institutions. Social-ecological systems are complex and adaptive and delimited by spatial or functional boundaries surrounding particular ecosystems and their context problems.
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