Proposed metrics on ecosystem health

Socio-technical ecosystems represent a complex and dynamic system of development distributed over individuals and organizations that act as collaborators, competitors, suppliers and users that mimic the predator-prey relationships in a natural ecosystem. Understanding the health of an ecosystem provides strategic information on the state and trajectory of that ecosystem. This paper instantiates and evaluates one proposed conceptual ecosystem health framework in the context of a research consortium managing the production of network analysis tools. We populated the conceptual ecosystem health framework with specific measures and applied that instantiation of the framework to the network analysis ecosystem surrounding the Cytoscape Consortium. We identified issues in both the ecosystem health framework and the Cytoscape Consortium that will drive our investigation and collection of data in the future. Current means of assessing ecosystem participants lack sophistication necessary to accurately quantify and reason about the impacts of orchestration and strategic planning in ecosystem health analysis, in addition to understanding the impacts of different types of actors participating in ecosystems.