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Collective Experiences:

An influence of socio-economics on architectural evolution


Michael Boniface (mjb@it-innovation.soton.ac.uk)
University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre

ICT SESERV (http://www.seserv.org)

Contributed as input to the workshop 3rd FIArch Workshop1

Introduction

A question that has been asked by the FIArch group:

“Is there one influence from socio-economics on architectural evolution and not the influence of use /
deployment of current technologies on short term strategic / commercial interests from providers
and network operators?”

The question contains two statements 1) Influence of socio-economics on architectural evolution


and 2) Influence of technology on short term interests of network operators. The FIArch group is
interested in 1) and not 2).

Statement 1) takes the position of analysing how socio-economic factors can influence change in
architecture. Such factors and trends are broad including aspects such as acceleration of societal
processes, increased mobility and globalisation [2]. Here technology becomes an enabler for things
that individuals, organisations and societies want to achieve. Architecture is defined by [3] as “a
formal grouping of function space, a state space and objects/information, as well as their respective
distribution that characterises their domain”. Evolution is defined by [3] as “incremental and reactive
additions” and is seen as a path for redesigning today’s Internet architecture. We are concerned
with the process by which systems change, adapting to the marketplace and inheriting
characteristics from pre-existing programs. This is open-ended evolution and is characterized by high
uncertainty [4]. While aspects of the new architecture direction are known, business, technical, and
market conditions prevent architects to shape a clear architecture a priori. The architecture focus of
open evolution is flexibility and management of uncertainty becomes a critical aspect of open
evolution.

1
http://www.future-internet.eu/home/fisa-futureinternetsupportactions/fiarch/fiarch-3rd-workshop.html
2
A full list trends is available within the EC report Social Impact of ICT
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/eeurope/i2010/docs/eda/social_impact_of_ict.pdf
3
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/foi/docs/current_internet_limitations_v9.pdf
4
There are different types of architecture evolution
(http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1648&context=compsci&sei-
redir=1#search=%22example+of+architectural+evolution%22) in addition to open-ended:
maintenance focused: aims to ensure an architecture that is fit enough to weather different classes
of changes, fixes, and new requirements
close-ended: is where the characteristics of the current and envisioned system’s architectures are
known.

©University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre 2011


Statement 2) comes at it from a different perspective looking at how technology influences short
term business strategy. This is starts from a position of technological determinism which claims that
socio-economic outcomes, in our case a network operator’s strategic interests, are shaped by
technology. Unlike architecture above “technology” is not defined by [2].

The distinction between technology and architecture is important. According to the Oxford English
Dictionary:

• Architecture: “The conceptual structure and overall logical organization of a computer or


computer-based system from the point of view of its use or design; a particular realization of
this.”
• Technology: “The product of such application; technological knowledge or know-how; a
technological process, method, or technique. Also: machinery, equipment, etc., developed
from the practical application of scientific and technical knowledge; an example of this. Also
in extended use.” Or if you like Wikipedia “Technology is the usage and knowledge of tools,
techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or serve
some purpose”

Technology is what network operators build, sell and/or operate to make money where architecture
describes, through abstract system models, the structure and behaviour of technology. It is
therefore architectural evolution that is important for longer term strategic decision making of
network operators.

Socio-economic influences on architectural evolution

There are many socio-economic influences that have and will continue to impact the evolution of
architecture. In recent years, we have seen cloud computing succeed where Grid computing failed
by directly addressing socio-economic concerns. Machine abstraction (lower level than with Grid
computing) was designed to simplify integration with applications and reduce the complexity of
federation between providers and consumers. Cloud computing made computational outsourcing
easy for consumers and also provided measures to ensure providers could maximise utilisation of
resources. Cloud computing did not attempt to solve all challenges (unlike Grids) but clouds did
ruthlessly focus on simplicity and cost effectiveness principles with major success.

A socio-economic influence on architectural evolution in the Future Internet is the need to offer
collective experiences to consumers and this is at the heart of many new business models.
Traditional business models that place digital information as the primary asset (through, for
example, content downloads), have largely failed to deliver due to the difficulty in protecting value
in digital goods. Providers of digital services are now looking to create value by linking people to
each other and to locations (both real and virtual) in such a way as to capture the popular
imagination, and exploit the needs of consumers to share their experiences, thus creating new
channels for revenue creation. To create such experiences requires innovative applications [5] and
also significant capabilities within network and content management infrastructures as providers
attempt to deliver guaranteed QoS and enhanced QoE to communities that dynamically organise
themselves around socially distributed, fixed and mobile content. These additional demands will

5
ftp://ftp.cordis.europa.eu/pub/fp7/ict/docs/netmedia/research-on-future-media-internet-2009-4072_en.pdf

©University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre 2011


require investment in infrastructure but the expectation is that by linking digital media and real-
world experience, consumers will be prepared to make longer lasting and greater financial
commitments.

The influence of “a collective experience“ on architectural evolution is interesting. We can express


the general principles for successful and resilient communities (digital and real-world):

• Choice and empowerment: promoting freedom whilst encouraging personal responsibility,


helping those who cannot be responsible for themselves
• Trust: lies at the heart of all relationships we should do everything possible to establish and
maintain the trust between stakeholders
• Integrity: to promote truth as the basis for stimulating trust and establishing reputation and
dependability
• Transparency: promoting accountability of actions
• Authenticity: helping people behave in accordance with their values and those shared by
the society they live in

We can then explore how socio-economic aspects of collective experiences can influence design
objectives for the FI, examples are given below:

• Accessibility: collective experiences take place at specific locations (you cannot virtualise a
sports venue or city location) that constrain the way that individuals behave, thus the
expected outcome of a service (e.g. usability, performance, scalability, legality, etc) also
depends on the environment, the community behaviour of consumers and the overarching
social/ethical framework within which they are operating. Future Networks will need to
move beyond obligations and commitments encoded in bi-lateral SLAs to services
supporting concepts associated with management of localised and physical community value
and interests. The uncertainty is concerned with the evolution (i.e. values change over time)
and perception of value (i.e. personal and cultural values is a matter of perspective) and how
values can be expressed, maintained and ideally amplified by Future Networks.
• Resilience6: user behaviour plays a significant role in the construction of community
services. There are users who are cooperative or collaborative in their dealings with others,
those who behave selfishly and consume others’ resources with little or no contribution of
their own, and malicious users whose goal is to attack and sabotage the system. Future
Networks will need to encourage personal responsibility within peer groups as well as
between government-citizen (i.e. citizenship). Proportionate and economically viable
surveillance methods will be required to classify behaviour, and then used by society and
law enforcement agencies for dealing with cybercrime and to enforce cyber sanctions. The
uncertainty is concerned the evolution of rights and responsibly, for example data
protection law (e.g. cloud and data protection7), to ensure socially and ethical systems are
developed from the dimension of the European Convention on Human Rights

6
http://sites.google.com/site/seservtest1/fise-conversation/resilientcommunitiesanddigitaljail
7

http://www.edps.europa.eu/EDPSWEB/webdav/site/mySite/shared/Documents/EDPS/Publications/Speeches/
2010/10-04-13_Speech_Cloud_Computing_EN.pdf

©University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre 2011

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