Welcome to open culture of API Economy
API Economy is not a single domain business, but as the result of Community development, where the participants come together from multiple different domains. Successful Community creates around a complete business Ecosystem. To form a Community the people need to be Open to come out from their domains and comfort zones to form a cross-domain discussion, Community and Ecosystem. Are you ready to be open?
Movement of Openness
Openness has made world a better place to live, thanks to movement of openness in many levels across several domains. Software domain is one of the successful forerunners of the movement. Following examples witness the victories that Openness has established in the Software industry.
Open Source
Open Source is more than for Software only. Open Source principle has started from the software domain. Still today the Open Source is strongly associated with the Software. Opensource.com has driven the change in mindsets and generalized the principle for general use. They have defined the open source way very nicely:
“The open source way is about applying the principles of open source software development beyond software. Beyond technology. Opensource.com is about sharing how the open source way can change our world in the same way the open source model has changed software.”
Open Source Initiative, founded the software centric movement in 1998, celebrates now its 20 years journey in 2018. Their main message is
“We are the stewards of the Open Source Definition (OSD) and the community-recognized body for reviewing and approving licenses as OSD-conformant.”
The movement of Openness started from Software and it has been expanded to be possible for every domains by the principle of the open source ways.
Open Data
Another great thing happening is the Open Data area, where Open Data Handbook defines What is Open Data as follows.
The full Open Definition gives precise details as to what this means. To summarize the most important:
Availability and Access: the data must be available as a whole and at no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, preferably by downloading over the internet. The data must also be available in a convenient and modifiable form.
Re-use and Redistribution: the data must be provided under terms that permit re-use and redistribution including the intermixing with other datasets.
Universal Participation: everyone must be able to use, re-use and redistribute — there should be no discrimination against fields of endeavour or against persons or groups. For example, ‘non-commercial’ restrictions that would prevent ‘commercial’ use, or restrictions of use for certain purposes (e.g. only in education), are not allowed.
The biggest motivation for the definition is the interoperability, so that organizations are able to work together (to inter-operate), although the datasets may differ from each others.
Open API
What goes around comes around. Now we are back in the Software business. Real Minimum Viable Product is indeed an API. Smaller granularity you might find it difficult to create. APIs are the greatest super tools of the software industry.
Open API is a yet another offspring of the movement of Openness. No wonder because API is one of the hottest topics to create more business easily. There are actually a quite a few activities ongoing to define Open API.
Wikipedia has a traditional summary about Open API:
Open APIs have three main characteristics:
1. They are available for use by developers and other users with relatively few restrictions. Restrictions might include the necessity to register with the service providing the API.
2. They are typically backed by open data. Open data is freely available for everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control. An Open API may be free to use but the publisher may limit how the API data can be used.
3. They are based on an open standard.
This summary is clearly addressed to the Software domain experts.
TM Forum has also a great initiative of Open API manifesto, as part of movement of Openness. They invite the Software vendor and customer companies to make a commitment with the manifesto and Open APIs.
Open API Initiative has the most fresh approach. The definitions are very strongly addressed to software developers who are the domain experts. In fact, the definitions written in software, so they are human-readable and machine-readable. The whole definition guardian process can automated and done by the computers. The means are provided with OpenAPI Specification, inherited from the popular Swagger tools.
Many local organizational and even national efforts have taken place to clarity Open API for their needs. Clarity is essential to define basis for common goals and ways of doing thing. The local organizations may unite and reform their clarifications. Some commons, especially when the overall interest has been low, are created as a wakeup call to take further actions. One such Open API definition was created in Finland as avoinrajapinta.fi in late 2014.
Each of the definitions and clarifications are good moves to push the Software industry toward common goal of Open APIs. One of the challenge with multiple instances is that they all have some deviation from each others. The movement itself will create common focus and goal over time to unite the deviations. Anyhow, the possible deviation of Open API, is a domain specific challenge only and not considered as an obstacle for API Economy.
Open Summary
The movement of Openness has been used and applied on many more domains, than software only. The important keyword in all occasions it the “open”. The open as such is not usually self-explanatory term in the details, but it must be defined or manifested for the domain experts to share the common understanding in order to commit in it and align the actions accordingly.
Possible internal debates on whether to be or not to be open, strengthen further the commitment to the openness within the domain. Eventually “open” becomes everything, which is good for the domain experts. Commitment to openness units the domain experts to be stronger together.
The known secret of successful API Economy lies in the cross-domain collaboration, which invites the participants to join together regardless of their roots. The term API Economy in itself has brought two strangers API and Economy together, which is a great demonstration on how open the foundation of API Economy is. Welcome to open culture of API Economy!
Embracing the openness of API Economy, the next few blogs will liberate the API Economy even further.
Writer is an Apitalist of APInf Oy, helping organizations to participate in API Economy, as well as API and Application developers come together around API Management platforms to standardize APIs of the World.
