[CALL] City as Developmental Platform
City as a Service and Beyond
Ten days ago, Gregory D Esau published an article titled City as a Service. He uses a term called NPE for his article. NPE stands for Networks, Platforms, and Ecosystems.
In 2011, Marc Andreessen famously wrote a prescient claim that “software is eating the world.”
Software as a Service was beginning to bloom.
In the year 2022, this has evolved into platforms are eating the world.
Make no mistake about it, Networks, Platforms and Ecosystems (NPE) are the defining forces and economic principles that are shaping the future.
No organisation, be it public, private or citizen based can afford to be ignorant of the degree of influence NPEs are having on business, society and governance.
As a thirty year veteran of covering this territory as both a professional observer and ecosystem designer, I can tell you flat out that I’ve yet to meet anyone at the civic level or enterprise level who fully comprehends the consequences of their lack of understanding.
Venture Capitalists are notoriously weak on the very fundamentals upon which they portend to invest their clients money.
This void of knowledge is having untold costs and lost opportunities for business and society.
You can find more details in his original article. I really like the term NPE because it offers a space to connect different approaches and perspectives.
If we use the diagram below, then the term NPE is a native vocabulary.
Both “Themes of Practice” and “Culture” share “Controlled Vocabulary” and “Native Vocabulary”, but “Langue (language)” only belongs to “Culture”.
Langue and parole is a theoretical linguistic dichotomy distinguished by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics.
Langue refers to the abstract system of language while parole means concrete speech.
I also developed a typology of Vocabulary to discuss the complexity of these entities.
There are some themes behind “Action”, but “Action” does directly refer to Vocabulary. Once you use Vocabulary, you start “Discourse”.
Parole (speech) and Discourse can be understood as the same thing. Both refer to Native Vocabulary and Controlled Vocabulary.
Langue (language) only refers to Curated Vocabulary.
This is the newest version of the “Themes of Practice” approach. It offers a solution to explain the relationship between Culture, Themes of Practice, and Language.
Now let’s see an example of Controlled Vocabulary: Developmental Platform. See the diagram below.
What does the term “Developmental Platform” mean?
The concept of Developmental Platform is defined as an intermediate concept for connecting theory and practice for interdisciplinary developmental study.
It is a Controlled Vocabulary for my 2021 book (draft) Platform for Development: The Ecology of Adult Development in the 21st Century.
The Platform for Development framework refers to an intersection between digital platforms and adult development. I have been paying attention to these two domains for over ten years. As a participant in digital platforms, I am both a user, a curator and a maker. As a participant in adult development, I have founded several non-profit online communities which aim to support the life development of university students and young professionals.
In the past several years, I also developed several models to guide my reflections on practical experiences on digital platforms and adult development. For example, I was attracted to biographical studies since I wrote my first learning autobiography in 2015. In order to help a friend, I developed a framework called Career Landscape which is inspired by Activity Theory, Communities of Practice, and other ideas in 2016. I recently reconstructed the framework with more theoretical resources and the outcome is a new method named the Life-as-Activity approach.
On the other side, I have been working on developing several models for reflecting on digital platforms. I shared these models with my co-workers and friends. In 2019, I started sharing some models on Medium. The Social Platform Experience Design (#SocialPxD) framework is the first one.
However, these models are separate. The Platform for Development is my first model which combines these two topics together. The major theoretical resources behind the framework are Activity Theory (the project-oriented approach, Andy Blunden, 2014), Social Domains Theory (Derek Layder, 1997), Ecological Psychology (James Gibson, 1979), and Self-Determination Theory (Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, 1971, 2017). I was also inspired by Knud Illeris’ How We Learn (2007) and John Hagel’s The Power of Platform (2015).
Though the original inspiration of the Platform for Development framework is digital platforms, I don’t want to limit the scope of the framework inside the domain of digital technological platforms. The P4D framework is expected to apply to various domains such as Startup Ecosystems, Brand and Communication, Community Engagement, Content Curation, Theoretical Traditions, Knowledge Platforms, etc.
In other words, I need an interdisciplinary definition of “Platform” for this framework. Thus, I defined a new concept called Developmental Platform in order to avoid misunderstanding.
As an interdisciplinary concept, the term Developmental Platform refers to a social environment that could strongly support adult development in various ways. There are three keywords in this definition:
- social environment
- strongly support
- adult development
The term “social environment” is a rough term. It can refer to traditional social structures such as organization and community. I also consider digital platforms and other emergent social contexts as social environments.
The term “strongly support” divides social environments into two groups from the perspective of strongness. Any social environment could support people, however, there are only a few social environments that could strongly support people. Thus, we can consider some strong social environments as platforms.
The term “adult development” is a solid term in developmental science. According to Wikipedia, “Adult development encompasses the changes that occur in biological and psychological domains of human life from the end of adolescence until the end of one’s life. These changes may be gradual or rapid and can reflect positive, negative, or no change from previous levels of functioning.” Thus, the Developmental Platform highlights the perspective of developmental science.
Originally, I used the following Venn diagram to discuss the context of Developmental Context.
Gregory D Esau inspired me to connect City as a new context of Developmental Platform. In this way, we can apply the Platform-for-Development framework to City as a Service.
This is a perfect match!
Why?
Because I used an ecological approach to develop the Platform-for-Development framework, especially the Infoniche model. See the diagram below.
Readers may know I have been working on the Ecological Practice approach since March 2019 when I finished the draft of Curativity: The Ecological Approach to Curatorial Practice. The Ecological Practice approach is inspired by James J. Gibson’s Ecological Psychology, Roger Barker’s Behavior Settings Theory, Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Ecology of Human Development, and practice theories. There are two goals behind the Ecological Practice approach:
- 1) Expanding Ecological Psychology from the native natural environment to the modern digital environment.
- 2) Expanding Ecological Psychology from perception-centered psychological analysis to social practice analysis.
In May 2020, I wrote the draft of After Affordance: The Ecological Approach to Human Action in which I proposed several new theoretical ideas for the above tasks. I spent one chapter introducing the Infoniche framework. After reviewing Gibson’s idea of Niche, Barker’s idea of Behavior Settings, and Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological Systems, I coined a new term Infoniche and developed an analytical framework for understanding ecological niches in the information age.
The term “niche” is originally from ecology, Gibson redefines it from the perspective of ecological psychology. According to Gibson, “Ecologists have the concept of a niche. A species of animal is said to utilize or occupy a certain niche in the environment. This is not quite the same as the habitat of the species; a niche refers more to how an animal lives than to where it lives. I suggest that a niche is a set of affordances. The natural environment offers many ways of life, and different animals have different ways of life. The niche implies a kind of animal, and the animal implies a kind of niche. Note the complementarity of the two. But note also that the environment as a whole with its unlimited possibilities existed prior to animals. The physical, chemical, meteorological, and geological conditions of the surface of the earth and the pre-existence of plant life are what make animal life possible. They had to be invariant for animals to evolve.” (1979/2015, pp.120–121)
Following Gibson’s definition of niche, I coined a new term Infoniche which is defined as a set of potential action possibilities such as affordances and supportances. The part of “info” means the new version of niche aims to expand Gibson’s idea into the information age and digital environments. However, I want to claim that Infoniche doesn’t only refer to information environments or digital environments, but to both traditional environments and digital environments. Moreover, the Infoniche framework also expands Gibson’s idea from the natural environment to the social environment by working with the concept of Supportance.
Unlike Roger Barker, Gibson doesn’t develop a systematic analysis framework for his version of niche. Inspired by Barker’s work on the theory of Behavior Settings, I develop a concrete analysis framework for applying the concept of Infoniche to empirical studies.
You can find more details in The Infoniche Model.
City is a special type of Developmental Platform for knowledge workers. It connects to other types of Developmental platforms too.
Now we can explore the “Person—City” relationship with the Platform-foe-Development framework.
The subtitle of my 2021 book Platform for Development is The Ecology of Adult Development in the 21st Century.
Now The Ecology has a new meaning, we should consider City as a significant part of the Ecology.
