Accelerating the Impact of a Digital Ecosystem for the Planet

A few days ago David Jensen & Jillian Campbell published a new think piece entitled The Promise & Peril of a Digital Ecosystem for the Planet, the core thesis of which is:

• Humanity is facing a near-term existential threat from ecological degradation
• A sufficiently coherent ecosystem of digital tool creators, focused on monitoring & modeling the wellbeing of humanity and our planetary ecology is essential to respond to this threat.
• To be broadly impactful in the way that is needed, this ecosystem needs to create highly usable tools that are strongly focused on providing actionable intelligence for key user groups, particularly those in government roles around the world.
• We also know, however, that there are a variety of challenges to be addressed to get there, including: ensuring the quality, transparency & openness of data & algorithms; the risk of data monopolies; and the need for protection of individual privacy, data security, and intellectual property.
• We thus believe that it is imperative for humanity to create a distributed digital coalition focused on planetary wellbeing (following the example of CERN)

So then, as I was reflecting on this, as well as on one of the images included in the paper, I started thinking about the role of the secretariat to increase coherent action within the ecosystem, towards the larger, shared goal - and here is where I ended up:

A Digital Ecosystem X-Prize

As I reflect on this image, what I see the need for is: A Digital Ecosystem for the Planet X-Prize.

The purpose of the digital ecosystem is to improve decision-making, by a broad range of stakeholders to achieve sustainability outcomes.

This means that the folks working at the insights & applications layer have to create tools that truly address the decision-making needs of key users.

Currently, I see a gap where many of the tools being created are not well-tailored to the decision-making needs of key stakeholder groups. And yet to have this emerging digital ecosystem achieve its potential, this gap needs to be closed.

So I see that one of the core functions of the secretariat for such a digital ecosystem is to identify & prioritize key unmet needs that such an ecosystem is there to serve, to conduct user research to understand the decisions that need to be made, the decision making processes that leads to those decisions, and thus what the tools need to provide to support the decision making process.

And then, at the Insights & Applications layer, the role of the secretariat is to catalyze & support strongly user-decision-centered innovation, based on this needs analysis.

I believe this looks like a Digital Ecosystem for the Planet X-Prize. A series of challenges, a supportive network, and a prize fund to encourage entrepreneurial teams from around the world to take on some of these challenges - and rapidly fill the gaps in the digital ecosystem in a way that leads to far more effective, data-driven, global decision making around our planetary home.