From Walled Garden
to Community Garden:
Collaborating in a Competitive World

yellow page directories), device manufacturers and data connection providers. We even have a name for this community: Services Provider Autonomic Collaboration Environment (SPACE). Many different players in the ecosystem would contribute both to the resources in this smart middleware and to the composition of mashup service products.

Management Requirements

Who will manage the membership? Who will vet the garden membership, collect the dues and fees, and distribute the rewards? Arguably network operators currently have the best-developed tools to evolve into a management capability for the Garden Clubs. But another option is that Garden Clubs themselves would evolve into mutual societies with independent management to perform this function, or even be initiated as for-profit independent enterprise.

Who will set global standards? A global industry organization – a Garden Forum? – could establish the library of core utility interfaces that the Core provides and Edge developed services use. Standardization trims the number of new interfaces developers must learn.

How about infrastructure and services management? The explosive universe of endpoints, connections, and services has become impossible to embrace with conventional management systems. As new services would continue to proliferate, perhaps even faster, could the Garden Club make matters even worse? If the industry gathers behind this Garden Club™ model, new infrastructure and service management facilities must be developed that function in this ever more complex environment. This then becomes another call for Autonomic Communications. As the autonomic communications technology matures and is deployed, the SPACE service grid will become self-managing and self-healing – yet, when problems occur that require human input or are beyond policy parameters of automatic response systems, core management components automatically assemble the correct response team in a shared group workspace with full data and tools to respond.

All services will eventually maintain an active connection to security watchdogs – utility security services that enforce security policies. Various services will also watch for and trap unauthorized intrusion - invoking automatic defense services when intrusion is discovered. Accounting services will be linked to security services, limiting fraud in this complex environment.