3.1 Long-term sustainability

In addition to the challenges mentioned in the last page, anti-rival cases may face difficulties with long-term sustainability. Anti-rival ecosystems not only benefit from increased usage and membership, but they also require consistent participation from ecosystem members.

Many ecosystems suffer from declining user engagement and participation – this is a common issue in open source, digital commons, and P2P systems. There are four main areas that challenge the long-term sustainability of an ecosystem:

• Provision: Are providers continuously contributing to the system?
• Appropriation: Are consumers (or appropriators) continuously consuming the product of output of the system?
• Revitalization: Are there new contributors to take the place of those who become disengaged or leave?
• Equitability: Is the workload of providers fairly distributed? Is the system too reliant on one or a few providers?

These challenges largely relate to need for positive participation and collaboration among community members. Possible methods for incentivizing participation can include:

• Acknowledgement and reputation: giving recognition to contributors builds up their reputation
• Decision-making rights: by offering decision-making power to ecosystem members, they may become more incentivized to contribute as they will have a sense of ownership over the ecosystem
• Advertising and curation: advertising and curation puts a focus on what you want members to see, whether that is new/potential members, or those who are already taking part
• Financial gain: providing financial compensation for contributions is common for employees and contractors (via a salary or wage)

This is not an exhaustive list, but it highlights the need for intervention to promote continuous and sustainable participation. Additionally, the above list shows that rival goods (such as financial incentivization, i.e. money) can have its place in an anti-rival system.

The challenges included in this unit have been identified by and adapted from Mindel, Mathiassen and Rai (2018), in their paper “The sustainability of polycentric information commons.”