An Introduction to Software Ecosystems

This chapter defines and presents different kinds of software ecosystems. The focus is on the development, tooling and analytics aspects of software ecosystems, i.e., communities of software developers and the interconnected software components (e.g., projects, libraries, packages, repositories, plug-ins, apps) they are developing and maintaining. The technical and social dependencies between these developers and software components form a socio-technical dependency network, and the dynamics of this network change over time. We classify and provide several examples of such ecosystems. The chapter also introduces and clarifies the relevant terms needed to understand and analyse these ecosystems, as well as the techniques and research methods that can be used to analyse different aspects of these ecosystems.Comment: Preprint of chapter "An Introduction to Software Ecosystems" by Tom Mens and Coen De Roover, published in the book "Software Ecosystems: Tooling and Analytics" (eds. T. Mens, C. De Roover, A. Cleve), 2023, ISBN 978-3-031-36059-6, reproduced with permission of Springer. The final authenticated version of the book and this chapter is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36060-

The Anesthesia Continuing Education Market and the Value Creation From a Sustainable Unified Platform

Practicing anesthesia professionals in the United States are all governed by various profession-specific regulatory bodies that mandate continuing education (CE) requirements. To date, no unified resource exists for anesthesia professionals (i.e., Anesthesiologists, Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists, and Anesthesiologist Assistants) to explore the CE offerings available within the marketplace. This study endeavored to convey the potential value of a unified anesthesia CE resource. It investigated how to cultivate a sustainable platform to potentially improve how anesthesia professionals search available CE offerings and to potentially enhance how anesthesia CE providers reach anesthesia professionals. This qualitative study was conducted utilizing an integrative review of the literature. The key concepts identified and investigated were network effect, segmentation, first to market, best of breed, search costs, transaction costs, minimally viable product, evolutionary phases of platforms, platform theory, platform business model, platform economy, and types of platforms. Inductive content analysis was chosen as the organizational method for the resultant qualitative data. The goal of the analysis was to create a conceptual, practical, and strategically applicable platform paradigm for the anesthesia CE marketplace driven by the insights and amalgamations from the literature. The analyzed concepts, dimensions, and indicators of platform successes and their applications potentially facilitate anesthesia professionals’ CE explorations and CE providers’ marketing efforts, as well as contextualize the overarching impacts and implications onto the anesthesia CE industry and beyond. The conclusion portrays these impacts and implications