A local ecosystem will have these main components:
People with different interests, motivations, experience, and disposition and skills. Some will have a wide network of relationships, some less; some will share ideas openly, others not.
Groups and organisations that may or may not have a culture of sharing, good or poor internal communications, hierarchical or networked structures.
Businesses, large and small
Networks that define the relationships between people and organisations.
Content in different formats and media: ranging from books and essays to blog posts and tweets; highly structured or snippets; formal or informal.
Types of exchange which may be conversational or formal; stories or documents.
Social spaces where people meet or just bump into each other - churches and mosques, supermarkets, pubs and school gates, community centres and sports venues.
Online platforms for sharing: big systems like Google, Facebook and Twitter that provide the platform for much exchange; closed systems within organisations; self-hosted systems.
Tools: social media and other tools that allow us to share content on platforms as well as face-to-face conversations, phone calls, paper-based communications, radio, TV.
Resources in the community - which may be places, funds, repositories of knowledge and expertise, for example.
Activities using resources, undertaken by people and organisations, that may become projects.
Ecosystem components