Ecosystemic Evolution Fed by Smart Systems

Information Society is advancing along a route of ecosystemic evolution. ICT and Internet advancements, together with the progression of the systemic approach for enhancement and application of Smart Systems, are grounding such an evolution. The needed approach is therefore expected to evolve by increasingly fitting into the basic requirements of a significant general enhancement of human and social well-being, within all spheres of life (public, private, professional). This implies enhancing and exploiting the net-living virtual space, to make it a virtuous beneficial integration of the real-life space. Meanwhile, contextual evolution of smart cities is aiming at strongly empowering that ecosystemic approach by enhancing and diffusing net-living benefits over our own lived territory, while also incisively targeting a new stable socio-economic local development, according to social, ecological, and economic sustainability requirements. This territorial focus matches with a new glocal vision, which enables a more effective diffusion of benefits in terms of well-being, thus moderating the current global vision primarily fed by a global-scale market development view. Basic technological advancements have thus to be pursued at the system-level. They include system architecting for virtualization of functions, data integration and sharing, flexible basic service composition, and end-service personalization viability, for the operation and interoperation of smart systems, supporting effective net-living advancements in all application fields. Increasing and basically mandatory importance must also be increasingly reserved for human–technical and social–technical factors, as well as to the associated need of empowering the cross-disciplinary approach for related research and innovation. The prospected eco-systemic impact also implies a social pro-active participation, as well as coping with possible negative effects of net-living in terms of social exclusion and isolation, which require incisive actions for a conformal socio-cultural development. In this concern, speed, continuity, and expected long-term duration of innovation processes, pushed by basic technological advancements, make ecosystemic requirements stricter. This evolution requires also a new approach, targeting development of the needed basic and vocational education for net-living, which is to be considered as an engine for the development of the related ‘new living know-how’, as well as of the conformal ‘new making know-how’. The papers of the special issue are significant contributions samples within the general ecosystemic view above highlighted. The first group of papers ([1–5]) pertain the focus on human and social factors through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches, which look for enhancing quality of life supported by the smart system environment. The second group of papers ([6–9]) pertains to some relevant technological infrastructure enhancements, based on exploitation of the Internet of Things the 5G network paradigms. Several contributed papers widely point out also the relevance of smart city context for grounding and developing the ecosystemic approach, through advancement of both intangible and tangible infrastructures. Contributions made by each paper is below outlined. The first paper—by Martelli [1]—exposes and grounds an initiative point of view about new education needed for smart citizenship. Education has to cope indeed with citizen awareness lack. The paper’s primary concern is about privacy and freedom requirements connected with the knowledge bases generated by the IT services. For such a purpose, an original education methodology