Digital environment for material commons-based peer production - with Sensorica

General Chat App Ideas
#1

Objective

Build a digital environment for the Sensorica OVN (open value network), hosted on Holo. This environment will lead to a generic template, composed of basic modules, which can be used, remixed and branded for other applications, allowing them to link with other existing applications (including Sensorica) in a fractal way, enabling locally adaptive flows of resources, incentives, agents.

Incentives for Holo and Holochain developers

  • Get paid for contributing to this initiative.
  • Acquire a stake in Sensorica projects.
  • Increase the visibility of Holo by leveraging Sensorica’s klout with over a decade of development of material peer production practices.
  • Sensorica and its peer production practices can lead to a killer hApp on Holo, making the network more valuable and, in the short run, increase the value of HOT.
  • Perhaps the best use case for HoloREA.

Read the full proposal here

@artbrock @pospi @lucas

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#2

I’m an accountant with interest in REA (been reading a bit on this topic), how can I contribute with this interesting initiative?

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#3

You should ping @lynnfoster or @pospi - I guess they can answer your question how you can engage

#4

Hi @redmonski , we’d be happy to explore that with you. What would be the best way based on what you know so far?

A brief sketch of the landscape might help to start thinking about it:

  • Sensorica is currently using an application called NRP (Network Resource Planning, or ERP for networks) that is based on REA, which was started back in 2012. It was done as a working prototype, and does work, but is showing many signs of age.
  • Sensorica’s application, along with others, was input to an implementation-level REA vocabulary called Valueflows, starting around 2015. Although Valueflows was created in the software community, it is also in frequent communication with the academic REA accounting community. (And Bill McCarthy has even visited Sensorica. :slight_smile: )
  • Holo-REA is a Holochain based application framework intended to be used as a generic “backend” for various REA-based economic applications. It exposes the Valueflows vocabulary for different user interfaces for that purpose. All of this will involve accounting.
  • Sensorica has been interested in Holochain for some time. As you see in this thread, they are now actively looking for collaboration to replace their old NRP with a new REA-based distributed application.
  • This is part of a growing software ecosystem intended to support distributed economic networks which can communicate using Valueflows/REA.
  • There are a few conversations going on specifically related to how REA feeds standard accounting reports from operational data.
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#5

I’ve read McCarthy’s paper and also came across Valueflows, back when I was researching on triple-entry accounting. I guess I can be of help on developing the Holo-REA framework as it involves accounting.

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#6

A related blog post mentioning triple-entry accounting, distributed ledgers, and Holochain

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#7

@redmonski do you have any knowledge of or experience with this kind of thing - SEEA, Material Flow Accounting? Or other methods to account for environmental impacts?

#8

I’ve read through the article and the related links. The single-entry version of REA is interesting.
As what I understand single-entry arises from the independent view / supply chain view, while dependent / local views can still subsist in the protocol (in my opinion should still be relevant). I maybe wrong, but i think traditional accounting reports may still apply. Or perhaps new accounting standards will arise to cater this “independent view”.

Boyle’s GLR could be the same as with McCarthy’s idea of a “centrally defined database able to support multiple “views” of itself”. Happy to see Boyle’s contribution getting appreciated and his ideas getting discussed in the linked paper. As an accountant, I can relate more to his views or TEA version.

#9

The original REA paper https://www.williamemccarthy.com/s/REA-Accounting-Model_A-Generalized-Framework-for-Accounting-Systems-in-a-Shared-Data-Environment_198.pdf was single entry single-agent (person or organization). The independent view evolved in the late 1990’s. They are all single-entry but with enough structure and relationships so you can derive all the usual accounting reports programmatically.

Both are true. @lynnfoster posted a link to one of the new ones, “global material flow accounting”, in this thread on May 7.

Yup. Todd doesn’t get enough credit.

#10

I’m currently reading the manual. Unfortunately, I don’t have experience in this field of accounting.

#11

I’m currently reading the manual. Unfortunately, I don’t have experience in this field of accounting.

Please, only if you are interested. I should have been clear that my question didn’t actually relate to Sensorica’s request, and probably started another thread. The conversation it does relate to is with someone who is not in this forum who is interested in environmental accounting with REA and with community currencies (and is an economics professor), and was wondering about this and other methods that have been developed for that. And there you were, an actual accountant!

If you are interested, we can pick that up in another place. But I don’t mean to take you off of the Sensorica track if you don’t want to be.

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#12

Hi all,

Sorry for being missing in action…

Before we dive deeper into NRP there is a lot of work to be done to design the architecture of the digital environment. The NRP is only a part of that and must integrate with many other services to provide all the functionality required for stigmergic work (large scale open collaboration).

Best thing is to meet in the Sensorica Discord (find it on the website) to discuss specific topics tight there, in context. We can then post general information here to let others know how things are going and give them a chance to jump in whenever they see an opportunity.

#13

A nice video of Noah explaining his experience with CoMakery.

CoMakery and Sensorica are different but share some similarities. This video expands the Sensorica context.

#14

@Qubeo we can discuss your request here. You wrote:

Dear Tiberius,
I have been reading your posts with enthusiasm for quite some time now.
In the meantime, we’ve been planning a project in Liechtenstein, that aims to interconnect several existing or emerging projects of the BlueLight fund (http://bluelight.li), like on demand 3D printing of sustainable clothing, modular housing, farmers marketplace etc., with the local economy and pilot towards a local currency (or current-see :slight_smile: ) ecosystem, connecting local producers (farmers etc.), municipality, local people, businessess and other institutions.
Community energy is also a part of one project, and we’re progressively coming to appreciate REA / ValueFlows as a way, that could help us create the internal accounting infrastructure for the projects (and possibly help move towards more distributed way of organizing), but also the more open “commons marketplace”.
Would you be open to chatting about your experiences in Sensorica, or perhaps even about possible ways we could be useful to each other? (We’d like to explore HoloREA for the implementation - Art offered us some consultations, so I’m looking forward to gain deeper insights into how to approach the whole endeavor.

Thank you for your interest. Yes, we can definitely arrange a date to talk, perhaps towards the end of the week, Thursday or Friday, before 4pm EST (Montreal time).

I don’t have too much time to engage in other projects, as I am facilitating some high pace projects within Sensorica at this moment. I can only free time to collaborate to develop the digital environment for Sensorica, as mentioned above. If you think that working with us can lead to the development of new tools that you can use, which I think it is the case for a lot of people here, we can definitely work together.

In my opinion, it is better to develop new infrastructure in the context of an existing organization that has already accumulated a great deal of experience with peer production, and transpose that infrastructure later to other new p2p ventures that have a very limited experience with p2p economics. Being experienced, sensoricans make better first users, they can provide meaningful feedback. Moreover, Sensorica’s processes are mature, are well designed and coherent with peer production, a better use case.

If you are just starting to operate as an open network I would highly recommend that you do not engage in infrastructure development separately. You will most probably fail or it will take you a lot more time than you think (I’d say at least 5 years, to get it right). It took us 11 years to get where we are now. Functioning as an open network or an ecosystem is changing paradigm. People go to business school to learn how to run a company. Imagine now that everything they’ve learned is pretty much useless in the p2p paradigm. You’ll find that same complexity but a very different logic. Take the probability of failure in traditional business and multiply that by 10 if you make your business a peer production venture of some sort. The best advice that I can provide is to work with organizations that already have experience in peer production, and transpose their experience to your case. You’ll save a lot of time and resources and most importantly you’ll have some probability of success.

You may think that I am biased because I have an interest to draw people in to advance Sensorica’s infrastructure. Trust me, during the past 10 years many people have come to me to learn about NRP and OVN and left to do their development on the side. Non of them have succeeded, not because the task is impossible, but because their have largely underestimated their lack of experience and the complexity of the work. p2p is quite new. Bitcoin is not a glitch in the Universe. Networks like this can be reproduced at will. We can port that model to material peer production and improve it. We’re just starting to understand how that is possible, but for the moment it’s largely a form of art.

I transferred your private message here because I think this task is huge, it requires a large group to work on it. If we discover that others are interested we can form that group and join forces to build these tool for us and for everyone else. Also, by having this discussions here, in everyone’s view, we can build a profile of this task, people can see how much interest there is, etc.

@nphias also wrote:

Hi Tiberius,
I would be interested in getting involved in the ERP /OVN conversion to Pospi’s HoloREA… i have started using the REA ontology in other holochain happs I am working on. I am quite well known in the holochain community and contribute code to open-dev with other holochain people like Guillem
Have joined in various discussions with Pospi and Lyn foster
Let’s have a chat?

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#15

Please feel free to include me in discussions if you feel it would be helpful to have additional REA / Valueflows expertise. :slight_smile:

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#16

Some more recent info to continue this conversation.

Here’s a recent video recorded with OpenTEAM that explains the Sensorica model.

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