Basis is also using Valueflows, so they might eventually be able to communicate with hREA apps, and even before that, their solutions will make sense here. They are also using Rust. See https://basisproject.net/posts/2020/04/valueflows-blockchain-holochain/
Soil testing is a pretty well established discipline and soil testing labs can provide useful measurements. If you have a history of such measurements, you can detect some signs of improvement or degradation. One useful measurement is percentage of organic matter. Less organic matter means deader soil.
Do-it-yourself soil test kits are also available but often less useful than what you can get from a lab with more sophisticated tests.
Back to the question of the commons…
The most important lesson that we can get from the forest / park scenario is, in my opinion, that with network resource planning systems it actually becomes possible to steward commons. I’d go even further than that to say that for the first time in history we can have a global economy based on commons, a commons-centric global economy, moving away from an economy dominated by private and public property. That is because it becomes possible to coordinate multiple stakeholders in a shared asset and allow them to engage in commons-based peer production.
Until today commons could only exist in simple forms. The classical example is the pasture shared among a number of animal growers. One type of use of a shared resource for all these stakeholders, simple metrics, one shared reality, a simple governance solution to make sure that the pasture is not grazed to exhaustion (avoid the tragedy of the commons).
More complex systems do not have simple governance solutions and the tragedy of the commons cannot be avoided. These systems essentially become open access systems that can be abused with high probability because the insight into their use and degradation is too complex to grasp. The forest / park scenario is a simple example of that more complex and unmanageable commons that is effectively an open access system. As mentioned before, we have multiple uses of the same shared resource and every stakeholder has its own reality. We’re already far from the pasture used by a bunch of herders in the same way, making sure they don’t exhaust it.
Ask yourself why parks only exist today as public or private property? Because otherwise they become unmanageable and they get abused or generate conflicts among users. The only way we can have that resource shared among peer entities in a decentralized manner is by using network resource planning systems that are able to absorb that complexity and hide or behind a user interface.
What do we value?
In the case of the pasture (traditional manageble commons case) everyone values the same thing, the capacity of the pasture to feed the animals.
In the case of more complex commons every stakeholder values a different thing. From my forest / park scenario the cleaner values the dead wood that he can sell. The park animator values the aesteatics of the surroundings, the shadow of the trees, some installations, the local neighbors value the capacity of the forest to absorb sound and refresh the air in the region.
What do we measure?
In the case of the pasture is the quantity of nutritious grass produced per year.
In the other case everyone measures different things, you can imagine them…
How do we steward the commons?
In the case of the pasture the herders agree in a time sharing scheme based on the type and number of animals that everyone owns.
In the case of the forest / park it’s not so simple and I argue that it is impossible to come to a consensus without the use of sophisticated tools such as NRPs. The easy solution is to put that under the public property regime, have the municipality make the ultimate decision and use the city hall as the negotiation place and to settle grievances of local users. So if the park animator is not happy about the cleaner he will report it to the municipality and a solution, good or bad, will be implemented. The municipality can come up with some rules to reduce the probability of conflicts, based on past experience. But what if we take the municipality out of the equation?
I suppose that stakeholders can, by trial and error, reach a consensus if they base their reasoning on what everyone values and on some metrics. The consensus is a compromise that brings more satisfaction than harm. That type of equilibrium can be maintained if metrics are used to keep what everyone values within the levels of acceptance. The system can signal to stakeholders how to conduct their activities. I believe carrots and sticks can be used, but other types of current-sees can also be instrumental. The good thing is that once you have this network-of-network NRP in place you can add all sorts of symbolic systems on top of it to nudge behaviour and increase synergy. A new space of possibilities is opened. But the good news is that complex commons become manageble and more and more assets can move out of the private and public property regime, into the commons regime. Is that a desirable thing? I do think so, because that will lead to a better allocation of resources in society, more sharing, do more with less, less externalities…
Whoa! Here’s a do-it-self test for microbial biomass.
As they say,
- The higher the microbial biomass, the more nutrients available to your plant naturally, decreasing or eliminating the need for chemical fertilizers.
- Microbes, especially fungi, are building soil structure which prevents erosion.
- If microbial biomass decreases after applying chemical fertilizer, you have used too much.
- Fungal:Bacteria ratio of rhizosome soil will tell you if arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) have colonized your plant making it more resistant to drought and pests.
- An increase in the F:B ratio indicates the green manure you used is optimal.
- Soil organic carbon is mainly the bodies of dead microbes, so if you are not increasing your microbes you are not building soil health or sequestering carbon.
Don’t know how accurate it is, but https://forum.openhardware.science/t/hackathon-project-developing-an-automated-workflow-for-colorimetric-testing-using-digital-microfluidics/1887 have been using some similar techniques.
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Hi all,
I wrote a post about commons and commons-based peer production.
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I updated this post and also provided a link to this discussion, which has been the source of inspiration.
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Who sets those rules?
Who designs that algorithm?
Organizations don’t have interests; individuals do.
What are my prospects in such a system if I wish to build a Nuclear Power Plant rather than a recreational park?
We can, for example, compare the use of the lab by those who engage in prototyping and those who organize events, and reason about what could be a fair use, in the context of the entire network.
How does one tell what “fair use” is? What if I want to do clubbing & partying in the lab?
To avoid the tragedy of the commons for a shared pasture, it is not difficult to conceive a set of rules to govern its use in a sustainable manner, based on the shared reality of animal farming, using some simple metrics.
Really? Who decides those rules? Who decides what metrics to use?
This type of resource is rivalrous and requires maintenance or replenishment.
So is the forest! Yours using it for plantation prevents me from using it for, I don’t know, clubbing!
How come? Remember, humans have infinite wants but limited resources within which to fulfil those wants.
I’ve read your posts and articles a number of times over the past few weeks, and still I don’t get the exact grasp of what it is…
I guess what you’re talking about is micro-privatization, whereby rather than privatizing, let’s say, a plot of forest land, you privatize Processes (and/or Roles)? But then, a tree can be used for a myriad of purposes, can’t it be? Then how does your socioeconomic system resolve that conflict?
Also, it feels like the system requires reinventing the man. And the last time people tried doing that, they failed horribly! You see, man is a territorial beast; how would he live in a shared commonwealth?
How else can they exist? It’s either public or private. Is there some other configuration I’m unaware of? Surprise me, then.
Ridiculous! It was never about the complexity.
Wow, that’s a clever way of saying that it’s impossible!
Anyway, me passing a judgment without even fully understanding what your socioeconomic system is would be wrong… Can you wrap it up in one brief paragraph, please?
Additionally, you might benefit from reading:
See if your system suffers from those issues or not. If not, then great! But if it does suffer them, then a fair bit of warning: going against Mises is equivalent to going against God! The later may not even exist, but the former is real as hell! Haha!
Note that I do not mean that hREA is useless! Quite the contrary.
But what I do believe is that hREA (or any breakthrough accounting system for that matter) is of little to no use in the wrong setting.
I imagine a day when all cross-organizational trades in the production-cycle (such as the one between Apple and Tesla regarding Lithium-ion cells, or even trades between our future decentralized peer-to-peer production systems) would be taking over the ValueFlow protocol; when labor would be registered as a Resource involved in a Process, and verifying that the end-product did not involve child-labor or forced-labor would be as simple as traversing through the network, making queries along the way; same with whether the production involved unaccounted pollution activities (both these cases assuming that the networks’ integrity is intact enough, about which @pospi has already ensured that it’s reasonable to expect that that would be the case);
It, I believe, will power the explosion of useful information that we’d be collecting and interpreting off of, in the coming future (thanks to AI, sensors, robots, p2p social apps for everything (including employment and human-labor), etc). It’s gonna make a lot of things that were implicit “explicit”. And the more, the better. Or as Pospi would say,
REA has the potential to completely revolutionize the production sector. But beyond that, I doubt it can be of any use to a “common-based peer-production system”…
Note that if by “private” you mean “individual ownership”, and by “public” you mean “collective ownership, as in shareholders collectively owning an organization”, and by “other” you mean “true public ownership that suffers from externalities”, and if “commons-based peer production” rules over the second, i.e., over how best to “collectively own something”, then I’ve no problem with governance, democracy, rules, algorithms, and metrics that you’ve proposed, assuming that participation within such a system is voluntary. However, another fair bit of warning: humans perform best when granted private-ownership of whatever it is that they’re performing. [As in an employee being granted stock-options (and only stock-options) vs one who gets paid a salary proportional to the contribution he makes.] So your collective ownership system would still be bound to be inefficient. [An employee granted purely stock-options doesn’t perform any better than one on a salary; in fact, the former performs worse since what he does no longer decides his financial fate, rather what everyone (with similar stock-option) does does.]
The Fate of Communal Ownership:
Commons, pool of shareables and nondominium are 3 alternative forms of property that we already use for the past 3 years. The Bitcoin network (not the individual minors) is a nondominium form of property for example.
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Well, the core of my thesis in my post is complexity. All I’m saying is that complex commons have not been possible before, but new tools that help us manage their complexity make them possible.
You might not agree with my thesis, which is fine, I respect that. I’d like to have your opinion about the distribution of commons, as a form of property, why it is the way it is.
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Commons-based peer production.
Have you read “Coase’s Penguin” or “The wealth if networks”?
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Commons-based peer production is a new economic paradigm, incomensurable with socialism and free market capitalism. You cannot explain it from either one of the other two. It’s a different paradigm, in the Khunian sense.
Try to explain the existence of wikipedia as a socialist or capitalist enterprise. Try now to explain its success, compared to public and private initiatives that fulfill the same function. You can definitly find some attempts in the litterature, but it’s like explaining the orbit of planets using Ptolemy’s cosmology. You can more elegantly explain it by invoking a new type of social production. You find out that you can do even better if you invoke new forms of properties. You’ll discover new patterns that operate in many other fields, open source software and hardware, open science, the crypto world, … You just find out that a new paradigm is needed to reorganize these new realities that have flourished in the digital age. You can still continue to believe that the sun is spinning around the earth… but your ability to perform in the new world using that theory will be vastly surpassed by those who have adopted the new paradigm. That’s the insight of people like Michel Bauwens, Yochai Benkler and others. That’s our insight with Sensorica, which we started a decade ago.
Find more papers on the Sensorica website. There’s now plenty of litterature about the subject.
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That’s precisely my point in the post I wrote. These were low tech attempts to steward complex commons and evidently they failed.
But I also need to mention that commons-based peer production is not the same as these communal experiences. It is not even an extension of it. It’s something completely different, that’s why I used the expression “different paradigm”.
You can find elements of these communes but you find at the same time libertarian elements. Commons-based peer production goes beyond both, integrating some elements of both and eliminating contradictions.
“Commons” is the far left element, sharing, build from a commun pool (see open source develoment)
“Peer” is the libertarian element, the individual, individual authonomy and freedom, the unalienable rights to the fruit of one’s labor, don’t thread on me type of thing.
But the individual and his community are too facets of the coin of existence or being human. You cannot conceive yourself in a vacuum. You need a community, a culture, an identity to exist as an individual. There’s no contradiction between individual and community. There is no contradiction between sharing and authonomy.
You can read about it and fortunately today you can also experience it by joining networks like Sensorica.
It’s real. I’ve been immersed in it for more than a decade. I quit the traditional world. I live in the p2p world very day, morning to night, not like others who have a day job in an institution and only take their spare time to read about or experience a bit of commons-based per production. I call these people tourists in the p2p land. You cannot understand a culture just by going in vacation one week per year or reading a traveling guide about it. A different culture is like a different paradigm, you need to be immersed in it to deeply understand it.
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I was looking at the Sensoroca website after reading through this thread the other day - some great things going on there!
In my previous “specialist subject” 
a fellow community member did his PhD thesis on CBPP - available under Creative Commons license of course!
I feel similar in that all my income since 2003 has been from Free/Libre Open Source Software, however it wasn’t until 2007 I first tried to be “part of the community” by posting some code I’d written to create a LinkedInABox module for Drupal 5.x and then didn’t get a response from that until I mentioned it many years later lol!
My involvement changed a lot since then as my skills are definitely not in creating lots of code although I dream of my brain being able to do that and I immersed myself in more community aspects however do feel we are at the very beginning of educating and enabling and empowering humans to leverage their talents and CBPP, and the longer we take the more we suffer from many effects like sustainability, projecting fear of future due to unknown unknowns, “losing” to “lesser” projects due to their ability to reach wider audiences and so on.
I now focus my efforts on what I see as I believe that life is a mirror and also how community projects work. For example, I asked someone at a DrupalCon conference how it was going for them and they said it was great but there were no sessions on Views [the DB query UI originally created by Sony so their non-tech people could create reports then shared with the community & now been part of core for many years]. He said he’d given a session at his local meetup and load of people had turned up for it. I replied “did you submit a session?” (the conference sessions are all from the community) - he said no, me and his friend looked at each other with “that look”.
So, in an attempt to answer my own questions here, what I see reading up on this thread is perhaps an opportunity to think about if there is some way of easily dealing with these perceptions “from the dark side” which can, do and will come up in the future as they do for me daily but I feel whilst they do create an opportunity to further discuss issues they take time away from the original point of a post.
I guess my interest here is heightened because I see how I did this previously and do in all walks of life, but the other day when I first replied I saw I was jumping to conclusions that were not useful - that is the easy option, the hard was to see myself doing that and the harder still is to click “reply” on this and not wonder if people will just read my reply and go “wtf?” lol. WTH…
Oh no, please! I love reading your replies… It’s just a discussion, after all. Don’t take things, especially my utter-fast (and might I say, a bit nasty) remarks (of yesterday) personally… [You see, when one is too delved into some subject, one (I mean, “I”) can often forget to be humble…]
I think quite the opposite; for if we don’t address these issues beforehand and rather keep going the course we’re (I mean, they’re) going, only to realize that too much time and effort has been wasted, that would be worse than wasting a few days addressing these issues before diving into the years-long actual development (of these REA modules or whatever)…
Anyway, getting back to reading Coarse’s Penguin…
First impressions haven’t been so good…
Anyway, let me see what else there is on this subject… Till then, bye.