Exciting, thank you for sharing @TiberiusB
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.
cc @TiberiusB:
While researching more about commons-based peer-production, :
This suggests that peer
production will thrive where projects have three characteristics. First, they
must be modular. That is, they must be divisible into components, or
modules, each of which can be produced independently of the production of
the others. This enables production to be incremental and asynchronous,
pooling the efforts of different people, with different capabilities, who are
available at different times. Second, the granularity of the modules is
important and refers to the sizes of the project’s modules. For a peer
production process to pool successfully a relatively large number of
contributors, the modules should be predominately fine-grained, or small in
size. This allows the project to capture contributions from large numbers of
contributors whose motivation levels will not sustain anything more than
small efforts toward the project. Novels, for example, at least those that
look like our current conception of a novel, are likely to prove resistant to
peer production.18 In addition, a project will likely be more efficient if it can
accommodate variously sized contributions. Heterogeneous granularity will
allow people with different levels of motivation to collaborate by making
smaller- or larger-grained contributions, consistent with their levels of
motivation. Third, and finally, a successful peer production enterprise must
have low-cost integration, which includes both quality control over the
modules and a mechanism for integrating the contributions into the finished
product. If a project cannot defend itself from incompetent or malicious
contributions and integrate the competent modules into a finished product at
sufficiently low cost, integration will either fail or the integrator will be
forced to appropriate the residual value of the common project-usually
leading to a dissipation of the motivations to contribute ex ante.
Why then does everyone think it can be applied to real-estate? [Forests, wells, whatever you call them…]
Oh, you have no idea how deep I’ve delved into this stuff, how much pain and suffering I’ve put myself through searching for answers and peeling off layer after layer and still when you think you must be close another entire world opens up and you feel like you’re back at the beginning again lol.
I suspect many others who are involved in this group of projects have delved very deep too, which is why I’m currently “giving it a go” - as some wise person said to me the other day, they realise these times are fleeting, things change, make the most of it as nothing ever lasts.
OK, well that is indeed where our views do digress as what I saw was a few straw man fallacies placed against seemingly every aspect of development when after a simple process of searching to check the background of the person shows they have a lot of experience in the areas of expertise they are discussing/proposing, along with a more moderate view of the fact that any software can be used for any purpose and perhaps that’s OK because it’s better to have it available for those who want to use it for good.
That is of course only the perspective I have, and perhaps the only reason I am voicing it is because I believe as you say there is value in having these conversations, I like the fact there’s others ready and willing to question authority of all kinds, I did however feel it could’ve been more constructive and I’m looking for ways to do that myself as I do feel in other situations people may not be so accommodating and fear losing valuable potential collaborations if at every point people are questioned as to whether they are creating projects just so the people in control can have more control, or something like that. I dunno, maybe I’m just worrying too much and avoiding sorting some other stuff out that I should be focusing on lol!
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I never said that; and would never say that… Their (i.e., the Sensorica people, REA guys, the Holo team, etc) genuine desire to change the world for the better, is truly unquestionable!
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Because it already is. Why do you think it can’t? [edit: I see you are altering answers so shall wait a while…;)]
All you’re doing is taking “something” and modularising its ownership and use.
Seems like, the whole base upon which your (Sensorica’s, REA-style forest-management, etc) foundation is built upon is fragile! You are all being blind to what is in fact the core problem that needs tackling: that being, externalities! [Or rather, positive externalities in our case; for instance, the benefits that a man enjoys from the passing-by of a beautiful woman…; haha! My favourite example!]
That’s what even Coase is talking about; that Friedman (the Sr.) talked about in his own original works.
Basically, it doesn’t make any economical sense to establish a market (or rather, a shop) whereby the cost of maintaining it (i.e., the market) exceed the benefits the establisher may draw from doing so… That’s the reason why private-restrooms are free; it just doesn’t make any economical sense to do otherwise.
But to develop an entirely new theory all from observing the (beautiful, enlightening, sublime, mesmerizing, divine) examples of free private-restrooms and Wikipedia is what I regard as silly…
One can successfully develop (and people have developed) a theory that explains that the earth is flat; indeed, at near light speed, thanks to length-contraction, you’d see Earth as flat. But the reason we don’t adopt these theories is that they’re so narrow; the best case would be “one theory that explains everything”. [The economical counterpart of which, mainly the Mises’ axiom, and the more mainstream Utility theory, Coase entirely dismisses…; if the whole structure (of your thesis, and of REA-style commons-management) is based on his ideas then it’s bound to collapse!]
Basically, my take (would be publishing some concrete, consistent, praxeological derivation someday…; basically, my idea around these subjects, or what I call Hourglass Economics, are that pay-what-you-want business model and tokenized real-world assets (such as art, musical pieces, and even scientific theories) can internalize those positive-externalities that exist in some industries) on digital commons is two folds:
- They’re worth exactly what they’re worth today; i.e., that Wikipedia really is a cheap platform; note that it’s “cheap” solely because there’re such a huge supply of people willing to publish and edit and maintain Wikipedia posts, and so many alternatives if Wikipedia even turns-off its servers (i.e., competition), that the price of using it is essentially zero. [Should have been obvious as hell!]
- We’ve failed to privatize these industries…
And there seems no reason why that shouldn’t be able to internalize (at least some of the) usually-lost benefits of doing open-source development…
For instance, imagine if Linux were a open (but private) organization; anyone can submit pull-requests, but it’s up to the board to decide which ones to pull/merge and which to not; those who make it earn some of the shares of the company; the company (Linux, in this case) can issue any number of pay-what-you-want tokens (or charity tokens), and any esteemed company/individual/organization that somewhere makes use of Linux (as even Microsoft does) would want to buy some of those charity tokens, the revenue generated through which would go to the shareholders, i.e., the many (thousands of) developers whole little contributions made it all possible…
Same with Wikipedia…
Thanks to Holochain, a Holopedia may want to leverage this approach; and in doing so it will be all too automated and decentralized (thanks to the Holochain-way)… It might wanna leverage some hREA modules in doing so (for example, wiki-contributors become agents, and article views become events that cause some resources (earned via donations or whatever) to be transferred to the author who wrote it, and so on)… [cc @pospi]
Basically, these are all just business models that can capture some of the lost profits due to positive-externality that exists in these industries (especially open-source development). I don’t see any reason for a full-blown “commons-based-peer-production” even here (in the Open Source industry).
What’s your (cc. @TiberiusB) take on tokenized NFTs for Open-Source as a better way of contributing in these industries (so called commons), and as a business-model for privatizing it?