How do you model land, forests, water sources (like wells) in hREA?

@The-A-Man I am struggling to see your argument here, I am hoping you can help so yet again I am delving deeper…

With respect, all your arguments and objections have been based on your own experiences and the readings of things that happened in the past. The future has not been created yet, and by creating theories and testing them out we evolve. A business does not start with a product but a customer. When developing new ways of working and collaborating I see it as perfectly valid to theorise on a few potential pain points that could prove valuable in order to develop these and gain customers, which then starts to build a new system. The only other option is to live in the past, and that’s not why we’re here - at least it’s not why I am anyway lol!

As for your favourite example, I don’t find that necessary either, it’s that kind of stuff that also deters people from joining in.

I’ve found a lot more abundance by focusing on the good than the bad, I do think you have good observations and value and obviously have done a lot of thinking and research and you have a lot of knowledge, I’m not sure you’re leveraging it as well as you could be with your current perspective, but I’m also fine with the fact that I could be wrong and you should totally continue to totally trash other peoples efforts.

Basically, if I make a nice time-lapse video of Fungi growing from the soil, anyone can copy-paste it and share it whichever way they want; [and, as a libertarian, I give no damn to copyrights, licenses, and trademarks; so they’re out of the question]; thanks to the-pirate-bay, they can watch it even if I did not originally intended to have them watch it… All this is due to the fact that digital files are easily reproducible and transferable… Same exists with open-source as well; I can fork your public repo at no cost! So one can say that positive-externalities exist in the industry of software; what’s the confusing part there?

They don’t exist with, let’s say, water-bottles. They are rivalrous resources, which implies that they also be excludable ones (mostly); that means, I can prevent you from drinking from that water-bottle unless you pay me 10 bucks… I can’t do that with software… Simple enough!

Yet another straw man. I too can easily pick examples of things that seem as if they will be the outcomes.

From what I can see throughout my 18 years in commons-based peer production and what projects like this are doing is creating frameworks which enable CBPP to work in a number of different situations, so taking a forest and the bits of that where people are interested in contributing and consuming value and building systems that can accommodate a wide range of those based on the context of the forest in question.

Not just one fun guy with a time lapse video :wink:

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But you see, what they (the Benkler, Coase, and their techno-descendants) are saying (as I’ve read from by brief research on the subject) is that, for some reason (all of which I find quite silly), such a Commons-Based Peer-Production approach should not only be a last-resort for industries exhibiting positive-externalities, but rather a superior one, superior even than a privatized market approach; thanks to the way it incentivizes contributors (through social, not just monetary benefits) and the clever ways in which it reduces management-costs (the ones I addressed in the toilet case). I find that take absolutely wrong; I don’t know if they (people on this thread) share the same opinion; I guess they do, which is why they’d advocate for using this approach for other domains (such as forests) for which exists better ones (mainly, privatization)…

And to the privatization critiques, trust me or not, Windows gave me more utility than Linux ever did; and to billions of people around the globe. In fact, Windows contributed more to the society at large than Linux ever did. That said, their approach (i.e., keeping it close-sourced) to do so (i.e., privatize the software industry) was a very dumb and naïve one; there’s no doubt that there’s no hope for close-source in the future. However, the core idea, i.e., privatization (or, internalization of +ve externalities) is still worth pursuing. Those few open-source Gods (Torvalds, etc) have done a great disservice to the society in promoting selfless contribution and negligence to profits; that’s the reason why many many potential people (like @stephenpurkiss) failed to contribute as much as they would have had the industry been properly privatized and they been rightly rewarded.

What’s “wrong” about being able to leverage the commons in order to leverage your value as you wish. You don’t have to contribute, you don’t have to leverage the commons.

My experience is I have, I’ve made lots of money out of doing it, chosen precisely what I want to be involved in and what I don’t want, I haven’t had to answer to anyone but myself, I’ve traveled the world, met thousands of amazing people, learned a hell of a lot about myself, gone through life transformations, gained a lot of respect for many people from many cultures, and there’s even a little bit of my code running on 1 in every 50 content managed websites in the world, and I’ve had random people come up to me and thank me for being me. And I have done relatively little in the world compared to many who I see contribute day and night.

Some things in life you can’t know before you do them. It was not in the big scheme of things that long ago when timezones were developed as a result of the growth of trains because before that it was sun time and ships were ok with that but trains were a bit of a nightmare to co-ordinated so they brought in train time and for many years they had two clocks next to each other and even people like wordsworth said “it’s as if the sun doesn’t exist any more” yet here we are now, couldn’t imagine life without time zones.

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The commons-approach is gonna be less efficient than a, let’s say, pay-what-you-want or tokenized NFT approach… It’s bound to misallocate resources (that being developers), and result in a great many inefficiencies, especially in unchartered territories.


Like, for open-source, it’s understandable. They would be underproducing, and would for the most part be overtaken (in terms of market-share) by private solutions that have figured out better ways to profit off of their works (like a Holo-Wikepedia that issues charity-tokens)… But for forests, the implications are unimaginable! They’d end up destroying potential value, and most importantly, never realizing that they ever did so in the process (see the calculation problem); I mean, I’m sure nobody here regrets not having flying-cars, right…; we could have had them, if it weren’t for privatized GitHub; haha!

Bitcoins are private-property; the network as a whole may be nondominium; but then so is the free-market, in that noone owns it; and so is verbal-language, in that noone developed it officially (it evolved peer-to-peer)… That’s just cooperation, that’s all. Cooperation isn’t either private or public, it’s simply mutual (and optionally, non-coerced).

Oh, I think you misunderstood me… I meant that “complexity” is not one of the big reasons to dismiss a commons-based peer-production system… Allocation is the major one; how would you make sure such a society does not end up producing golden toilets and wooden jewellery?

Or, in our case, how would you make sure people are using the forest in the most optimal way? [Without a market, which does so through private ownership of the said capital and thereby generating prices; it’s the only solution that at least tends towards optimal efficiency in resource allocation]

Commons-based Peer Production doesn’t even address it, and doesn’t have to, knowing that it initially developed from an industry where the resource (that being freelancing contributors) are somewhat abundant; but the forest and the resources contained in it are not abundant!

I guess what you call peer-production, I call social-platforms; what you call commons-based, I call externalities-suffering; and what you call incentives, I call tokenized-charity-style business models.

One can argue that both are the same things, and I guess that’d be right.

But me using the word “+ve externality suffering” means that I’d never advocate such a business-model (or what you call peer-production) in a domain that doesn’t suffer such externalities. And land clearly doesn’t.

Oh wow, now you’re really showing your naivety! First, it’s GNU/Linux :wink: We wouldn’t be having this conversation now if it weren’t for GNU/Linux. Without knowing what the world would look like without Windows, I can happily say it contributed a lot - of insecure systems, dodgy business practices and ethics, and held technology and human advancement back. Even they have had to admit that Open Source is a better way of developing technology.

What utter trash. I have experienced so much because I’ve had the freedom to choose what I want to do and how much I want to be rewarded for doing that. Take today for example, I have a long list of stuff I was going to be doing however I’ve spent the day communicating with someone who seems to think they know it all, they know what is best for me, and for everyone else too.

I’ll let you into a little secret… you know sh*t my friend, and it shows.

Was simplifying things down only for you; but to no use, apparently.


And I was talking about the common man; I mean, it takes money to promote personal-computing at the scale Microsoft did, back in the days… But you wouldn’t admit it; you’re under the influence of the documentary “Who is Bill Gates” that you mentioned that day, and believe a conspiracy theory that he has some “secret agendas”! What nonsense!


Sure! Moreover, Windows containers were a flop; your GNU/Linux is immortal; and would go down the history as “the greatest free-lunch-ever”! Okay? Rest in peace!


If that were the case, I wouldn’t be here, asking questions… In fact, @TiberiusB’s links and hints that he threw had only broadened my knowledge, if anything. And I’m hoping I can clear some more doubts regarding its applicability in the domains of real-estate. Nothing’s wrong with that? Moreover, if I know nothing, why even worry that my criticism (if any) would deter anyone from exploring these paths? And if my questions really are that dumb, then you can all choose to ignore them, and I wouldn’t bother you all ever again! I’ll be fine with that too…


My argument was that: take another example: you aren’t an artist painting some artwork because, quite frankly speaking, there’s no money in that industry! You’d be broke, you’d suffer poverty and much more if you were to go down that road (in the average case). But if that weren’t the case, if we (the society) had some way to reward artists more than it does now then there would be an upsurge in art-creation and we’d experience another renaissance. That’s the art of privatization & capitalization! Because open-source rewarded just moral, personal, and social gains for contributions, it didn’t go as far as it could have gone had they figured out a more economical way of privatizing it.

The very possibility of pulling resources out of the public and the private regime opens the door for large scale commons-based peer production. In my opinion, this is desirable because it leads to a better allocation of resources in society, more sharing, lower redundancy and fewer externalities.

What would an NRP (REA) algorithm even try to maximize? Universal happiness? “Stakeholder” satisfaction?

And I’m guessing you use the term “stakeholders” in a different sense than the corporate “stakeholders/shareholders”, in that the stakeholders includes everyone, right? And stakes are not transferrable for money, right?

And what does a forest even “produce”? Timber? Rubber? Wildlife-documentaries? It could be anything. And, assuming the majority of stakeholders decide democratically what it is that they wish to maximize (or whatever its REA equivalent of “maximizing-profits” is), how’d they know that they’re maximizing the right things? The way I see it, commons-based peer-production systems are closed systems (in that they don’t depend on outside charity, etc), and are thus self-sustaining? Then that just means you’ve done away with prices, without which can arise no rational decisions, hence no rational allocation!


Found some (partially satisfying) answers from your Quora post; will post it in case anyone is looking for them;

The “value accounting system” captures different types of contributions from contributors to a project ($, material, time, social capital, etc…) and amalgamates them into a dynamic pie share of (fluid) equity, using the “value equation”, which is a social contract that defines the rules of value accounting (how contribution are evaluated and mixed together). This equity is called fluid, because everyone’s share is diluted as soon as someone else adds more value to the project. The equity distribution for a project stabilizes when the project reaches maturity, i.e. when development (design, R&D…) has stopped, when a product has emerged and it is now exchanged on the market.
In the “value network” model equity is not only split between co-founders, but among all participants to the project. There is no clear formal status of founder, which is to recognize the fact that later contributions are as important as the initial idea, and that an idea or an initial initiative can’t go too far without the makers and shakers that will come later.
In the “value network” model, the “value accounting system” is strongly coupled to a “role system”. The “role system” is emergent. The topology of roles within the organization shows different types of activities, how important they are, who is doing what… The role played in a project (technical - R&D, or non technical - writing, etc…) is a modulator in the “value equation”, and therefore affects equity.
In the “value network” model, the “value accounting system” is strongly coupled to a “reputation system”. Reputation has many dimensions. Some of these dimensions can directly impact the ability of contributors to extract value from the system, i.e. act as modulators in the “value equation”, which has a direct impact on equity. Thus reputation acts as a modulator of behavior by affecting equity.
Equity is calculated from contributions, taking into consideration all the modulators, by a “value equation”. The “value equation” is a in fact social contract, and is designed to match the philosophy of the group that implements it.There is no magical solution, only some general guidelines to follow. The “value equation”, which is part of a “value accounting system” must be carefully designed and implemented in context.

Figuring out the “value-equation” (as in your terminology) for something like a forest or land is not only hard, it’s impossible; especially a prior. Everyone has subjective opinions, most of which they do not even know until they are presented with the choice; or as Ford would say:

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses .

Free-markets, unlike democratically setting the “value-equation”, lets everyone make their own subjective preferences, and letting them express them through prices and voluntary trade, thereby making use of insurmountable knowledge, and all that in a decentralized “peer-to-peer” way, hence “maximizing utility for everyone” without ever having to explicitly set the value-equation to be such.


And of course,

A forest is not Wikipedia; PERIOD!

Actually I’m speaking as someone who’s first full-time job was selling computers with Microsoft DOS and Windows from around 1988/89, when the margins on hardware were considerably more than they are these days.

I’m speaking as someone who’s been in the industry and seen at first hand how the business deals made on the operating system that he didn’t even create created an entire landscape of technology that whilst created initial mass appeal it then lumbered users with old technology because there was no incentive to innovate just leverage patents, and insecure systems you can’t fix because you aren’t allowed to see what’s wrong with them and they only usually get fixed if the company makes money from it. So we end up with situations like where the NHS were held to ransom due to insecure, out-of-date code.

Sure, Mr. Gates did a good business deal, he is after all the King of Viruses, and has shown he is able to dupe most of entire population into a similar situation by basically buying up and controlling every entire angle of a situation, but it doesn’t mean he’s “right”. He has, like you, his one point of view - from what I gather yours is the return of value to a creator from their creations. This is a simple thought to a big subject - many artists never even signed their paintings, not everything can or should be calculated, and empowering people with the freedom to participate or not is of far greater value than saying “well, it should be like THIS”.

Commons-based peer production gives you and I the freedom to do what we want, you can implement your “privatise everything” dream, and I can implement my “do what I feel like doing today” one. I have freedom, you have freedom, we all have freedom. Your only suggestions so far are very restrictive, especially as ‘currency’ is just an idea, a concept, and nothing related to value. Because I have a different idea of what value is than you do, and the next person, and so on. So there is never one answer.

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Can’t quite wade though all of that last chat, but a couple things about REA/Valueflows, which I have worked deeply with for a number of years:

  • It is a simple flexible agnostic model. It works for lots of use cases, and is not limited to contribution accounting, although a lot of people are interested in that. It works for capitalist economics and anti-capitalist economics.
  • It is about resource flows of all kinds, which you can define, and can definitely include “externalities”. Or not of course.
  • It can be used at different granularities, from operational to analytical.

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I was a member of the Automotive Industry Action Group’s Supply Chain Committee for two years when Bill McCarthy, the father of REA, was the chairman. So they thought REA was pretty good for describing auto supply chains, among other things…

McCarthy also loves what Sensorica is doing. Somewhere there’s a photo of him in the Sensorica lab. Maybe @TiberiusB could post it?

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You apply the capitalist logic to analyze commons-based peer production. You can’t do that… it’s a different paradigm. Different logic… Read Yochai Benkler’s paper and bring up your criticism here for debate. At least we’d be on the same page, talking the same language. Otherwise your points are missing the target, we cannot have an intelligent conversation and learn from one another.

The quote on value equation is pretty old. I wish I could share with you the new page on the OVN wiki. It’s down for the moment…

To get back to the park/forest situation and your objection about the complexity to handle with an NRP, let’s compare apples to apples, not criticize in the absolute.

The park is managed as a public good by the municipality. The municipality states that it manages it to maximize benefits for city residents. So that’s what we have now. In my post I want to compare that specific situation with the park / forest as a commons. From public property to commons, for the same thing.

So when I say that the NRP is used to reduce complexity in managing this shared resource ,you need to compare that with how the municipality is doing in reducing the complexity of the same shared resource, in the public property regime. When I say that new tools can be used to maximize benefits for stakeholders, you have to compare that with the municipality’s performance on maximizing people’s benefits. If you take everything and bring it to an absolute we can’t have a discussion, because we’re not on the same page, we’re not talking about the same things.

So the main question here is: can we better utilize resources in society under alternative property regimes? Better means to compare it with what we’re already doing, not with a utopian representation of the world, in the absolute. If it turns out that we can do better, commons-based peer production might take over and we’ll have another socioeconomic transition out of capitalism and socialism, all together. If we can’t do any better, I guess we’re going to be stuck here. But we can’t know before we try. Some of us have dedicated our lives for trying.

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None of you are to be blamed…

Benkler himself never presented any sane answers to those economical concerns; his approach is non-methodological, and his rants don’t make much sense; his proposal (the CBPP) is no replacement for the market approach and the firm approach; deducing a whole new alternative on the behalf of a few insignificant developments isn’t very rational of a methodology; or as the review notes: Wikipedia’s successful case is that of a different “degree”, not a different “kind”…

The best analogy I could draw for his utopian visions of a “generative” playground was:


No problem… I can wait.

In regard to the stated topics at hand-

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!

I’m really not sure where you get such notions, though it does appear you’ve invented a strawman “REA-style forest-management” and applied us as originators of the concept. Much of the literature surrounding this body of work focuses specifically on externalities.

Figuring out the “value-equation” (as in your terminology) for something like a forest or land is not only hard, it’s impossible; especially a prior. Everyone has subjective opinions.

That at least, we can agree on. But this doesn’t mean that people aren’t trying, and when you see carbon, natural capital and ecosystem services accounting standards like SEEA and WAVES and TEEB in the wild it’s important to remember that this is in effect what they are doing. Stakeholder groups with input on such standards are frighteningly exclusive affairs, and every effort should be taken to remedy that.



This thread otherwise seems to have veered dramatically off-topic since its inception, though reading between the lines it does appear to me that the author’s original intent was in fact to propose his “DEARTH” model as a superior form of organising than Commons-Based Peer Production.

So, in an effort to redirect conversation to the appropriate places I’ve taken the liberty of responding to much of this thread in the context of DEARTH over here.

My advice to others involved in this exchange is to simply stop engaging @The-A-Man. His opinion is inflexible and only intention appears to be asserting his superiority. We’ve said as much as can be said and there’s no point continuing to communicate with somebody who has no intention of listening.

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Well, what I meant when I say “it seems like you guys have diverged from the core idea of internalizing externalities all the way to handling/managing all resources thyself”; of course I’m aware that “externalities” is how you people advertise your ideas! [And by you people, I mean Benkler and all of the commons-proginators]


Sure, go ahead and give them a try! After all, it’s what the approach here (even of Holochain) has been: advertize first, try second, think later (if ever)! Haha!


Hahaha! You really have brains! [SARCASM]

A theory, model, or an idea cannot be disproved on the premise that its originators were impelled by “a drive to prove others wrong”, or “a drive to succeed”, or “a drive to pass time”, or “a drive to insult others”, or whatever. I do not say “you people are wrong because you want to appear good to the public, or that you crave the mob’s affection, or that you want to use beautiful & nice words”; what I get to say is “your solution of conglomerating the would-be property-owners into stakeholders of a ‘commons’ resource is bound to produce inferior results and is bound to be wasteful”. [Note that I’m talking about natural resources, not the web-style commons that Benkler himself originally highlighted; he too would be Goddamn skeptical about your crazy proposals for “commonizing” all forests!".]

As for my personal intents:

Well, I consider contemplating about the problem first-hand and only objecting to someone else’s solution when I can easily think of (or reference someone else’s) solution that’s bound to perform better than the solution being attacked, nothing more. I take no pride in writing thousands of words of documents (which nobody reads) that address the problem from the very base level and go on to build a proposal; that should be evident from the kind of language I often use in my writings…

It is your personal problem if you take my remarks personally, or as attacks to your technical/mental expertise. As for me, I wouldn’t mind AT ALL if my ideas turn out to be proven UTTER FIASCO! And by the way, they aren’t MY ideas either. They are just borrowed ideas from others being fit together into a framework for managing earthly (or even extra-terrestrial) private property: borrowed from Hoppe, David Friedman, and the likes, who have all taken a great deal of pleasure in visualizing what and how a fully anarchist society should look like; a society found on the order of division of labor.