Economic Networks

Introduction

Here are some other intros to Valueflows: * the pie story * all of these other examples.

So this is a new one. Hope it makes sense to you.

Don't take this example too literally:

Don't think this is only about community meetings. That's just one made-up example representing many use cases for coordinating resource flows in networks of independent agents. That is the key idea here, not community meetings.

We're trying to give people a general idea of what Valueflows is good for, not that it is only good for this exact case. Ok?

The scenario

This is a Scenario about a group of people planning, organizing, and staging a big community meeting.

At least some of them will need to know each other, although others can be introduced as the meeting organizing progresses.

Valueflows software or something like it...

This scenario will assume that all of the people involved in organizing the meeting are using Valueflows software, but they could also do everything described here without using any software at all, because Valueflows is a vocabulary for communicating with people to organize and perform economic activities in groups. So you could use the vocabulary in email or text messages or semaphore signals (but you might miss the records of what happened so you can reward people accurately for their contributions, see Rewarding the contributors below...) Or even if you don't use the Valueflows vocabulary, you will end up with something like the same patterns of communication to get the job done.

None of the people need to be employed by the same organization or company. In Valueflows, everyone can be a peer, no employees required (but some or all of them could be employees, too). As peers, Valueflows requests people to help, but does not command them.

What will they need?

So let's say the meeting will require a big enough room, and seating (chairs?) for the expected number of attendees, and maybe some audio-visual equipment, and then maybe some food or drinks, maybe even a full meal if it will be a long meeting, which might require some tables to go with the chairs, and some place settings for diners. The organizers can find lots of guides for hosting a community dinner online.

So if they are using Valueflows software, they will create Proposals for the Meeting and the Dinner. The Proposals will contain lots of Requests to the community members and (the organizers hope) will be met with Offers from the community.

So (for example) the organizers of the meeting would post some requests for: * a meeting room big enough to hold 100 people * a blackboard or whiteboard with chalk or erasable markers * equipment for showing slides * 100 chairs * 25 dining tables * 100 dinner place settings * a caterer, or a community member who can organize a big dinner * 12 turkeys * 6 tofurky roasts * etc etc etc (... I hope you are getting the idea...)

Offers?

Community people might respond with offers to meet some of those requests. If the organizers are lucky, they might get offers for a lot of that stuff. But they might need to pay for some of the requirements, in which case, they might also post requests for donations of money.

Once sufficient commitments come in for sufficient requirements to host the meeting, the organizers can plan the processes of hosting the meeting and catering the dinner. Which might mean posting more requests for community members to commit to doing various kinds of work, and then for the people who did the work to log what they did in the Valueflows software (or for one of the organizers to log their work for them).

Organizing the dinner

If a community member commits to organize the dinner, they might use a separate Valueflows plan to coordinate the dinner ingredients, food preparation, serving, cleanup, etc.

Rewarding the contributors

Let's say that the organizers request payment from community members who attend the meeting and partake of the dinner. The accumulated payments might be distributed according to a value equation or benefits distribution algorithm to all of the people who contributed work or materials or equipment or space or money to host the meeting, prepare the dinner, etc. All of their contributions can be found in the Valueflows meeting organization records and they can be rewarded from the meeting proceeds.

Different organizations?

As mentioned above, Valueflows does not require all participants to be employees of the same organization. (But they could be.) Valueflows will also work for normal companies, or networks of normal companies, or wild mixtures of different forms of organization or disorganization. The more experiments, the better!