Economic Networks

In Part 1, we looked at the community economy plans of Andrew Roach of Ellijay, Georgia, USA. In this part, we'll look at some Internet communication systems that might help them coordinate their efforts.

Unless one person can do everything themselves (unlikely), they will need to coordinate between different people, groups, organizations, etc, in the same or related communities.

This post Coordinate all the flows explains how the New York Textile Lab first tried coordinating their network by phone, email, and driving around, but that got old and too difficult, so they are graduating to software to help them.

Since Andrew has already deployed Mastodon, which uses the ActivityPub protocol, they can also add any other software that uses that same protocol, and all of their Pubs can talk to and coordinate with each other.

Getting started

One of the first useful features of an ActivityPub for an economic network is Offers and Needs, also sometimes called Offers and Requests.

Two ActivityPub apps can provide Offers and Needs: * Epicyon, and * Bonfire.

Both of them have some problems, depending on the shape of the economic network.

Epicyon runs on small single-user systems, which means each participant in the network needs to run their own software, altho they can all coordinate with each other. (But Andrew is already collecting and refurbishing old computers which would be perfect for running Epicyon, or they could deploy a fleet of Beaglebone Black boards for around $50 each and they could be like Star Trek Communicators.)

Bonfire provides multi-user sites where each participant can use the same software, but their offers and needs feature is not yet ready for public use. But Andrew has some organizing to do before the Ellijay network is ready for Offers and Needs, so maybe the software will be ready by the time the network is ready.

In the meantime, here's a nice description of Offers and Needs from some other software, that seems also not-quite-ready: Web of Needs, which includes this diagram:

Next

Andrew may already have passed the Offers and Needs stage. He probably already knows the players in the community economy and what they want and can do. So maybe he's ready for Proposals and Agreements and planning and performing some collaborative processes. Like getting some inputs and creating some outputs, like planting and harvesting crops, milling grain into flour and baking bread.

Maybe they could use a Community Meeting with a delicious dinner.