This blog post will spin off from four sources: 1. https://fab.city/ “The transition towards productive and regenerative economies in regions and cities, driven by people.” 2. Economic Governance Roadmap for the Fab City Economy on FCOS (FCOS = FabCity Operating System) 3. Valueflows and FCOS 4. Mentioned in #2 (“For a guide in terms of power distribution within institutions/networks, we use institutional economics (see Elinor Ostrom , a prominent scholar of the commons”)). One of the main ideas of Institutional Economics is that economics is “the science of social provisioning”'.

Fab City is an economic network

The network is composed of several institutions. We'll focus here on FabLabs that design and manufacture goods, and FabCities, where the FabLabs live, and are helped and somewhat governed by FabCity organizations.

What makes these into an economic network rather than separate institutions is their economic relationships, where Economic Agents (the FabLabs, their members, and their related organizations) collaborate in Economic Processes that create, transport, and transfer Economic Resources between them.

FabLab networks might become supply chains

...where (for example) one FabLab designs a component that is then produced in another FabLab and then assembled into a product by another FabLab. You can see many of those relationships in the resource flow diagram above.

If they collaborate in those ways a lot, they will start to strengthen their relationships. Here are three stages of development of supply chain relationships, each stronger than the previous stage.

1. Transaction Integration “Level one involves computerization of general business activities and transactions.” FabCity can reach that level by implementing Valueflows networks.
2. Information Sharing Designs, agreements, etc, can also be shared via Valueflows networks.
3. Strategic Collaboration “...you and your supply chain partners will be collaborating on planning and redesign processes, and you will usually be sharing some risk and reward” (which of course can also be shared via Valueflows...)

...and beyond those three... 4. Partial or complete economic and/or physical integration Apple is one of the companies that invests a lot of money into their suppliers, for example, Apple invests 410 million into one of its optical tech suppliers. Ford has also done some partial integration where suppliers set up sub-assembly-lines within their main factory.

For each of those levels of integration beyond the first, the supply chain partners are no longer dealing with each other by market relations based on prices alone. And even the first level, transaction integration, usually requires some technical collaboration and probably some contractual agreements.

From Product-in-Trash-Out to Data-in-Data-out

The circular economy principles of FabCity are yet another level, beyond supply chain integration, on to community governance agreements.

Institutional Economics

Elinor Ostrom

She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, for among other research, Design principles for Common Pool Resource (CPR) institutions, and also, Ostrom's Law:

Ostrom's law is an adage that represents how Elinor Ostrom's works in economics challenge previous theoretical frameworks and assumptions about property, especially the commons. Ostrom's detailed analyses of functional examples of the commons create an alternative view of the arrangement of resources that are both practically and theoretically possible. This eponymous law is stated succinctly by Lee Anne Fennell as:

A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory.

Ostrom studied economic institutions in real life. One of her most important findings was how community institutions can and often do manage the theoretical “Tragedy of the Commons”.

Heterodox Economics

Institutional economists often call themselves “Heterodox Economists”. to differentiate themselves from “orthodox economists”, as in the article below about social provisioning.

Social provisioning

Note: this section is incomplete. Needs more research into social provisioning, to come soon.

The Social Provisioning Process and Heterodox Economics

'The social provisioning process is how heterodox economists define economics in general. Instead of having a narrow definition of what constitutes economics, such as the mainstream has with its allocation of scarce resources among competing ends via the price mechanism, heterodox economists have opted for a much more expansive definition that permits different theoretical explanations for ways in which the provisioning process can take place in different types of economies in different historical contexts. In this chapter, we first examine the changes in the definition of economics from classical political economy to neoclassical and heterodox economics. The comparison between classical political economy and neoclassical economics manifests a clear distinction in view of economy and economics. The second section substantiates the meaning of the social provisioning process. In doing so we make a case that, first, defining heterodox economics as the study of the social provisioning process positions heterodox economics as an alternative to neoclassical economics, and, second, that such an expansive definition of economics has potential to synthesize various heterodox theoretical frameworks in a constructive manner. “ -Tae-Hee Jo

(I won't get deep into that paper in this blog post. but it's really good...instead, I'll focus on what they mean by social provisioning.)

“Essentially, individual units of economic activities are embedded in the economy, which is in turn embedded in and an integral part of the society in particular regard to the material basis of the society. In this perspective, nothing is isolated from and independent of the society. It is interactive agency through social institutions that renders individuals, organizations, and the whole society on-going. It follows that an analytical reduction of the whole to the individual or the converse is neither possible nor sensible, since such an attempt expunges all the interrelationships between constituents that generate, constrain, or facilitate the dynamics of the social system. By the same token, it is inconceivable that an economy is viewed as a system of exchange organized by the market price mechanism, which is at odds with empirical reality and which is theoretically incoherent.” -Tae-Hee Jo

Another angle on social provisioning that leads right back to FabCity is the circular production economy:

“In this production-oriented, production-based capitalist system, resources are reproduced in the technically interrelated process of production between capitals or industries—that is, the circular production economy, which is most rigorously and clearly formulated by Sraffa (1960).

“The circular production economy indicates that production is not only a complicated process which can hardly be represented by a simple neoclassical production function, but also a social process in which basic goods and the surplus goods sectors are technically connected, and going concerns—households, the business enterprise, the state, and market governance organizations—are socially connected to each other through the structure of production and incomes. In this theoretical framework, the viability of the system as a whole (and of going concerns therein) becomes a fundamental question, as opposed to the feasibility of production based upon scarce resources and the efficient allocation of resources through the market mechanism.” -Tae-Hee Jo

As rendered by FabCity:

Critical comment

The Methodology and Guiding Principles section of Economic Governance Roadmap for the Fab City Economy on FCOS says, “To argue for a certain order of the economy that shall unfold itself on top of FCOS, we set guiding principles, also with the help of economic theory. For economic governance, we utilise transaction cost economics. For a guide in terms of power distribution within institutions/networks, we use institutional economics (see Elinor Ostroms , a prominent scholar of the commons). For the price mechanism, we choose microeconomics. [...] “For the price mechanism, we analyse marginal costs, which are the costs that arise when producing an additional unit of a given asset/artefact/product. “

From the explanations of institutional economics cited above, it should be clear that institutionalists contradict marginal costs and similar price mechanisms. In fact, one of the well-known institutionalist papers is entitled “Redefining economics: from market allocation to social provisioning”.

Institutional economists would observe and analyze the economic networks of FabCity and very probably (as suggested in the Strategic Collaboration level of supply chain integration) share some risks and rewards, for example, rewarding designers even though marginal cost theory might say otherwise.

Likewise, the overall goals and network designs of FabCity are very consistent with institutional economics, with their circular glocal economy principles, while microeconomics would advise self-interested agents who pass their externalities off to their communities (the indivisible foot accompanying the invisible hand).

But enough theory, what to do in real life

To come...

This blog post previews the mythical next generation of Network Requirements Planning systems, NRP2, which will be a flow-oriented resource management system. And contrasts NRP2 with NRP1, which was not flow-oriented, and Odoo, an Enterprise Requirements Planning (ERP) system which is also not flow-oriented, but also not for networks.

Then we'll discuss what a flow-oriented system would look like and a bit about how it might work.

NRP1 (an open-source Network Requirements Planning system)

NRP1 was a collaboration between Sensorica and Mikorizal. We expect more collaborators on NRP2.

Odoo (a dual-license ERP system)

Both NRP1 and Odoo look pretty functional, huh?

Probably designed for functional (deparmental) organizations, where you work in a functional department. Or at least that's the world that Odoo was mostly designed for. NRP wasn't designed for departmental organizations, but we were emulating ERP systems when we created it, so that functional-department view was probably a mistake.

What would a flow-oriented system look like?

For one thing, the flows can cross from one network node to another, and also travel through the internal operations of one node and then cross over to the next node and flow through the internal operations of that node, too.

Flows are like a river system where different towns (functional departments) live along the banks.

Is flow-orientation something new and amazing, or did it get lost and now returns?

Flow orientation preceded ERP systems and then got (partly) lost and now returns,

ERP systems added functional-departments to a basically flow-oriented app.

The flow-oriented app was Material Requirements (MRP), which was the first business computer system that did something really new, that could not be done without computers. And then the evolution from MRP to MRPII and ERP added some functions from the past, copied from paper systems, that dammed up the flows.

MRP is a flow system

The basic pattern of MRP is Dependent Demand, where independent demands (like customer orders) are fed by dependent demands to create all of the inputs to satisfy the customer orders. So in the other direction, dependent demands flow into independent demands (the customer orders).

ERP is (mostly) not a flow system

The original sin of ERP systems was inherited from MRPII systems, which were relabeled Enterprise to appeal to big enterprises. So MRPII connected the flow-oriented MRP to a set of departmental accounting apps: Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Payroll, and General Ledger. And MRPII evolved into ERP.

..but Odoo ventures into flows now and then, for example:

• Auto-intercompany transfers, which is a very nice add-on provided by one of the many Odoo 3rd party developers taking advantage of the Odoo open-source code.
• DDMRP “Demand Driven Material Requirements Planning is a formal multi-echelon planning and execution method” – also a 3rd-partty app.

So let the flows flower

(I stole that name from The Weather Makers lovely flow diagramming app named Flower. Thanks, Angel and Pieter! Ok if I mention it like that? I'll give it back soon. Or if you prefer, I won't mention it at all...)

What would that look like?

That's a little hard to read, but you can select it and Open Image in New Tab and then enlarge it to make it readable.

The flows in that diagram go from right to left until they end up in a Raglan Sweater.

Along their path, they visit several functions, like farming, spinning, knitting, etc.

The people responsible for those functions can get their own view of the flows crossing their path, like a todo list, and the designer, who is responsible for managing all the flows in that diagram, can see her flows in that big picture.

Here's another flows view from an upcoming app from https://hrea.io/ , which probably also needs to be enlarged to read:

Yet another view might be the flows-in-motion, which we have not created yet. So that's for another time.

But to summarize, you can get the functional view from the flow view, but you can't get the flow view from the functional view,

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!

The problem is pretty well described by The Fallacies of Distributed Computing. To repeat the list here: 1. The network is reliable; 2. Latency is zero; 3. Bandwidth is infinite; 4. The network is secure; 5. Topology doesn't change; 6. There is one administrator; 7. Transport cost is zero; 8. The network is homogeneous.

(Remember, those are all fallacies.)

And we, in ActivityPub and Holochain environments, are trying to implement economic networks, including agreements among 2 (and sometimes more than 2) independent agents living in different nodes in distributed networks.

What could go wrong? For example...

1. The network will go down.
2. The messages between nodes will time-out.
3. Not enough bandwidth.
4. Hostile actors interfere or harvest private info for bad purposes.
5. The connections between nodes that you used before no longer exist.
6. There are two or more admins and they disagree.
7. That conversation ate up your whole budget and your host shuts you down
8. You're using ActivityPub and they are using their latest invention.

Regardless, we want to implement scenarios like Conversation for Action which involves a somewhat complex distributed state machine:

That's a conversation between two agents, A and B. Could be more. Regardless, each state change requires agreement among all of the participating agents. Each of those agreements will require a distributed 2-phase commit transaction. Each of those transactional agreements could fail because of any of those problems.

So that's the problem. How do we do that reliably?

One building block is Post Exactly Once for which many implementations can be found via that web search.

But we will need to implement a distributed app that can manage that whole conversation reliably...

On Monday, December 12, 2022, Bill McCarthy hosted an online meeting featuring two presentations on REA models and apps for contracts: * Collection of info from the meeting, including video and audio recordings and slide decks like the next two. * REAContracts: Adding semantics to business contracts by Jesper Kiehn * HyperContracts by two authors named Martin (Martin Jul and Martin Clausen).

Why I think this is important, and to whom I think it should be important:

• Anybody who is working in the hREA ecosystem might want to use some of these ideas for hApps, because hREA, either now or soon, could include all of REA Contracts model components and logic.
  • Maybe especially Paul d'Aoust who has been collecting these kinds of ideas.
• Connor and Pegah of Sprillo, because Sprillo could easily emulate the HyperContracts business model (consulting to help businesses implement automated contracts using an hREA Contracts app).
• Zippy, who is interested in the “expansive grammatics of value flows”.

Valueflows is a vocabulary for networks of independent Economic Agents to communicate about Economic Events to coordinate their flows of Economic Resources.

Think of an automotive assembly line. All of the components are made by other Agents in other places and the assembly line just puts them together. In the more extreme versions, like the Toyota Production System of 1975, each component was supposed to arrive at the assembly line Just In Time – no earlier and no later.

Such coordination requires some timely communication, both of plans, but also all the inevitable differences between plan and reality. Valueflows is a vocabulary for such communication.

REA

Valueflows is based on an Ontology (the set of concepts and categories in a subject area, that shows their properties and the relations between them) called REA (Resources, Events and Agents). Here is a collection of references to REA documents: https://www.valueflo.ws/appendix/rea/

Evolution of REA

REA was first published in 1982 as an accounting framework.

In the late 1990's, it evolved into first a supply chain model, and then as a general-purpose economic model.

While a lot of people have written about the accounting aspects of REA, and they are important, this story will not do so.

This story will focus on coordination using the REA supply chain model, first published in 1997, and collectively improved in 2000.

Discoordination

Supply chain problems have been in the news lately, described in Wikipedia as the 2021-2022 global supply chain crisis.

That should provide some idea of the importance of resource flow coordination.

The flows are IPOs...

...Input-Process-Output resource chains, where one resource is the output of one process and then becomes an input to another, thus connecting the processes into a flow. The Agents involved in each Process in the chain need to coordinate with the previous and next Processes about the quantity, quality, and timing of resource flows between them.

For example: a food network

...might include farmers, food processors, restaurants and bakeries, grocery stores, families to eat the food. and vehicles to move everything from place to place. Coordination might be needed between each of those stages: seeds and other inputs for planting crops, workers etc for harvesting crops. when are the crops ready for processing, when is the grain ready for milling and then for baking and then for people to eat, when is the fruit ready for pies, etc.

Or for the example we will feature in this story...

the New York Textile Lab

—-who describe themselves as an ecosystem, and then in their relationship with Fibershed, a network-of-networks, or a community.

They are an association of designers of textile products, for example, clothing. The designers organize their supply chains, which include farmers growing the raw fibers (wool from sheep and alpacas, linen from flax), scouring the raw materials to extract usable textile fibers, spinning the fibers into yarn, weaving and knitting the yarn into textiles, and creating clothing from the textiles.

The coordinator

In the textile supply chains, the designer is the coordinator, communicating with each of the other agents, although the other agents often coordinate between each other, too.

Coordinating the flows to produce finished garments

But in general, the designers creates the design for a line of clothing, while checking out what fibers are likely to become available when. They will get plans for fiber outputs, like what sheep of different breeds and colors are scheduled to be sheared this spring. This information may influence their design.

The designer, or group of designers, then makes orders for what fibers they want, and settles with the producers on quantities, timing, and price.

The designer, or the fiber producers and the designer, then arranges fiber processing with one or more scouring facilities, and transportation between the farms and the other processing facilities.

Similar coordination happens between the scouring facility and the spinning mill, and again between spinning and weaving or knitting, and yet again in producing the finished garments.

The textile supply chains are evolving, too.

From single-designer supply chains, they are evolving into multi-designer networks, where all of the associated designers can collaborate to take advantage of synergies in their textile flows.

For example, groups of designers coordinate to combine orders for fiber and processing to take advantage of minimum orders – and so doing even more coordinating communication.

More of the story

Big flow diagrams

Here's a set of big enlargeable resource flow diagrams from the Textile Labs people: https://mikorizal.org/textile_diagrams.pdf

They want to animate them. Should be fun.

All the diagrams in this story, including the big ones, were created by the New York Textile Labs.

Shared ledger

You could (and the NY Textile Network now does) coordinate the flows using phone calls, text messages, and emails.

But then you would miss the records of what happened, which is useful for many purposes, including: * distributing income according to peoples' contributions to earning it, * distilling the records into repeatable recipes for future flows, * and, of course, accounting.

Intro

Sync up means to bring two or more agents in an economic network into a synchronized state, that is, where the agents have agreed on what they have done together and intend to do next.

Coordinate means to continue to synchronize the actions of two or more agents through a series of agreed-upon actions, like a dance following an agreed-upon choreography,

Such choreography often comes in patterns which can often be named and re-used to guide coordination. [asking Mike Hales for a citation here...}

State machines

From Wikipedia:

“a state machine, is a mathematical model of computation. It is an abstract machine that can be in exactly one of a finite number of states at any given time. The FSM can change from one state to another in response to some inputs; the change from one state to another is called a transition. An FSM is defined by a list of its states, its initial state, and the inputs that trigger each transition.”

Besides computation, a state machine is also a model of coordinated actions between agents, and also a model of conversations about those coordinated actions.

Conversation for action

CfA is one of the main named patterns of coordination used by Valueflows. Here is a diagram of the CfA state machine:

“In order for action to occur between two people, one person must make a request or an offer to get things started. If no one makes a request, or no one makes an offer, nothing is going to happen between them.

“Once a request or an offer is made, then the ball is on the other person to determine what happens next, and so forth, until the person making the request, or accepting an offer, is satisfied.” from CfA Playground

At each phase of the conversation (Negotiation and Evaluation) two agents, A and B, are either synchronized (agreed) or the conversation fails.

Coordinating Textile Lab flows

See https://write.as/economic-networks/coordinate-the-flows

The Textile Lab flow patterns will (eventually) be captured in Valueflows Recipes. Here is a diagram of their proposed flow for a knitted hat:

The flow in that diagram goes from right [the Designer] to left {the hat].

The Designer is the coordinator, and so will be involved in each of the conversations for action: * Designer<>Farmer * Designer<>Trucker * Designer<>Washer * Designer<>Spinner * Designer<>Knitter etc.

What is a good UI for the coordinator in those Conversations?

The providers of goods and services may be involved in several of those conversations, but each one will usually start with one offer or request, and end with one delivery and its evaluation, and their interactions will be relatively similar in each case..

The coordinator, by contrast, may be involved in several conversations at the same time; even several conversations in the same flow from raw materials to finished garments. So they will need to know their current stage (where in the flow) and current state (in which conversation in which flow) and responded appropriately in each case. The UI will need to help them manage all of those conversations at all of those stages in all of those flows.

One possible UI for the coordinator:

Two main panes: * On the left, a graphical view of the resource flows in action. * On the right, a threaded chat showing each of the conversations the coordinator is involved in.

The threaded chat would mostly consist of structured messages using Ivan Minutillo's economic sentence structure. In other words, each message in the chat would be a Valueflows statement. Ivan is working on https://bonfirenetworks.org/ which includes Valueflows, so maybe he'll do it.

The messages in the threaded chat panel could be simplified to

VF Action	Provider	Receiver	ResourceSpec
Produce	Goat Farm	Natural Sweaters Co-op	White wool

...and then if the coordinator clicks on a chat line, it would open up in a bigger edit form.

That same simplified representation could be used for other Valueflows statements in other places. It's almost the same as the text on the arrows on that resource flow diagram.

More conversationally, it could be “Natural Sweaters Co-op requests Goat Farm to produce White Wool” or “Goat Farm commits to produce White Wool for Natural Sweaters Co-op” or “Goat Farm produced White Wool for Natural Sweaters Co-op” depending on the state of the desires of the agents to perform the action.

Mockup to come...

Gladys Foster (mother of Lynn, my partner in work and life) once told me that economics is about provisioning, not money: provisioning human (and now ecological) needs.

These next two blog posts will consider community provisioning systems. The first one, here, will discuss an actual community economic system being developed in Ellijay, Georgia, USA. The second will consider how Valueflows might be able to help.

Here is a previous post about community economic systems for flavor: A Fractal Economy. This other post gets into some details about coordinating economic networks, which would be a good form for a community economy: Synchronization and Coordination.

Ellijay: an example community economic system being born (maybe):

Andrew Roach of Ellijay, Georgia is chatting about organizing a community economic system in a Social.coop thread.

I will copy and paste some important bits below. But the “Show More” button works, and the link at the bottom of the “Show More” excerpt opens a new tab on the whole thread.

Andrew writes:

“Let's start with the vision:

“I want to live my life outside the rule of megacorps and rent seekers.

“I want to excise Extractive Economics and Surveillance Capitalism from my life.

“I want to build a community that can sustain, that can keep it's money circulating within the community. A community that is built around the idea of enriching one another.

“That's hard!”

More of Andrew's intentions:

The main intent for this discussion is below the fold: “We have to treat ourselves like a separate economy, and focus on what we can sell to the world (export, extract from them) versus what we have to buy from the world (import, extract from us) versus what we can keep circulating within our community.”

(This blog thinks this is best done as a local Circular Economy but that might be too big a leap from where Ellijay is now.)

Where to start?

Most attempts at community economies that I have seen start with food. Andrew starts very differently:

Even before the Community Web Infrastructure:

Andrew was known to the Ellijay region for running the Ellijay Coffee House featuring many local musicians, making toys, and making movies.

More background:

Food? Pottery! Toys! Books! Music! Radio! TV! Computers! Social media! Software! But Andrew says it's not enough.

If you want to organize anything locally, it helps if people know you and you have contributed something to the community. Fun might be a good contribution to start with.

Where's the food? When do we eat?

“We grow food! Not enough for a whole community, obviously, I'm not a full time farmer. But enough to supplement for our neighbors.”

I think they need partners to really provision food. Real farms with real farmers.

But who provisions the farmers? They probably have land, but if they have machinery, it needs fuel and often repairs. Otherwise, they might want some machinery, unless they're going Amish, in which case, horses! And they need seed and a bunch of other farm inputs. And a lot of work.

So a circular economy will need to also provision the farmers. And the farm equipment repair people. And the farm equipment makers, who could be the same as the repair people: refurbished older machinery is often better for small farms than the new stuff. (And don't forget the horses...)

Lotta organizing needs to be done. See the end of https://write.as/economic-networks/a-fractal-economy

They got the music, they could stage such a scene...

Next

We'll see if Valueflows could help...could plug right into that Community Web Infrastructure...

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.