This might get a little long, sorry. It could have been longer, so I separated out some of the details into another blog post.

But this is what we are focusing on in the next stage of our work together.

We are Mikorizal.org and we're moving into a new stage of work, which will also require an update to our poor neglected website. But I'll try to explain it in this series of blog posts.

We've been focusing on economic networks for some years, but our most recent stage was focused on developing the Valueflows vocabulary for communication in economic networks, and working with different software projects to implement the necessary apps and logic.

Now we want to start to try out the software with real-life economic networks.

What do we mean, “economic network”?

An economic network consists of independent economic agents (individual people or organizations) collaborating to produce and distribute goods and services to meet human and ecological needs. For example, food, clothing, housing, education, health care. healthy soil, etc.

If the agents in such a network want to work together, they will need to coordinate their activities.

This post will discuss using Internet protocols and software based on the Valueflows vocabulary for messages between agents in the network to help with such coordination.

We'll use the New York Textile Lab (NYTL) as an example. NYTL is an economic network that produces clothing. The network participants include clothing designers, farmers producing wool from sheep and alpacas, washers who scour the wool, spinners who spin the wool into thread, and knitters who turn the thread into garments for people to wear.

NYTL also pays a lot of attention to their network's environmental effects: https://www.newyorktextilelab.com/carbon-farm-network-2

Along the way,we'll explain some of the benefits of using the Valueflows vocabulary and accompanying software to coordinate economic activities.

What's the diff between an economic network and a supply chain?

A supply chain is shaped like a tree or a river with a “parent company” as the root or source, while a network is shaped like a map with roads going in many directions. (Technically, a network can be depicted as a directed graph.)

A supply chain is also technically an example of an economic network, but the NYTL network includes several supply chains, one or more for each designer, and they all work together at least once a year, because they share many of the same resources and support services and operate in the same territory, the Hudson River Valley between New York and New England.

The designers do most of the coordinating of their own supply chains, and sometimes they get together on group orders for textile materials and services.

Two diagrams and a comic strip

This is a resource flow diagram created by the NYTL. It shows economic resources flowing (on arrows) between processes (circles) operated by economic agents (rectangles).

You might want to open it in a new tab so you can enlarge it for readability.

This is an interaction diagram showing the messages going between a designer and the other participants in the network.

Here's the start of a comic strip showing some of the conversations between the textile network participants:

I'll finish the comic strip later. For now, just know that all of the conversations in the interaction diagram will also be accompanied by comic strip panels.

Benefits of using Valueflows (VF) to coordinate your economic network

Two dimensions of VF benefits: 1. A standard vocabulary: any standard vocabulary that is agreed upon and used by all members of a network in their communication messages. 2. The VF vocabulary has some particular advantages, since it was designed to help coordinate economic networks.

Benefits of using any standard vocabulary:

1. A standard vocabulary helps members of the network understand what a message means.
2. By using a standard vocabulary in your own messages, other people can more easily understand what you meant, and so your messages might more easily get your desired effects.
3. This standardization is especially important if you are using software that you want to understand the messages, because software is very literal-minded and cannot figure out random variations on messages.

The next section will assume you want to use software to coordinate your network. You could do all coordinating with phone messages, but then you would waste a lot of time and work.

Benefits of using VF as your standard vocabulary:

VF provides not only a standard vocabulary for economic interactions, but also, data structures and methods of generating the structures from the messages that use the vocabulary.

The VF data structures provide directed graphs of resource flows in economic network on three levels:

• What resource flows usually happen in a particular network. Those are created by trained people as Recipes.
• What resource flows are scheduled to happen in the network. Those can be generated automatically from the Recipes with a very few starting parameters.
• What resource flows have happened. Those need to be entered by people doing the work, but their data can usually entered by pointing and clicking guided by what was scheduled to happen.

VF code can automatically generate accounting and other economic reports from the VF data.

If a network uses a “contribution economy” like Sensorica or the DisCOs, VF code can generate the claims for income for all contributors to the network.

All of those automatic outputs save people a lot of work and make the coordination a lot smoother.

Preview of Part 2:

We'll look the New York Textile Lab's plans for using their upcoming software. Once the software gets finished enough for them to start using it, I'll do a Part 3.

Part 1 introduced the New York Textile Lab (NYTL) and how they might use Valueflows to help coordinate their economic network, which produces clothing from (mostly) woolen fibers. This part will get a lot deeper into how the coordination might work.

Software for economic coordination

A year and a half ago, NYTL selected Holochain as their partner for developing network coordination software.

That software is getting closer but not quite ready for their use. I hope this series of blog posts helps all the participants to identify some of the functions the software will need to handle.

This post started to describe some of the required features. The next post will get into even more detail on the configuration of the software..

The annual cycle

The NYTL uses natural fibers which are grown by animals (mostly sheep and alpacas) to keep them warm in the winter. So they like to get their wool trimmed in the spring before they get too hot. So the farmers, who want the wool for making warm clothing for humans, shear the animals every spring. That starts the yearly cycle for the NYTL.

The first stage of the annual cycle will be a lot more conversational and free-form, everybody talking to everybody else, more like a social network than the later stages with structured messages in structured interactions.

Network map

One of the main features of the software should be a map of the network, showing all of the members, and selections of what is happening in different locations.

The map shown below is an early prototype. Would be good for some of the network members to suggest what what kinds of information they'd like to see on the map, or in popups on map locations.

Network resource flows

Those will happen, and can be depicted, on several levels: * resource flows that have happened (the past) * resource flows that are happening now (the present) * resource flows that are planned (the near future) * resource flows designs that could be planned (what we call “recipes”).

Here's a repeat from Part 1 showing two different resource flows planned by one designer: to create two products, a hat and a blanket

Recipes and planning

Recipes in this case are not for cooking, they are for planning resource flows to create textile products. The resource flows will need to be planned over and over again, for each textile order, and creating the plans by hand will be tedious work. So let's automate them!

A Recipe starts with * an end product (for example, a hat), * and then adds the process to create the hat, * and then the inputs to that process, * and the processes to create those inputs, * and their inputs, etc.

The inputs might include * textile materials, * work of various kinds, * equipment of various kinds, * and whatever other resources might be needed at each process in the recipe flow.

Planning from recipes

The designers will generally do the planning. When a design gets an order for some products, like 100 hats, they will kick off the recipe software that woll create the plan for producing those 10 hats, including all of the material inputs, the equipment, and the work that needs to be scheduled.

If the required materials can be found in network inventory, they will be allocated to fulfill this order. Likewise if the scope of the plan is internal to one node in the network (as contrasted with planning the whole network at the same time). the people to do the work may be known, and they can be scheduled to perform the processes and given work orders. Required equipment and process locations will be scheduled, with orders to their custodians. Anything that can not be found will go on a todo list for the designer to find and add to the plan.

Planning logic

The planning logic is the same as MRP which is explained in this pattern called Dependent Demand and has been implemented lots of different software.

This diagram from that pattern paper shows the principle behind the pattern:

The order for 100 hats is the independent demand. All other requirements flow from the 100 hats, to fulfill the order.

Sensorica's NRP software. developed by http://mikorizal.org/ , has working code to plan from recipes.

Preview of Part 3:

We'll explain a couple of the configuration features of the upcoming software: * Type objects, and * Facets. We want these features because, while we love the Textile Networks, we also have many other kinds of networks waiting in the wings and we want the software to also work for them (for example, fablabs which will use Valueflows to fabricate and assemble hardware). Plus, the textile networks may evolve and need the same configuration features.

Configuring the software

We want this software to work for many different kinds of economic networks. Plus, the New York Textile Lab, the currently planned users, may change and develop new requirements.

Two main configuration features are in the upcoming software roadmap (and have been implemented in previous Valueflows software): * Type objects, and * Facets.

Type objects

Type objects came from game programming:

In typical object-oriented programming, Classes are built into the program code and cannot be changed, nor can new ones be invented, without more programming.

Type objects allow regular users to create their own custom types without any programming.

Valueflows has three levels. The Knowledge level is all made up of Type Objects and their relationships.

(Lynn reminds me that in many systems, some of those would be Master Files. The diff is that Type Objects have built-in methods (logic, code) while Master Files don't. But the ideas are definitely related.)

ResourceSpecifications

These are user-defined resource types like “Brown Alpaca Wool” or “Shima Seiki knitting machine”. A particular network might need lots of those, and more may be found or invented all the time.

ProcessSpecifications

How does some Resource get created? What ResourceSpecifications would be used for inputs and ouputs? Etc.

Recipes

Recipes are combinations of Resource and Process Specifications used to create new Resources. They are also used for automated planning, as explained in Part 2.

Facets

Facets are lists of user-defined fields that can be added to data obects to flexibly add more information. For example, a ResourceSpecification like Brown Alpaca Wool might have Facets for different measurable properties of the wool, like denier. Or in a food network, Apples might have facets for Variety and Growing Method.

Here are some the facets from Sensorica's NRP system:

Might help to open the image in another tab so you can enlarge it for readability. But as you can see, Sensorica uses their facets a lot.

See https://communityeconomies.org/ .

They got an Institute. They got a Research Network.

I have been carrying on about this topic on this blog here and here and little did I know, they are way ahead of me! Which is good!

And they are talking about https://www.communityeconomies.org/publications/books/postcapitalist-politics – which means we might even agree!

J.K. Gibson-Graham

“Community Economies is founded on the groundbreaking work of J.K. Gibson-Graham (the authorial voice of Katherine Gibson and the late Julie Graham). In publications such as The End of Capitalism (as we knew it): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, A Postcapitalist Politics, and Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming our Communities, J.K. Gibson-Graham opened up our understanding of 'the economy' as comprised of diverse economic activities—including those are the basis for more ethical economies.” – from https://communityeconomies.org/about

...and they got people in Madison!

https://www.communityeconomies.org/people

Wait wait that's Madison New Jersey, not Madison Wisconsin...

More to come!

The context for this discussion is the upcoming software for the New York Textile Lab, where their network takes wool from sheep and alpacas and, through several processes, converts it into garments for people to wear..

Planning forward means to start with wool and find out how much yarn can be made from the wool on offer.

Planning backward means to start with requests for yarn and see how those requests could be fulfilled.

The Pattern of the Textile Flows

Using the Input-Process-Output Resource Flow pattern.

The processes include: * Pick Up and Combine Lots, * Scour (clean the wool), * Spin, * Split up yarn, and * Knit.

With transportation between the processes, so the overall pattern is: * Pick Up and Combine Lots, * Ship to Scour, * Scour (clean the wool), * Ship to Spin, * Spin, * Ship to Knit * Split up yarn, and * Knit.

The algorithm

Each process has inputs and outputs. Assuming a Valueflows Recipe or something like it, the quantities of the inputs in the recipe will be required to produce the quantities of the specified outputs, for example, 1 measure of apples to produce 1 pie.

If planning forward, start with the offered wool. * add each of the input resources to the process's input list, * and use the process's output calculations to create the process's outputs. Then take the outputs and make them inputs to the next process.

If planning backwards, do the same thing in reverse, starting with the requested yarn,

“If you are supply-driven and want to know how much yarn could potentially made from wool on offer”

I intend this blog post to start a conversation about organizing community economies in communities that I know and live in. Be aware that I have no experience with land trusts or Solawis, altho I know people who do. So what follows is guesswork.

Recently I found a Community Economies organization

I've been talking a lot about this topic here and elsewhere. Along the way, I found an organization that might be way ahead of me, at least in some directions: http://communityeconomies.org/

This page explains their approach (which I like a lot): http://communityeconomies.org/about/community-economies-research-and-practice

They say,

...this approach challenges three problematic aspects of how “the economy” is understood: seeing it as inevitably capitalist, assuming that it is a determining force rather than a site for politics and transformation, and separating economy from ecology.

I agree with every word of that.

I want to contact them and ask some questions, but thought I'd write this introductory post first.

Community Economies' definition of “Economy”

In conventional usage, economy often refers to a system of formal commodity production and monetary exchange. Our use of the term is much broader. The “eco” in economy comes from the Greek root oikos, meaning “home” or “habitat”—in other words, that which sustains life. The “nomy” comes from nomos, meaning management. We view economy as referring to all of the practices that allow us to survive and care for each other and the earth. Economy, understood this way, is not separate from ecology, but refers to the ongoing management—and therefore negotiation—of human and nonhuman ecological relations of sustenance.

Yet again, I fully agree. Lynn Foster and I collaborate on https://www.valueflo.ws/ . Lynn's mother, who lived to 99, was an institutional economist, as was her father. Her mother told me that economics is about provisioning: providing the needs of people and their environment. It's not about money.

Today I found another Community Economics organization...

...even more exiting, because they are deep into Community Land Trusts (more about them below), and they are coming out of Cooperation Jackson. And I'll write a bunch more about them below, too. Cooperation Jackson is a model for the kind of community economic system that I would like to help organize in our region.

The organization is the Institute for Community Economics of the National Housing Trust.

Community Land Trusts:

Some of the founders of the first Community Land Trust in Albany, Georgia

We know a local lawyer who has set up community land trusts, so he could help us if we want to do that. And I think we do want to do that. Usually they seem to be created for community housing, which is a great idea, and we will want some, but I'm also thinking about a community farm. And a Community Land Trust might be the best legal ownership form for a community farm.

An idea about community land trusts: a Community Solawi.

This is not real. Yet. I'd like to make it real. I think it could be the starting point for a more all-purpose community economy.

I wrote about Solawis here: https://write.as/economic-networks/a-fractal-economy

A Solawi is something like a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm, several of which we have around us, and we belong to a couple of them. But a CSA is still a private farm, operated by the owners, who make all the decisions. A Solawi is owned by its community, and run cooperatively.

As that blog post says, a Solawi has yearly meetings of all the members where they decide on what to grow this year and pledge money for the growing expenses.

And many of the Solawi members work on the farm:

From Solawi to whole community economy

My Solawi article transitioned to a related website about Community Supported Economies.

“Solawi...works according to the principle of sharing costs and harvest: A group of people forms a community and allocates the entire running costs of an agricultural operation to all members. This changes the relationship between consumers and producers – they share the risk and responsibility for the production of the food and the development of the organization. The products are no longer sold for a market price, but distributed to the members, because the running costs are already covered by the members' contributions.

“This principle can also be transferred to other areas – from a jointly funded health center to energy supply, crafts, gastronomy and creative services to providers of leisure activities.”

Are Mutual Aid Networks a basis for community economies?

They might be. Here's some Mutual Aid action in our region: https://mutualaidnetwork.org/

I'll ask them what they think.

I have not finished this post yet, but I am sharing the link with a few people to get feedback. If you have read this far, what do you think of this set of ideas?

Let the critics (Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek) go first. From http://www.cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/assets/writings/library/accelerate_manifesto.html

We believe the most important division in today’s left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology. The former remains content with establishing small and temporary spaces of non-capitalist social relations, eschewing the real problems entailed in facing foes which are intrinsically non-local, abstract, and rooted deep in our everyday infrastructure.

We are guilty, to some extent. We work local-first and spread horizontally. We get their point about globality (more about that later), and we agree about technology.

We believe that any post-capitalism will require post-capitalist planning. The faith placed in the idea that, after a revolution, the people will spontaneously constitute a novel socioeconomic system that isn’t simply a return to capitalism is naïve at best, and ignorant at worst. To further this, we must develop both a cognitive map of the existing system and a speculative image of the future economic system.

We have a combined 60 years of large-scale software systems development that says your speculative image will not work. That’s called “Big Design Upfront” or “Build It and They Will Come”. That approach has mostly been abandoned in favor of agile and incremental development, always working with the people who will use the system as soon as possible, at first in small pieces loosely joined.

Lenin (whom they quote) would roll over in his grave. But then he had a revolution behind him and an army to support him. We are two old people living in a canyon in the woods supported by US Social Security, for as long as that lasts. So we do what we can do, which might be a lot. We’ll see.

But back to our strategy.

I’ve been working since about 1995 on a precursor to our current strategy, which you can read about at https://write.as/economic-networks/about

Lynn and I have been working on a subsequent strategy that came out of a project called an Open App Ecosystem, of which many variations have emerged which you can find in this search: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=Open+App+Ecosystem&ia=web

What it meant to us, was different people developing different software apps that could all work together and cooperate to form larger systems with replaceable, loosely-coupled components.

In the discussions for an Open App Ecosystem with an organization called Enspiral, we decided that the open apps would need one or more vocabularies to communicate with each other. So Lynn and I, along with some other people listed here https://www.valueflo.ws/introduction/contributors/ , started to work on a vocabulary for economic networks called https://www.valueflo.ws/ .

From the start, we intended Valueflows and its open apps that used it to grow into the administrative support for whole anti-capitalist economic systems.

“Systems” instead of “system” because such systems would need to start locally or regionally and then join together place by place until they might organize together into larger economic systems.

This strategy seems to be the opposite in some ways of the Accelerationist strategy, which seems to want a global system. But as I read more of their manifesto, they temper their enthusiasm and end up with something more like what we want to do:

Any transformation of society must involve economic and social experimentation. The Chilean Project Cybersyn is emblematic of this experimental attitude — fusing advanced cybernetic technologies, with sophisticated economic modelling, and a democratic platform instantiated in the technological infrastructure itself. 15. We do not present any particular organisation as the ideal means to embody these vectors. What is needed — what has always been needed — is an ecology of organisations, a pluralism of forces, resonating and feeding back on their comparative strengths. Sectarianism is the death knell of the left as much as centralization is, and in this regard we continue to welcome experimentation with different tactics (even those we disagree with).

So they might (or might not) welcome our experiments….

But there is a problem with our strategy, as it has evolved from large centralized platforms to decentralized networks. A platform has a center, a place to make decisions and set rules for all participants. A decentralized network does not. As in the poem by William Butler Yeats called “The Second Coming”,

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

...and we are not anarchists.

The popular way that decentralized agreements have come to be implemented is via Blockchains, which created the first practical method for global consensus. But we don’t want to use them, because blockchains are huge, recentralized via all participants needing to use a copy of the same chain, and consensus decisions get slower all the time. An Internet search now says “In general, Bitcoin transactions usually take from one to one and half hours to complete.” That’s a long time to wait for your lunch transaction to clear.

And most of the time you don’t really need global consensus. All you need is agreement among the participants in a single decision. So we are working with implementations of local consensus, in two different decentralized technical environments: https://www.holochain.org and https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ otherwise known as the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse

Why do we imagine that we can create the operating system for a new economy? Well, first, we continue to organize as much help as we can get. But second, both of us have a lot of experience with large-scale economic software. I worked in several https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_resource_planning systems, the kind of software that most big capitalist organizations use, and Lynn worked on the software used by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve . So we have some basis to understand what is needed, and as described above, we will work on it in as many experiments as we can manage, and learn as we go, and organize other people to take over and move forward, because we are getting old.

Back to planning...

Here’s a survey of different proposals for a new and better economic system: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NwEcKf-AlD3WlvHFNCmGmDKp9NerPeAaHeTHTrdF628/edit?usp=sharing

The one that I like is called “Information Technology and Socialist Construction” or the “General Catalog” of provisions that should be produced. Assuming all of the producers on each level of the production chain have something like our https://www.valueflo.ws/concepts/recipes/ for production, all of the provisions can be planned recursively and all of the production processes, with their inputs and outputs, can be tracked and documented. It would like you are Cuba and know what needs to be produced for the whole island. And I assume Cuba knows and plans accordingly.

(“Our” refers to http://mikorizal.org/ )

Let the critics (Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek) go first. I'll do some point-and-counterpoint with them. But first, what I think is their most valuable idea.

All quotes from Alex and Nick are excerpted from http://www.cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/assets/writings/library/accelerate_manifesto.html

In The Economic Prospects for Our Grandchildren (written in 1930), Keynes forecast a capitalist future where individuals would have their work reduced to three hours a day. What has instead occurred is the progressive elimination of the work-life distinction, with work coming to permeate every aspect of the emerging social factory...Capitalism has begun to constrain the productive forces of technology, or at least, direct them towards needlessly narrow ends...The properly accelerative gains of neoliberalism have not led to less work or less stress. And rather than a world of space travel, future shock, and revolutionary technological potential, we exist in a time where the only thing which develops is marginally better consumer gadgetry. Relentless iterations of the same basic product sustain marginal consumer demand at the expense of human acceleration.

Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces. In this project, the material platform of neoliberalism does not need to be destroyed. It needs to be repurposed towards common ends. The existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed, but a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism.

That was what I think was their most valuable idea and why they say “accelerate”. I'll come back to that idea later, below...

On to some point-counterpoint. (Their points, my counter-points.)

We believe the most important division in today’s left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology. The former remains content with establishing small and temporary spaces of non-capitalist social relations, eschewing the real problems entailed in facing foes which are intrinsically non-local, abstract, and rooted deep in our everyday infrastructure.

We are guilty, to some extent. We work local-first and spread horizontally. We get their point about globality (more about that later), and we agree about technology.

We believe that any post-capitalism will require post-capitalist planning. The faith placed in the idea that, after a revolution, the people will spontaneously constitute a novel socioeconomic system that isn’t simply a return to capitalism is naïve at best, and ignorant at worst. To further this, we must develop both a cognitive map of the existing system and a speculative image of the future economic system.

We have a combined 80+ years of large-scale software systems development that says their speculative image will not work, unless they do it in smaller pieces, working all the time with communities on the ground. That approach of starting with your speculative image is called “Big Design Upfront” or “Build It and They Will Come”. That approach has mostly been abandoned in favor of agile and incremental development, always working with the people who will use the system as soon as possible, at first in small pieces loosely joined.

Lenin (whom they quote) would roll over in his grave. But then he had a revolution behind him and an army to support him. We are two old people living in a canyon in the woods supported by US Social Security, for as long as that lasts. So we do what we can do, which might be a lot. We’ll see.

But back to our strategy.

I’ve been working since about 1995 on a precursor to our current strategy, which you can read about at https://write.as/economic-networks/about

Lynn and I have been working on a subsequent strategy that came out of a project called Open App Ecosystem, of which many variations have emerged which you can find in this search: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=Open+App+Ecosystem&ia=web

What it meant to us, was different people developing different software apps that could all work together and cooperate to form larger systems with replaceable, loosely-coupled components.

In the discussions for an Open App Ecosystem with an organization called Enspiral, we decided that the open apps would need one or more common vocabularies to communicate with each other. So Lynn and I, along with some other people listed here https://www.valueflo.ws/introduction/contributors/ , started to work on a vocabulary for economic networks called https://www.valueflo.ws/ .

From the start, we intended Valueflows and its open apps that used it to grow into the administrative support for whole anti-capitalist economic systems. We don't pretend that we can do this by ourselves, or even that we would be a big part of the effort, but that's what we want and are working toward and collaborating with whoever else is working toward the same goals.

“Systems” instead of “system” because such systems would need to start locally or regionally and then join together place by place until they might organize together into larger economic systems. Maybe global? We don't know, but we have collaborators in more than one continent.

Depending on how I understand their Accelerationist strategy, our strategy might be the opposite in some ways. They might want a global system now (which will not work). But as I read more of their manifesto, they temper their enthusiasm and end up with something more like what we want to do:

Any transformation of society must involve economic and social experimentation. The Chilean Project Cybersyn is emblematic of this experimental attitude — fusing advanced cybernetic technologies, with sophisticated economic modelling, and a democratic platform instantiated in the technological infrastructure itself. 15. We do not present any particular organisation as the ideal means to embody these vectors. What is needed — what has always been needed — is an ecology of organisations, a pluralism of forces, resonating and feeding back on their comparative strengths. Sectarianism is the death knell of the left as much as centralization is, and in this regard we continue to welcome experimentation with different tactics (even those we disagree with).

So they might (or might not) welcome our experiments….

But there is a problem with our strategy, as it has evolved from large centralized platforms to decentralized networks. A platform has a center, a place to make decisions and set rules for all participants. A decentralized network does not. As in the poem by William Butler Yeats called “The Second Coming”,

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

...and we are not anarchists.

The popular way that decentralized agreements have come to be implemented is via Blockchains, which created the first practical method for global consensus. But we don’t want to use them, because blockchains are huge, recentralized via all participants needing to use a copy of the same chain, and consensus decisions get slower all the time. An Internet search now says “In general, Bitcoin transactions usually take from one to one and half hours to complete.” That’s a long time to wait for your lunch transaction to clear.

And most of the time you don’t really need global consensus. All you need is agreement among the participants in a single decision. So we are working with implementations of local consensus, in two different decentralized technical environments: https://www.holochain.org and https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ otherwise known as the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse

Why do we imagine that we can create the operating system for a new economy? Well, first, we continue to organize as much help as we can get. But second, both of us have a lot of experience with large-scale economic software. I worked on several https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_resource_planning systems, the kind of software that most big capitalist organizations use, and Lynn worked on the software used by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve . So we have some basis to understand what is being used now, and what is needed for a better future. And as described above, we will work on it in as many experiments as we can manage, and learn as we go, and organize other people to take over and move forward, because we are getting old.

Back to planning...

Here’s a survey of different proposals for a new and better economic system: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NwEcKf-AlD3WlvHFNCmGmDKp9NerPeAaHeTHTrdF628/edit?usp=sharing

The one that I like is called “Information Technology and Socialist Construction” or the “General Catalog” of provisions that should be produced. Assuming all of the producers on each level of the production chain have something like our https://www.valueflo.ws/concepts/recipes/ for production, all of the provisions can be planned recursively and all of the production processes, with their inputs and outputs, can be tracked and documented. It would be like you are Cuba and know what needs to be produced for the whole island. And I assume Cuba knows and plans accordingly.

Accelerate!

Harking back to “Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces” ...

Using Valueflows, people can coordinate their activities peer-to-peer with no bosses. They can organize projects in their communities to feed everybody and house everybody and provide for all of the human and ecological needs in their communities. They can pool their resources and produce what they want and need.

They can, but will they? We'll see. The first network that aims to try is https://www.newyorktextilelab.com/ . We are working with them and a bunch of people from https://hrea.io/ on a network coordination system.

If anybody read this and gets interested in doing likewise, give us a yell at ???

This is one of the main functions of all our Valueflows software systems, from the first Network Resource Planning system for (and with) Sensorica to the upcoming hREA planning apps. Might be THE main function.

If a network is using recipes (and if not, why not?) all of their planning and re-planning revolves around their recipes.

I plan to write several blog posts about planning from recipes. This will be an overview and recap: mostly a set of links to other pages written in the past.

• Here’s Lynn’s previous recap: https://lab.allmende.io/valueflows/valueflows/-/wikis/Application-specification-guidance#planning-wip

• This page explains our recipes: where they come from, how they are constructed, and what they are good for: https://lab.allmende.io/valueflows/valueflows/-/wikis/Recipes-vs-Bills-of-Material-and-Routings-vs-Resource-Flows

Will this survive an edit?

Looks good so far....

Another section?

https://www.valueflo.ws/