Economic Networks

A series of posts about those things. Oldest posts first.

What is “The Commons”?

Here’s an introduction: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-17th-century-ideal-commons-means-21st-century-180973240/

CROP intends, as a contribution to a newly emerging Commons, to create open-source, freely-available, and free-to-use economic operating and planning software where all of the participants can engage in social provisioning (https://wiki.communitiesforfuture.org/wiki/Social_Provisioning_Process) to plan, create, and use economic resources like food, housing, health care, child care, and other necessities of human and ecological life.

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems are what most big companies use. Can we do better for the Commons? Yes we can.

ERP software is badly designed (see next section). We (http://mikorizal.org/) have been working on a better design since 1997, and had working software that has been used by several organizations. That software needs an update: all of the software components are dead, and the architecture also needs an update, although the model and logic are still mostly good, and the old software provides a proof of concept of the ideas. The model and logic have evolved into Valueflows. We will help you implement a Commons Resource Operation and Planning system based on Valueflows, but we are too old to do it by ourselves, so CROP needs you. (Where “you” are other development organizations and/or individual developers.)

So this is an invitation.

What’s wrong with ERP software and how can we do better?

Most ERP software follows the same design pattern, which is a kludge.

kludge /kloo͞j/

noun

  1. A system, especially a computer system, that is constituted of poorly matched elements or of elements originally intended for other applications.

  2. A clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem.

In the case of ERP software, the core of the system is MRP (Material Requirements Planning), which has an elegant data model and algorithm, which you can read a lot more about here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_requirements_planning or other places on the Web. MRP is a flow-oriented system. But then several older financial applications get tacked on to the MRP core that are the opposite of flow-oriented: Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, and General Ledger, which are all control-oriented, aimed at blocking the flows to keep the money in the pocket.

AP, AR, and GL were older applications that the ERP software vendors had already developed or that they knew how to design from long experience. But very poorly matched to MRP.

The Commons systems of the future will be flow-oriented

They will not need or want the elaborate control systems of today’s ERP software. They will want smooth flows through social provisioning of all the necessities of personal and organizational life. They will want collaborative planning and doing.

CROP software stack candidates

As of now, we have two candidate stacks in development:

1. Holo-REA [hREA] on Holochain. And

2. ActivityPub, maybe based on Bonfire software.

We would be delighted to work on this set of ideas with pretty much anybody on either stack. (Or any other stack people want to use. Especially if it can be distributed in a P2P network.)

Each of those stacks has advantages and disadvantages:

  • Holochain is peer-to-peer, where each person operates from their own computer
    • P2P is the appropriate computing architecture for CROP, which wants to be a peer-to-peer system.
    • On the other hand, as of now (2024), each participant will need a powerful personal computer.
  • ActivityPub can be peer-to-peer but can also be organization-to- organization where each participant can operate from a group environment but have their own personal identity for P2P interactions.
    • So ActivityPub is more flexible and forgiving as an operating environment.
    • On the other hand, the group software will need to promote and enable P2P interactions, which could lead to some awkward design decisions.

If CROP gets implemented on either of those stacks, or anything else, because it will use a common vocabulary, any of those implementations should be able to communicate and internetwork with any of the others.

So it could become the economic internet.

Why might you want to help create CROP?

  1. If you want to help create software for economic networks that want to live in The Commons.

  2. If you want to help create software for economic networks that might partly live in The Commons and partly need to survive in capitalism.

  3. If you want to help create software for economic networks that want to be able to evolve freely with the political-economic systems they need to survive in.

Read more...

What MRP is now:

  • MRP…
    • is usually a big batch process
    • usually runs overnight
    • and work must stop for the duration of the regeneration process; no new records can be allowed until MRP has finished (depending on the rules of the MRP software implementation).
  • MRP plans for a single company, not for a whole supply chain.
  • Some MRP apps can do “net change” updates but some can only do full regeneration of all plans.

How would distributed P2P planning work?

Agent-centric? Each agent could send planning messages to its network neighbors in local conversations (where “local” means not geography but topology. “among network neighbors”

Suppose that Agent A gets resource inputs from Agents D, E, and F, and sends output resources to Agents B and C. So those are the network neighbors involved in planning and executing resource flows.

…is something we intend to do. This is the start of a plan for us and we hope other collaborators.

…maybe best to start small.

Maybe start with some people who are already exchanging economic resource flows.

…maybe start easy:

Maybe start with some software that the participants already have and use, like email. Add mailing lists. And then add social media.

Best social media to use is based on ActivityPub:

See https://activitypub.rocks/ . It’s an open standard with lots of software that can build on it, as we intend to do. And lots of people using it, for example, in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(social_network)

…then add economic logic to the social media.

One good economic planning logic is MRP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_requirements_planning).

MRP was designed and developed by Joe Orlicky (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Orlicky) in 1964. It was the first system that I know of that did economic planning in a way that could not be done at scale without a computer.

But MRP is usually a big centralized long overnight top-down software process usually run by a big company, because it is expensive and time-consuming to implement. But we want bottom-up peer-to-peer conversational collaborative planning that should be easy and cheap for each participant to implement, as in, just install this app on a personal computer.

One problem with MRP…

…it plans for a single company, not whole supply chains or economic networks. What companies often do is add other expensive and complicated software to their MRP systems and use those add-ons to plan their supply chains. But the add-ons often do not integrate with the MRP system. Awkward, difficult, and even more expensive.

But the design outlined here will plan whole economic networks via each network agent creating their own input and output plans for them and communicating those plans to their network neighbors, as suggested below.

Fortunately, MRP is already a sorta conversational system:

MRP systems usually do not create plans, they sends messages to people suggesting what plans they should make, and the people create the plans by following the MRP suggestions.

So that is perfect for what we want to develop, which is…

P2P MRP:

Where participants in the economic networks send MRP-style messages to their network neighbors suggesting plans and changes to plans.

How would distributed P2P planning work?

Agent-centric? Each Agent (where an Agent can be a person acting for themselves or acting for an organization) could send planning messages to its network neighbors in local conversations (where “local” means not geography but topology. “among network neighbors”

Suppose that Agent A gets resource inputs from Agent D, E, and F, and sends output resources to Agent B and C. So those are the network neighbors involved in planning and executing resource flows. Agent D would be involved with Agent A and Agent G, Agent E with Agent A and Agent H, etc.

How to implement

One software infrastructure would be Holochain (https://www.holochain.org/). As they say, it is an “open source P2P app framework”, and it is serverless. Each agent communicates from its own Holochain app on its own personal computer.

Another infrastructure would be ActivityPub (https://activitypub.rocks/), more server-to-server than agent-to-agent, but you can include the agents in the server interactions. And people could combine their social media conversations with their economic planning interactions, for example:

  • Agent A: “Please start a process to use these resources as inputs”.
  • Agent B: “I already have a process like that in motion. How about if I add your suggested resources?”
  • Agent A: “Ok, good!”

Use the Valueflows vocabulary

https://www.valueflo.ws/ was designed for these kind of economic conversations, and if anything needs to be added or changed, they are up for the changes.

Next…

I’m still working on this. I want to detail the conversations between the agents in that diagram such that it will make sense to people who know MRP…need to find at least one of them for some early feedback.