'new economy' concepts and relationships

before responding to the paper (which is an amazing topic), i would also like to propose we create a new standard of "common scientific paper format"

the old style is simply inaccessible to too many and unnecessarily so

i know in order to get respect, things are written in this format — and i know people can enlighten themselves to understand this format better

but it seems there must be a better, more straightforward, clearer, and better way...

Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting actually talking about the substance of that paper, but yes, it does give an example of what we don't want to do as well as what we want to do. That's the level at which I would say it is helpful.

What makes sense to me as mattering to a commons is what matters to the commoners, not any abstract or imposed definition of what matters. You're right, the current scientific paper format is helpful mainly to scientists in the same discipline. In contrast, many articles in Wikipedia are in my opinion well written for a general audience. The drawback of Wikipedia is that there one must have a neutral point of view NPOV while we have a position on some things; and no original research is permitted. In contrast, for a commons, what the commoners decide needs to be written down for reference (and updating when necessary), irrespective of whether anything has been published about it before.

What do you think of Wikipedia format? Can you find some articles there that you find are genuinely helpful?

i believe wikipedia is great — but also could use improvement in a number of ways

i think the general idea behind scientific papers is great as well — the orderly standardized format is something that enhances efficiency of knowledge sharing

but some of the terms to define the structure are outdated and not as precise — for example, why isn't the "abstract" simply called the "summary" — that term is more accessible and more to the point

in addition, on medium dot com along with hackmd dot io, there is a multimedia functionality which allows users interacting to ask questions or make comments which are directly attached to a specific paragraph or sentence in the article

this is a great functionality which allows the author or other readers to engage with the content to make further insights or clarify things

and lastly, i'm not sure what would make some of the subject-specific language more accessible in certain scientific domains other than a massive project to universalize and simplify almost all scientific terminology 😂, but i do believe something could be done and hopefully creative ideas can be dreamt up in this domain in the near future :)

Regarding hackmd . . I find it very comfortable as a writing/publishing/co-authoring environment for single documents (although governance of editor rights and actions is not supported in the full featured way of wiki). Except that . . creating a library of docs is VERY poorly supported. There is no file management worth the name in hackmd. This is where wiki wins hands down. I think hackmd needs serious forking, before it can be a serious infrastructure for systematic community learning and exchange. Would be great if that happened.

In terms of the trinity and the stack (outlined in the Open2020 tools session notes), the systematic support of document curating (in the trinity) and shared cloud stewarding (in the stack) is well supported in wiki (well maybe it’s a bit pedantic, but it works, and is at the heart of that medium ).

Sadly medium needs to be set aside as a channel for OpenCoop, since it’s a private publishing medium (in several senses) and isn’t equipped with the affordances that could enable it to be a central repo in a cultural commons.

Agreed about medium in particular. Nice interface, so an obvious target for emulation by a platform coop. I'm up for helping with the conceptual, not graphical, design.

i have written down many reflections, ideas, and insights in a doc about all the note-taking and project management apps i've used

with the very purpose in mind to use this doc for the creation of an ultimate open source productivity suite (cal, proj, notes, habits, etc)

i agree with both of your comments and it would be a great boon for the os comm if such a suite was available as part of the foundation for systemic change

Just a quick note to emphasise that I am not advocating -- not at all! -- doing things like this academic article I cited above does. If you're interested just look at it for interest, and we can all sense for ourselves what the disadvantages are of using this academic format. It may be, however, a useful reference -- for example if someone did an ontology entry for emergence, this could be one of the references added for further reading. To my mind, it is essential that the main, first page that you see when looking on the kind of ontology I would like to see is one that is accessible to most if not all likely readers.

and yes, i can tell your intention is to be as accessible as possible to all :) <3

I think there is a reason why scientific papers are written in jargon. It is precision. (At least this is my interpretation.) For certain ”scientific” term in certain context of scientific field has well defined meaning. While the same term (or “laymen counterpart”) in same or some other context could have other meanings as well. We, as commoners, are also working on developing certain well defined terms so that there is no doubt what one is saying. It is the same process. We might as well end up in highly “scientific jargon” at the end.

For that reason I would not venture into “changing” the format of scientific papers, but propose that there is a proper “translation” available of the scientific paper that explains it in laymen language. With a link to the original text in case of disambiguation need.

agreed, i think translation is a better target — as that would allow other formats of "scientific writing" to emerge with the tools for (quick and easy) translation for those who don't have the background knowledge

Thought I might add a note based on mediawiki experience with P2PF. As it's complex, the demands for admin skill are high. Harder to get a small team of peer admins. Thus my attention is drawn again to dokuwiki. Who would host it for us?

Webarchitects hosts mediawiki I think, not docuwiki. I can look into this soon - but does anybody here currently host docuwiki?

I’m looking quickly in the framasoft free toolkit, which is plentiful, but don't see a wiki. https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/list

Thanks Mike, just strikes me that Dokuwiki is better suited to our purposes, unless someone comes up with some feature that we need that only Mediawiki has.

also forking a collaborative version of standard notes (if possible) has been something on my mind for a couple years

https://standardnotes.org/

I did suggest DokuWiki for this purpose a while back, and even went so far as to create an empty "ontology" wiki in my DokuWiki farm. Then I discovered a problem I hadn't seen before - all links were going via Google. I immediately purged my DokuWiki farm (fortunately the flat file structure makes content very easy to preserve). I assume the Googliness infection must have been added by one of the plug-ins that I had installed, so I'll start with a fresh installation to see whether that really is the case. I first used DokuWiki around 2006 and found it to be both powerful and friendly.

Looking forward to hearing your diagnosis / treatment of this infection, John @John Waters !

any update to google infection?

If I can reply for John, he did a fresh installation and he hasn't noticed any recurrence of the Google infection since then.

In complex systems, patterns emerge due to multiple interactions between agents and by accident. https://cognitive-edge.com/concept-papers/complexity-emergence-importance-of-failure/

Good point, @Anthony Green -- do you have an idea of how we might try using it?

Hello again everyone! Are there any new people here? Please say something about your interest...

John and I have looked much more at wikis. DokuWiki seems to be fine...

We are also looking again at Fedwiki, and I'm taking another look at HackMD -- especially as it too has an open source version you can install on your own server, CodiMD

I like the way HackMD posts clean looking documents to the web, and is shareable within groups and with the public at at various levels of privileges. I find it useless as an environment for managing files - once there are more than a small handful of documents, it's a pain in the bum.

Happy to talk about fedwiki. Particularly, the mystery of how to create one ;-) Wiki can't be understood and appreciated until a person has become an author. I have a how-to-wiki kit in my resource wiki http://mhresources.federated.wiki and its welcome page has links to starter tips and wiki wisdom.

The basic need, for a keen non-geek, non-sysadmin wiki-ist, is for a wiki farm hosted 'close to home', by a friend or trtusted close colleague within the user community; or a reliable hosting-services organisation. This need isn't generally met - any more than the need for conventional wiki farm-hosting serving non-geek authors is well met either. A breakthrough in fedwiki literacy would be, if a coop opened a fedwiki farm-hosting platform, in much the same way that meet.coop has opened a BBB-hosting platform-service for video meetings, offering paid accounts.

Tags is the way to go here. Tags are better than folders (since they allow one doc to be in several places), but require more conscious discipline. Which admittedly makes their usage in group contexts potentially problematic.

Not a problem at following conditions:

• Unified
  Conceptual Space ( http://confocal-manawatu.pbworks.com/w/page/63359697/Unified%20Conceptual%20Space ) for a team or organisation

• Tag
  Clouds ( http://confocal-manawatu.pbworks.com/w/page/64581516/Tag%20Clouds )

• Memory
  Agent ( http://confocal-manawatu.pbworks.com/w/page/128166039/Memory%20Agent ) providing interface with the Long Term Memory of the
  organisation according to the Communication Protocol like this ( http://confocal-manawatu.pbworks.com/w/page/103970045/LikeInMind%20Communication%20Protocol )

Done already for a few projects.

The only problem is funding.

The notes on these pages make sense, thanks.

I don't see funding as the real block. What is required is a group of writers who are interested, analytical and thoughtful about both the issues you refer to and at the same time have a strong need to develop a knowledge commons for their own purposes.

Such a group is required, I think, to take the abstract, theoretical analysis and work it through into praxis, producing an example that has both workable tools and demonstrably valuable content. If even a rough version of this can be achieved, I believe that - as with wikipedia - it will be relatively easy to access the resources needed to polish it.

Groups like the Nlnet Foundation, for instance, would likely fund work once a prototype had been developed.

Interesting to see that you are using PBwiki - I have been with that project from its origin (when it was peanut butter wiki and run from a garage), used it for many projects, and watched it develop into a capable and diverse platform. Of course, the path it took was a commercial one, which rules it out-of-reach for the development of knowledge commons.

Our idea for a knowledge commons is to create a network of networks of like minded groups, indivs. orgs. etc horizontally, no central authority divided into the numerous categories that exist in a society from transport to regen. agri., water, housing, etc. with state of the art tools for collaborating and organizing. We have been working on this with different teams of IT experts since march, 2020 and are trying to collaborate with any and all doing something similar or the same (utopiacornucopia.org).

However, there are some major issues that are blocking collaborating, i.e. interoperability or bridging platforms, how to share databases with security, and to justly distribute costs when for example, building state of the art tools for collaborating and organizing.

As you can see, this would solve the problem of sharing info in the knowledge commons, though it is complex and takes maybe another 10 months or so. I am wondering if anyone here has ideas for this, and could collaborate with us (all the groups attempting this)? It is possible we could procure the funding. [email protected]

building state of the art tools for collaborating and organizing

I'm not convinced software tech is the blocker. We have cheap FLOSS-based video meetings now (eg meet.coop), we have cloud sharing (eg various NextCloud hosting services) and various FLOSS cloud collaboration tools (Framadate, Etherpads, NextCloud markdown docs, HackMD, etc), there are numerous chat networks (eg Element/Matrix). What tools do we need beyond these, to do the necessary, general, foundational-architectural work? Special tools will be needed in specific areas - open-value networks and supply chain operations, for example - but do we need more advanced tech to do the foundational work of collaborating and aligning?

I wonder whether it's the gritty intention to collaborate and make change that's the blocker, sometimes syphoned off into 'best infrastructure' projects that might be nice-to-have rather than stricly essential? I would say ontology is the blocker. In other words . .

the numerous categories that exist in a society from transport to regen. agri., water, housing, etc

This present 'new economy ontology' thread has been running for more than a year now, and it's not clear to me that it's closer to working agreement now than it was then: "rough consensus, and an ontology that runs". Here's my two-pennorth on ontology: From economics to organising. My approach to "the numerous categories that exist in a society" kicks in as Provisioning - The scope of material stuff on p25. The broader ontologising kicks in as Three landscapes of-and-in practice on p16. And all this falls under a rubric of 'from economics to organising' - aiming to shift the focus from a language of 'economic' categories to a practical 'language' (a pattern language?) of creating activist formations that are capable of doing the deep-running and skilfully choreographed work of regime-change, across diverse locations in economy and society.

Ontology:

One key aspect of Pattern Language - if one pays attention to the canonical 'Alexandrian' format - is the inclusion, with each pattern, of an element at the head which identifies the contexts within which the pattern may contribute (with hyperlinks, these days), and an element at the foot which identifies which patterns can usefully contribute to this one.

This directional linking (toward both broader and narrower scopes) allows for patterns to be functionally connected in a network of arbitrary structure - see attached image.

For any particular need, a subset of available patterns may be chosen (the colours in the image suggest various subsets - of course, a pattern may be used in many different contexts - an animated image might show this more clearly).

Thus, a collection of patterns can support an arbitrary number of ontologies without them needing to be specified in advance.

To take one of your examples, a 'water' project might need to write some new patterns at various points in the hierarchy of scope, but could also add in any other patterns which made sense simply by adding the context to the top or tail of the existing pattern.

Part of the art of pattern writing is to be both specific and general. If one is very specific in identifying the 'whole' that the pattern addresses, this helps one then to be generic in detailing the required characteristics that make up that whole (and also in seeing the patterns of tighter scope that contribute to the whole). A pattern that works like this should be instantly recognisable as a recurring condition and at the same time applicable to any instance of that condition: such patterns can be applicable across many domains.

Pattern Language says - real things are real, and ontologies are conceptual - the two don't neatly map, so let's use a structure which allows for arbitrary mapping. Spend more time mapping the real, and less time worrying about ontologies, which can be composed as needed from a growing library of mappings.

For examples of the format, see the original, or a more recent effort.

i agree that sometimes the obsession and energy spent to find better tools would be better spent doing the work in the already existing pretty good tools — i just found myself complaining the that signal app doesn't have a section for saved links in each chat like telegram — i could let this lack of feature consume me and convince me that it is an extreme hardship

or i could realize this limitation and be sure to save links as they come in the app or if i miss some i could use ingenuity by using the search feature and typing in "https" in order to find all the links in the chat thread — it certainly will take a little bit longer but it won't take that much longer

though i will also add that i think creators get a little too obsessive sometimes in the search for better tools as opposed to just creating with what we have.. on the casual user or consumer side, this could be a real bottleneck — a creator may find it worth the time to deal with workarounds but a casual user may not — and so in order to gain adoption of whatever it is we are trying to achieve here in this thread, a more streamlined user experience would be necessary

so the middle way may be to realize that creators can deal with lesser tools but in the end better tools may be necessary in order to gain mass adoption by users on the other end of the creations

I'm interested in this. To check how much, I'd like to have a conversation, where so much more can be communicated than in a short piece of text. I'll email you.

To my understanding, each team (or a collective subject in a broader
sense) is an ecosystem on its own. It may already have a set of
processes and tools mostly suited to its nature and actions.

We can only try to convince them to shift onto a platform we think
will work best for them. - We cannot expect they will ever follow
the advice - KM axiom states "A client doesn't change - we change
our tools and methods of work with a client"

Therefore, I can only think of a role of "a long term organisational
memory" (memory agent) for someone in a team, or a piece of AI to
bridge each of us with a team as a collective subject. This piece of
AI can be called a personal Cognitive Assistant. It will be personal
at keeping all the data and information confidential and sharing
only what "its boss" agreed to share.

To get a feeling of those concepts, we may need to form such a
collective subject / a team, find a way of supporting a memory agent
or develop a Cognitive Assistant, one instance for each of us, and
one for the team as a whole.

Cheers,

Dmitry

Dmitry – maybe we can expect a little more than this, through influencing the culture and the awareness. It seems that the understanding of interoperability is growing, and once people get into this, they will recognise the need for a common language of sorts. I agree about the platform – yes, let people choose whichever one suits their style – but let's try to persuade the platform builders to build in interoperability, gradually perhaps, step by step, based on a gradually clarifying (though never finally static) ontology.

Interoperability relies on two things : data standards and protocols. Of these, the former would seem to be more important. Protocol bridges are possible where there are compatible data standards, while incompatible data standards in practice seem to require human attention to enable translation of sufficient quality.

Having argued against 'domain ontology' above, data standards require a deeper 'knowledge ontology'. Further, if we are to consider, as I and others contend (see Nora Bateson on warm data), that what matters is contextualised knowledge (aka wisdom), then also an ontology of contextuality.

We cannot expect such frameworks to naturally emerge out of the work of 'communities of knowledge development'.

This is the crux of our current condition : understanding that we cannot demand, expect or hope for the emergence of the social structures we believe that a healthy civilisation should express.

Neither can we build them and expect them to be viable when the 'ground patterns' of civilisation do not provide the conditions which would support them.

Some humans must be simultaneously bold enough and sufficiently humble to consciously and also cautiously engineer low level interventions which introduce new possibilities below 'ground level' - in the soil itself, as it were.

Brave, because this is an act of hubris. And so also humble and careful.

Digital culture has already boldly made many such interventions - but largely without humility or care. This has changed the soil, and thus provided conditions for new emergences - but without sufficient attention, care or analysis, these are effectively random.

We don't have time for this.

So I deeply appreciate this conversation, because it is prepared to go down to lower levels of 'the stack', and think carefully about crafting humbly at that level, while holding in mind the types of emergence we hope to see.

@dilgreen Two quick echoes:

• The 'deeper knowledge ontology' may put us on the same ground as 'patterns' in the Chris Alexander sense? Or rather, practices of pattern language(ing) And

• In the case of pattern languages . . sometimes patterns feed on data. Ward Cunningham for one is brilliant at this - especially robot-scraped, 'wild' data - and with fedwiki has made a powerful machinery for meeting that kind of need. But most of the practical patterns that organisers will need run on varieties of story? Very human-labour/skill intensive. Skilfully producing 'The Quality Without A Name'. Valuing, ontologising, mobilising, stewarding-thro-history - aka commoning. Fedwiki serves here too - but as a repo of highly curated ontology-stories, designed to be 'sung' into practice in a 'chorus of voices' (one of Ward's metaphors for fedwiki, as distinct from orthodox wiki).

I would refer to the Triangle of Meaning first:
http://confocal-manawatu.pbworks.com/w/page/141232983/Semantic%20Triangle

Our thoughts will have practical meaning only in the view of an action happening now, with each of us taking and playing a significant role in it. Different locality and time will suite a different situation, where our combination of participants with their experience, language and skills may dissonate too much, and be not even heard. We don't see what we don't understand, and we don't understand what we don't see.

Please stop talking generalist ideas of Alexander, Nora and others. Take a shovel and see what is the ground we are standing on. If it's a sand, don't build a house. If it's a rock, don't throw seeds.

I am standing on the ground of the theory of collective subject. Only a subject can build a conceptual framework suitable to the ground of his project. Thoughts of others can be like the pearls in hands of a farmer who is going to seed the wheat. They are a treasure but not in this particular moment and place when farmer's hands and mind are aiming something very different.

Let's build a team and see what is present and what is missing, including patterns, language, concepts, roles, resources.

No team = no goal = no contextuality = no meaning to thinking and talking about thinking.

Pattern Language, advocate as I am, I don't think is sufficient - although an important tool - but I think it works at the 'domain ontology' level, and is itself one 'type' only in a 'knowledge ontology' in the senses I used those terms.

In the introduction to 'A Pattern Language', Alexander claims that 'patterns are like the hypotheses of science'.

A hypothesis is a type of wisdom, and thus deserves a place in any knowledge ontology.

But as you point out 'datum' seems like another type, to which I feel that I can add 'definition/symbol' and 'terminology/metaphor' .

In an unfinished bit of work on 'knowledge modalities', I also refer (following many others) to:

• 'experiential knowledge' (that which is immediately felt, whose apotheosis is joy),

• 'endogenous knowledge' (intuition/conviction which arises from the body, whose apotheosis is the prophetic vision or revelation),

• 'symbolic knowledge' (metaphor, whose apotheosis is 'the word'),

• 'cultural knowledge/mythopoesy' (that which develops with/in language - whose 'ground' is oral culture, whose apotheosis might be represented by eg Inuit culture),

• 'Grand Narrative' (whose ground is writing, whose apotheosis is the novel, [this is where most of us live - which is now incredibly dangerous, since it is the modality least coherent with what we observe, and that which allows others most powerfully to change us, since we grant the author privileged access to our own experiential and endogenous modalities as we read]) ,

• 'hypothetical/provable knowledge' - 'Science' (whose ground is peer review - [Bacon, Latour], and which has not achieved its apotheosis - science remains trapped by Grand Narrative as a technical legacy, and is thus not yet able to birth the next modality, even though it has discovered it [I would propose Pattern Language as a candidate here]),

• 'non linear knowledge / meta knowledge' - Complexity / unknowable knowns (whose ground is systems thinking, which is in its infancy)

The current work required, I contend, is in helping science to free itself from the trap of Grand Narrative - so that it can at least explain complexity to itself, and from that position enable the development of the non-linear modality - the one which we must attain if we are to develop a viable relationship with the rest of the biosphere.

I am not a believer in 'looped history' - I see a clear 'progression' in increasing complexity - both of life processes and of human metaphysical capacity. Nevertheless, there is a clear sense in which developing a knowledge modality of 'unknowable knowns', must re-engage with the earlier 'endogenous' and 'mythopoetic' modes.

My contention is that when we 'take a shovel' to the (cultural) ground on which we are standing, we discover that it is incapable of supporting the structures we need.
That there is immediate, practical, vital work to be done beneath that surface.
This work is needed because we have arrived at a break-point in our evolution where we are required either to become instrumental in our own evolutionary pathway, or see our civilisation collapse.

This is not just talk. It is the work I am doing with many others in the field of 'new economy'. See here for what we have built: https://gitlab.com/credit-commons-software-stack/credit-commons-microservices

Hi Dil,

that looks just great - can we test it on my current case, please?

I am asked to urgently suggest a business model based on the mutual credit system. That is a Health Care network project with about 2M participants.
I need a transition method from my current situation into the new position of CKM. The problem is that the project is underfunded. I will have to invest my time, to be paid in future. That means that I will have to keep with my current job at investing 2-3 hours a day until the new project is taken off.

What I am trying to describe here is a transition through to the stages:
unemployment - precarious work - part time - full time position
That methodology is needed right now, and it will be appreciated by many in our changing world.

How do we do that, based on your system, please?
How do you manage the value flows in your team? - Knowing that would definitely help, and put your and my team on the same ground.

Looking forward to talking with you live:
I am on FB:
https://www.facebook.com/dmitry.sokolov.18062
and Telegram & WhatsApp
Dmitry

Hi Dmitry,

That's very exciting! I'll share this with the collaborators at http://mutualcredit.services and get back to you asap.

Thank you Dil,

yes, we have to keep pushing.

I just know that without us forming a collective subject

http://confocal-manawatu.pbworks.com/w/page/127063157/Collective%20Subjects

we will have no chances to reach the Conscious Evolution:

http://confocal-manawatu.pbworks.com/w/page/121439130/Conscious%20Evolution

by the very definition of a subject as an entity capable of putting
a goal and finding the means of achieving it.

That's where your methods of mutual credit and value flows
management can be invaluable.

How do we start, please?

It can be the Credit Commons Microservices project itself. We just
need to build a team and find resources for it to develop.

Our challenge is that the team will be driven by enthusiasm for only
1-2 months of time, even if we all see the light at the end of the
tunnel. I think that finding an investor or a successful team
needing our vision, methods and techniques is the only realistic
task we may accomplish within this short time.

Your thoughts?

Cheers,

Dmitry

Hi Dmitry

I'm a colleague and co-founder with Dil in the mutual credit project and my experience, expertise, and UCL ISRS action research of legal design of financial technology (in its broadest sense of law/accounting & ICT combined) involves institutional frameworks (as risk/cost/surplus/data sharing agreements) within which mutual credit systems may be developed and operated.

This article - Caring for Scotland - will give you relevant context, I think although I have long since realised that the institutions of Nation States and MegaCorporations will be dissolved and distributed to local level of 'smart' (and therefore capital and resource lite) service delivery.

I look forward to engaging with you on the subject of legal design of a sustainable business model for care.

Best regards

Chris

That's my turn to get exited 🙂
Chris and Dil, thank you very much for your invitation!!
I will go through the links this weekend.
Looking forward to working with you ASAP.
Many thanks again!!

You can take a look at some of the work that I've done on the https://voiceofhumanity.one/sufficiency-currency/ website. I've been working on coordination mechanisms and design of how communities would communicate among themselves. I also have some kinds of design for different proposal-making systems which you can find on the Voice of Humanity whitepaper. This is an area where I"m very interested and have a good foundation in the tools that are available in the decentralized space for this. [email protected]