User interface patterns for "neighbourhoods" modules

Yeah, should do! You're talking about essentially routing toward the best possible trade via all active contexts you have with a potential trading partner? I think that's mostly just going to be about searching & ordering results.

Hmm - slightly more specific than that. If you have an offer to sell open across neighbourhoods, the relaying of information when a matching bid arrives should happen through memetic bridges. One of the pieced of logic we build could be: 'If even one of the neighbourhoods cannot be informed, the trade doesn't go through, because it could result in a double spending problem.'

Must we replicate an intent to get it to different markets? Can the same intent (same hash) be stored in different markets? (different dna's) I'm also thinking ahead to transfers, where each agent involved would ideally have the same identified record.

It could be, but I don't think it will be. Because of the ontological translation needed for converting classifications and specifications between networks, there's no guarantee that the data will match and have the same hash. Unless we do something clever RE splitting it up into more bits.

I see where you are coming from, and I guess there is a whole discussion there about where classifications and specifications live, and if agents can and will use the same ones. Maybe located in a public or shared dna? Or even in the other agent's dna? Like if you offer something specified as X, and I order it, I want to be committing to that exact product specification. Or, on the identifier side, maybe we need some other reference numbers like happens today and gets shipped around to everyone who needs it, order # 123, product # xyz, whatever. Some unique identifier, at least per agent, that can travel with the duplicated records so we don't get so much of that "nightmare".

The UI/UX for a neighbourhood

Indeed, it’s a fun thought experiment to think about what this ends up looking like. For me it’s essentially a thought experiment as to the kinds of features I’d like in my apps; as a “power user” with access to & knowledge of all the backend data sources that might intersect with our collective.

First I want to answer a few of the questions above quickly and simply (bluntly?), because the design philosophy I have in my head for NH leads to particular conclusions. A lot of them I think are informed by the Unix design philosophy—

when I’m hovering within Economikit do I see offers stream in within the EK-verse?

Yes, if it’s relevant then it should become part of the collective’s standard app suite & embedded into whatever dashboards & other apps are appropriate.

Or do users view a consolidated marketplace of offerings and transactions across all the communities they are part of. Or is it both?

Both. The contextual marketplace of the community as visible within the community; and the non-contextual (or individually contextual?) “virtual marketplace” of all of our personal marketplace-like interactions across all spaces which have marketplaces in them.

We are essentially switching between group & individual experiences when toggling between the two. In the former space we are acting fully in service to the group; in the latter we are balancing our personal energies among the many groups we have relationship to.

Should the consolidated view across communities be part of the reputation vault?

I don’t think so. It should be a whitelabel marketplace app that’s connected to every compatible REA network the user has installed.

Perhaps another way of saying the above RE group/individual contexts: You end up with apps for specific community contexts which encompass many operational details; apps for specific operational contexts that encompass many communities.

I also want to point to the Unix philosophy here in particular. Just because the reputation vault connects to many source datasets doesn’t mean that it should try to reproduce functionality from those network spaces. What is the reputation vault’s interface for, specifically? What is the thing that you would jump out of another workflow for and enter the vault to manage?

My first thoughts are that it would be a mostly ‘administrative’ interface akin to the stuff Holo-REA needs for knowledge management. Somewhere to connect reputation data sources from other DNAs and to import, author & share reputation scores with others?

I think that most of the functionality of the reputation vault is probably about UI components that it provides to other applications, so that they can embed reputation data that it provides and show it in relevant contexts when you’re doing tasks across the Neighbourhood.

I’ll post a few followup threads and separate out the necessary technical requirements, which might help to make some of what I’m saying here clearer.

I’m going to continue thinking in terms of the “datatype / display context” model for now; mostly because my brain wants to ensure that it’s programmable. (Let’s revisit that core underpinning if it’s not making sense to everyone else though.) So—

“Datatype” is the underlying “thing”, stored in one or more Holochain DNAs, that we might want to display in the UI. Examples could be people, economic events, files or comments.

“Display context” is an abstract concept to describe where and how the data is presented in the UI. Examples could be: list view item, full page detail, summary view, icon row. Deciding on display contexts is difficult. Over-abstraction leads to a loss of comprehension and “blocky” or “bitty” UIs which feel cumbersome. So, in early phases at least, perhaps it’s best to design the management of display contexts in an app-specific, non-generic manner. This would mean contexts that sound more like “marketplace listing avatar” than “list view item”; but the hope would be that through iteration and development of more apps, similarities can be found and common abstractions can be built.

“Person” datatype

People are going to be one of the core “anchor” data elements in every network, and the central items in most reputation economies. The display of a great deal of extended information is likely to be desired by agents seeking to add context to their online interactions.

Just low-hanging fruit that feels like it could be useful…

• Network commonality

• The number of networks which you share with other agents, perhaps indicated as a function of colour saturation

• Presence in specific networks may want to be emphasised, perhaps with badges or icons

• Web of trust

• People are going to want to pre-load their real-world trust into their networks; we could provide a DNA to manage GPG-like trust levels against other agent keys. You could then surface these trust levels into the UI in any application.

• Availability

• This seems to get pulled from the Holochain Personas DNA or something similar in a few demos I’ve seen from the HOLO team; could be useful to make visible.

Actually I won’t go too far into these, I think some might end up being things that emerge more as the applications being built in our networks do. Seed sharing statistics from Seedshare are a good example of this- not something you’d normally consider a part of many other apps, but can become a significant indicator in you’re a FairBnB host with a particular ideological leaning.

Organisation datatype

Placing this here to note that with the architecture I’m currently using in Holo-REA, Holochain DNAs are equivalent to organisations / group agents. Related data includes the agents who are a part of the organisation in addition to whatever kinds of organisational metadata we decide to standardise across apps.

Again, I suspect the kinds of metadata needed will differ by use-case.

Economic event datatype

Another big one for us is recordings of economic coordination events. In these cases, there are various other DNAs you’d want to have plugged in by default for the display of extended information: location of the event, comments & discussion threads, file attachments are a few that come to mind.

In list view can see some of these doing interesting things- eg. the location could simply be a “5km away” kind of widget in a list view; map showing other nearby events in detail view.

There are also some “extension” modules planned for Holo-REA which we would want to surface around events- for example the visibility of pending events which have been marked as disputed (along with the details of the dispute).

Good thread this. The way I see it, the Neighbourhoods implementation of Marketplace means each community can spin up it's own micro-marketplace for circulation of goods within the collective.
- Implications for UI: Does a user view the marketplace as a section within a community. For eg, when I'm hovering within Economikit do I see offers stream in within the EK-verse? Or do users view a consolidated marketplace of offerings and transactions across all the communities they are part of. Or is it both? Should the consolidated view across communities be part of the reputation vault?
- Pushing intents to different membranes: If an intent to offer goods/services is pushed across multiple Neighbourhoods, how do we co-ordinate this? From a central user-chain that then pushes out intents, and also confirms trades? Because separate intents on multiple DNAs will be a nightmare for co-ordinating trades that match.
- Reputation based Price matching: When a user makes an offer within a Neighbourhood, it is made with a conditional element of reputation associated with it. So basically, another user can only pick up offers if they have the necessary reputation to back it up. For eg, you might want to offer organic produce from your home garden only to people who volunteer at community gardens.

I could break this down further if we want to get into this. Personally, I think this social-fabric-interwoven-commerce is what NH is all about :)

Anyway, maybe this is enough examples for now to start to get us thinking about the relationships between different datasets and how those become useful to us as interpreters of the information.

And I also don’t want to think too much about which kinds of reputation modules are useful to folks; my head is full of making REA work and I think it’s mostly up to Sid to dream about what he sees as useful there, and what/where derived information from things like “likes” and “upvotes” might be useful & interesting to see.

“To see”, hmm.. well, adding context visually is just one part of it. There might also be data dependency things at play here which we could experiment with (eg. ordering & filtering of marketplace results, price matching etc). Worth thinking about the specifics of both.

Just because the reputation vault connects to many source datasets doesn’t mean that it should try to reproduce functionality from those network spaces.

I've been mulling over this, and I agree. In fact, we could consider another container altogether called 'Bazaars' for decentralised marketplace co-ordination. (Only if required)

I think that most of the functionality of the reputation vault is probably about UI components that it provides to other applications, so that they can embed reputation data that it provides and show it in relevant contexts when you’re doing tasks across the Neighbourhood.

Interesting. Hadn't thought about it like this.

So, in early phases at least, perhaps it’s best to design the management of display contexts in an app-specific, non-generic manner. This would mean contexts that sound more like “marketplace listing avatar” than “list view item”; but the hope would be that through iteration and development of more apps, similarities can be found and common abstractions can be built.

I get the app-specific, non-generic manner thing. But explain the marketplace-listing-avatar thing more? I feel like understanding the example you used is critical.

Actually I won’t go too far into these, I think some might end up being things that emerge more as the applications being built in our networks do. 

Agree.

The marketplace-listing-avatar thing is just to say, we'll probably have fairly context-specific UIs to begin with. Listings on a marketplace app might look quite different to listings in an inventory management app; so at this stage it's better to consider those two separate display contexts even though at some point down the line we'd hope to be unifying the two and arriving at something that makes sense for all people when displayed in all kinds of lists in all contexts.

RE the reputation vault and where these things bubble up in the UI, I think it might make sense to start thinking of Holochain app bundles as not just DNAs + app UI; but as DNA + app UI + UI components. So most of the components that the reputation vault offers to other apps are going to be aggregate in nature (badges, ratings etc). In other words, it won't offer the "like this post" widget or "liked by 5 of your friends" widget itself; because those components would be bundled with the "likes" app rather than the "reputation vault" app.

The marketplace-listing-avatar thing is just to say, we'll probably have fairly context-specific UIs to begin with.

Thanks, this is helpful. I think from a marketing/strategy perspective there's stuff to think about here though. Ideally, we want to implement projects that rely on new ways of collaborating and information exchange to showcase the power of neighbourhoods. Or else, we run into the same problem of users being drawn to it and using it like an app in the same old way.
So it could be a social-networking/conversational tool, or a bazaar-style tool that can be offered to different neighbourhoods. Will share more tomorrow.

Neighbourhoods and network agency

How do neighborhoods map to economic agents?

are some neighborhoods looser than that, have some identity as a group but no economic agency as a group?

Could there be neighbourhoods which are not engaged in commerce?

I think it’s a mix, as we’ve discovered with CommonsPub. Some networks could be said to operate in a “Neighbourhood-like way”, maybe if they meet some of the requirements I’ve bolded above. But I don’t think that implies anything about agency of the group, at least at this stage. You can have a group of folks collaborating tightly without any formal governance or organising principles, sure.

What you didn’t ask was-

How do neighbourhoods map to networks?

to which I think the answer is, “loosely”. So “farmers in Wisconsin who grow organically” could be a Neighbourhood in of itself, but it could also be simply part of some neighbourhood of folks who fit into this and other usergroups. And the notion of its “neighbourhood-ness” could be an emergent property of the higher-order compositional structures of the networks around the organic farmer network! As in… maybe each network itself has no membrane control built in; but simply as an artifact of the visibility of information in different networks, different tiers of users might emerge.

are all non-person economic agents neighborhoods, by definition?

I want to say “no” here. I think being a Neighbourhood implies some technical constraints regarding the customisability of user interface and backend data sources (which at this stage are quite complex, I’ll admit. Hopefully we can automate away a lot of that.)

It’s interesting to end up at this conclusion… I think perhaps I’ve had a looser idea of this in the past. For those who disagree, I’m wondering what you see as the specifics of “Neighbourhood centric tech”?

I guess this is Sid’s view—

the minimum qualification (for the way I’m defining Neighbourhoods) is for reputation/monetary/governance layers to be articulated in agent-centric environments.

Whereas (perhaps in addition to this) I see some requirements around access to information and customisability of UI which lead to my idea of “true agent-centrism” as an individual with their own subjective view of a neighbourhood.

I also want to point out that I broadly agree with the need to articulate a reputational culture in a neighbourhood, I just didn’t want to rewrite a lot of this. I wonder whether there might be something to tease out RE “actual neighbourhoods” (with articulated culture) vs “virtual neighbourhoods” that individual users might assume the viewpoint of across networks. The latter has no culture articulated other than to the single person observing their view of the available datasets.

Maybe it’s sort of a paradox, where in order for Neighbourhoods to exist we must also build non-Neighbourhood liminal spaces that allow individuals to “hover” at the margins, and see across Neighbourhoods with different value sets.

>I think this social-fabric-interwoven-commerce is what NH is all about :)

Let's do a little ontology mapping, just for fun. How do neighborhoods map to economic agents? Do all neighborhoods have economic agency themselves (different from the individuals who make up the neighborhood)? Or are some neighborhoods looser than that, have some identity as a group but no economic agency as a group? Do some or all neighborhoods have some form of governance, formal or informal? And/or can a neighborhood be defined through some circumstance or activity but not be actually identified or organized in any way, like "farmers in Wisconsin who grow organically"? Inversely, are all non-person economic agents neighborhoods, by definition? (This would include Monsanto or Goldman Sachs too!) If not, which kinds of economic agents would be neighborhoods?

I'm also curious about the "commerce" part. Could there be neighborhoods that are not engaged in commerce? For example, purely social groups? For another example, can a project that is engaged in producing something but not engaged in any form of commerce or exchange be a neighborhood? Like say ValueFlows? ValueFlows is also an interesting example in that it has always had a slowly evolving core group; and also had a lot of people moving in and out, not really members, rather contributors. (Note that there is disagreement if VF itself is an economic agent or not - I think it is and Pavlik, another core member, thinks it is not. So there's that.)

>the Neighbourhoods implementation of Marketplace means each community can spin up it's own micro-marketplace for circulation of goods within the collective

This makes sense to me, especially where there is some internal economic governance involved, like a timebank - but really for any community that wants to. Seems like there is also a range of options from that to completely open, like say etsy. Seems like Kamal was thinking of a marketplace for Seattle, geographically based and maybe a focus on circular economy? (Is Seattle a neighborhood?) But I'd like to dig into that a bit with him. Actually the question of what are the different scopes of marketplaces we want to address in this app is a big question I've had.

>Implications for UI: Does a user view the marketplace as a section within a community. For eg, when I'm hovering within Economikit do I see offers stream in within the EK-verse? Or do users view a consolidated marketplace of offerings and transactions across all the communities they are part of. Or is it both?

In the Mutual Aid Network for example, I'm pretty sure there is a requirement for both, but they have expressed the latter since they already have the first in their separate software that doesn't talk to each other.

>Because separate intents on multiple DNAs will be a nightmare for co-ordinating trades that match.

Could be challenging, although I'm not sure if you are thinking more of holochain's distribution mechanisms or the model. I think the VF model should help, because if you have a Proposal (an offer or request), you can post the same Proposal to multiple groups (Agents in this case) and I assume the identifier will stay the same in the different dht's (?). If you have say the same thing you are offering (same Intent), but you want to price it differently in different groups, that is different Proposals. (I don't know if that was clear at all.)

I wonder whether there might be something to tease out RE “actual neighbourhoods” (with articulated culture) vs “virtual neighbourhoods” that individual users might assume the viewpoint of across networks

Read this a couple of times, but I don't think I get it. Elaborate? Or maybe we discuss in the NH sync

Whereas (perhaps in addition to this) I see some requirements around access to information and customisability of UI which lead to my idea of “true agent-centrism” as an individual with their own subjective view of a neighbourhood.

Makes sense.

RE actual / virtual; think of our recent work with BASYN. You could consider them an "actual" neighbourhood (putting aside for the moment the specifics of their governance) since they are a real usergroup with a real client base and therefore some form of community (formal or informal) built around it. You could say the same of Shiro or Seedshare.

But the whitelabel marketplace app which I am building isn't for any specific usergroup or community. It is "virtual" because it can be connected to as many VF-compatible marketplaces as the agent has installed. And what that agent sees as context for others within that space is entirely up to the agent as an individual- not part of the formal articulation of any of the groups that they exist within.

Apologies if this is not the right thread, this whole question is broader than UI. The discussion around neighborhoods vs economic agents has sent my thinking on a different direction for how we model "groups" to try to use the loosest name I can. History:

• In VF we have had an insular view in that we care about groups with economic agency. We also know that there are networks that do not have agency themselves, that emerge out of the economic interactions. And a bunch of gray areas.

• When we looked at integrating VF and ActivityStreams (AS) for CommonsPub, we decided to call groups with agents Organizations (because that is in VF) and groups without agency Groups. (AS has Actors with types Person, Group, Organization. VF has Agents with types Person, Organization. There are other vocabularies in the semantic web scene that basically have Agent (defined pretty loosely) with types Person, Group, Organization.)

• As we now look at neighborhoods we understand they are sometimes economic agents and sometimes groups without economic agency.

Problems with all of this: For one thing a non-agent group could decide it wants economic agency, and then it gets a new type? Ouch. And also we have these overlapping definitions that will just get more complex.

I think that the initial model was faulty. We let roles creep into the core definitions of what something is. I think the core definition should be Person and X, where X is a collection of people which has some kind of identity. So not just a set of filters from the outside like "all the organic farmers in Wisconsin", but some sense of understanding of who is in the X and why it exists. (Perhaps people and other X's must agree to be in the X? Definition to be refined.) Then X has roles or behaviors they can decide to engage in, like reputation schemes or economic activity. Those things are not part of their definition as X, and also the software is structured this way. (Like delegation rather than inheritance, in the object oriented world.)

I'm still thinking this all through, and not sure what to do about it atm.

(To note to those reading along: the more Holochain-specific technical conversation regarding these particulars has forked to https://www.loomio.org/d/S1lBFPa7/technical-requirements-for-neighbourhoods-compatible-software.)

Nice questions. So the minimum qualification (for the way I'm defining Neighbourhoods) is for reputation/monetary/governance layers to be articulated in agent-centric environments. Here are some answers to your questions:

> Do all neighborhoods have economic agency themselves
Yes, as defined by their governance.

> And/or can a neighborhood be defined through some circumstance or activity but not be actually identified or organized in any way, like "farmers in Wisconsin who grow organically"?

Yes. For eg, Sid's group that shares entertaining content everyday.

In general, a Neighbourhood is specifically identified by its culture. If Sid's group rewards its members on the basis of who generates the most 'claps' everyday, it forms its own unique Neighbourhood. If Bob thinks this isn't good design, he may 'fork' this Neighbourhood to form a new Neighbourhood with the same members, but with upvotes/downvotes instead of claps. Bob's neighbourhood stands distinctly different from Sid's, even though the content might be somewhat similar.
At this point I should also say geo-location maps on to Neighbourhoods as a reputational data point. For eg, only people within 50 miles of me can join my Neighbourhood. If they hold this data point on their source chain, they gain access.

> Inversely, are all non-person economic agents neighborhoods, by definition? (This would include Monsanto or Goldman Sachs too!)

No, because they leverage reputation systems that aren't agent-centric (i.e. legal system articulated by the nation-state). On that note, some neighbourhoods will also have a footprint in the legal system to function in the real world.

> I'm also curious about the "commerce" part. Could there be neighborhoods that are not engaged in commerce? 

Absolutely. I reckon somewhere in the region of 90% of Neighbourhoods won't have commercial activity for multiple reasons: either they're purely social i.e. groups of people sharing conversations, or ideas, or volunteering; or they haven't gotten to the stage where social fabric can support commercial activity. In fact I'm excited about building with Neighbourhoods without commercial aspirations initially - let's us play and evolve systems together.

> But I'd like to dig into that a bit with him. Actually the question of what are the different scopes of marketplaces we want to address in this app is a big question I've had.

Yeah, I'd be keen to do that too. I think they're still thinking of it as an 'app' instead of a Neighbourhood.

>  If you have say the same thing you are offering (same Intent), but you want to price it differently in different groups, that is different Proposals. (I don't know if that was clear at all.)

That was very clear, thanks. So it seems like we would have multiple proposals generated from a single intent. And once a proposal is accepted, updates the intent, which then propagates to the other proposals that are open?

I think I got all your questions. Happy to keep this going.

@Sid Sthalekar this is very helpful, but I'm still struggling a bit to understand Neighborhood in the context of concepts I'm used to thinking about. I'm pretty sure that Economic Agent and Neighborhood will be overlapping concepts, but neither will be contained within the other, if you are thinking about a Venn diagram.

Here's a try at what I start to understand of what a neighborhood is/has/behaves. Please correct me, this is more like a question than a statement....

A neighborhood must have:

* a reputational culture with rules explicitly defined

* defined membership, a membrane around person agents who have to join explicitly

* some elements of governance, explicitly defined

* all of the above is decided by the members, and voluntarily agreed to by new members, and can be re-negotiated by current members (is this close to what you mean by agent-centric environment? some definition of little-d democracy?)

A neighborhood can have:

* economic activity within it, or with others

* social activity within it

I do want to make sure I understand what you mean by "agent-centric". Holo-REA and holochain have different definitions, but they are fairly clearly understood by now. Here is Art's definition for holochain: https://forum.holochain.org/t/how-will-holochain-handle-group-agents/1095/4

I'm struggling a bit also with technology vs real world. For example in any kind of grouping in the real world, there is probably always a "culture", usually informal and often unspoken, but there. And probably always some level of social activity. But in our holochain world, it matters if something is captured as data or not.

> I'm pretty sure that Economic Agent and Neighborhood will be overlapping concepts, but neither will be contained within the other, if you are thinking about a Venn diagram.

Yes this seems about right.

Wrt the points you listed about Neighbourhoods, they all seem on point. I would just add some membranes may have no qualifying criteria. All that is required is that a user downloads the code and joins in.

> I do want to make sure I understand what you mean by "agent-centric"

For me, agent-centricity is the user's ability to own, and port the data they generate within a Neighbourhood. They would then hold the right to port it to another Neighbourhood, without having to seek prior consent. Also, any other Neighbourhood cannot gain access to a user's data without the user's consent. This is critical, because it shifts the dynamic in reputation design - and allows users to play with it, and port it.

> For example in any kind of grouping in the real world, there is probably always a "culture", usually informal and often unspoken, but there. And probably always some level of social activity. But in our holochain world, it matters if something is captured as data or not.

This is a super interesting topic you've raised. In communities where culture is held informally (tribes/religious or communal groups/volunteer networks etc.) rules are articulated, but the enforcement mechanism are not drawn out formally. As a result they have a tendency to decay over time, or be appropriate by whoever gains influence in the group (devolving into paternalism?). In other groups, like organisations/corporations, the nation state is leveraged to award power to titles like directors/shareholders/management etc. In Holochain environments, we're saying agent-centric ledgers play the role of formalising culture.

>For me, agent-centricity is the user's ability to own, and port the data they generate within a Neighbourhood.

Ok cool. Just focusing on this view of agent-centricity for a moment, how do you see users vs people, and do the holochain profiles/personas concepts play a role in how you think about reputation and neighborhoods?

I can go first. :) For VF, although not in Holo-REA yet, and speaking for myself, I think it is important to distinguish between person and user. A user being a set of credentials, as in a person would afaik need to have a different user on each device when they are using holochain apps. There are lots of reasons that user credentials are not very stable over time, in addition to the issue that a person needs to have many of them at one time. But if a real world person promises to deliver a resource, they are responsible to do that, irrespective of what user id was involved.

In terms of profiles/personas, I don't think that matters for VF, they are at a level even lower than user in holochain if I understand correctly. (I think they can be useful concepts, for people who want to separate aspects of their lives, and have online personas and such, but probably not for economic activity.)