Vision for 'Neighbourhoods'

I love the general idea of neighborhoods. I'll riff on the idea for a bit, based on our experience.

If you look at several of the neighborhoods that we have worked with, as well as the neighborhood we live in now, transformations start with food: specifically, growing food. And then distribution and some exchange-like relationships develop around the food.

Farmers markets are a lot like old-school bazaars, but farmers don't like them very much. Takes a lot of time away from farming.

So arrangements like community-supported agriculture and Solawis and food hubs and networks and retail food co-ops emerge as better ways to exchange and distribute food. They also engage more people in the neighborhood in deeper ways.

Somewhere in that evolution food processing becomes important, but is often lagging. Restaurants serving local food help. One network started to freeze cut vegetables, but I don't think it worked very well for them. There are some impediments in the way of local food processing.

Likewise local manufacture of farm equipment happens in some farm communities, but it's rare. Where it does, it helps local economies a lot.

Overall, rural neighborhoods tend to bleed wealth. Circulating resources more times inside a neighborhood would be a lot better. But if all you got is exchange inside a neighborhood, the goods that gets exchanged came from outside, and the payment for them goes outside.

Yep, well articulated :)

My tangible example would be this collective @Lynn Foster (:

Ideally we will not build any tools specifically for Economikit, though maybe there will be some bespoke dashboards or presentations of information some day. It is our chosen cultural frame that makes us unique, and we would pick and choose the Holo-REA, Sacred Capital, publishing & miscellaneous components that service our particular needs; then assemble those for use in our collective.

For example the standard way of rating content in conversational topics might be Reddit-like upvotes & downvotes, but we might think that's coarse or a biased gauge of a post's quality. So we might disable that module and bring in a different one which allows multidimensional rating of content via emotionally centered "sentiment labels", and instead label posts with words which indicate how they made us feel in reading them.

Hey @Lynn Foster appreciate the comments. I realise we've been chatting about this within an echo-chamber, so assumptions may not be flowing through clearly. For eg, there's been some chat within Holochain about 'Apps' as structures being derived primarily from 'businesses' but adapted for a tech-enabled world. So while there might be some apps for communities/co-ops, we're talking about them being primarily based in for-profit/extractive consciousness. Since Holochain promotes new patterns of collaboration, we think this might be a good time to reinvent organising principles.

I don't think the Loomio format does justice, but I hope some of the answers below are a good start. I'm thinking along the lines of a deep-dive call with a larger group of people some time.

What would it look like to have specific culture in a neighborhood? Example?

Refers to my earlier point about apps having evolved as an instrument of business. As a result, we often see the dominant culture within apps is designed to generate monetary revenue or some other similar metric. So while you might be an open-source collective; if you're using Facebook groups for co-ordination, you have to work within the over-arching culture stipulated by the platform i.e. their rules for how content arrives on the user's feed, their rules for censoring content, trust ratings of users etc.

This open-source collective may choose to build a 'neighbourhood' of their own, where they can design the overarching culture, as well as sub-cultures. For eg, who can join the community, how they maintain trust levels, who gets highlighted and featured over other etc. They may also choose to create sub-cultures for specific domains like funding, governance etc. 'Neighbourhoods' would offer them generic tools to communicate and engage with each other.

There might even be a situation where a subset of the open-source collective decide to spin off into a new 'neighbourhood' because they hope to tweak the existing culture, and fork a new version of it. That's why we say you would create a new neighbourhood if you wished to amplify a specific, new culture.

Bazaar: Monetary Tools powered by REA

You're spot on. I think it's my banker/trader mindset that tends to highlight and focus the financial transaction-end of things. Production and creation would definitely be included here and would specifically be of interest to collectives like permaculture communities, decentralised manufacturing networks, a group of 3d printing enthusiasts etc :)

Feel free to keep questions flowing. They're very helpful at the moment.

@Sid Sthalekar , appreciate you thinking about all of this! I probably haven't studied it enough, but here are a few semi-random comments anyhow, hopefully helpful, but if not please just disregard:

>The Key Difference?

I have an inkling about what you are saying about apps and neighborhoods, but am not quite getting there conceptually based on what it means materially. What would it look like to have specific culture in a neighborhood? Example?

>Apps exist to maximise efficiency (or monetary capital)

How so? Apps do all kinds of functions, some having nothing to do with monetary capital, or even economic activity at all.

Bazaar: Monetary Tools powered by REA

REA has a lot more than "bazaar", specifically thinking of creation/production - is there a reason you are focusing on that? Do you see that as the scope of EconomiKit?