gcassel
commented
8 years ago I can't speak for anyone else but I think we're probably closer to alignment now!
I'm not interested in the idea of "ownership" per se, but I think that permissions/ authorizations/ use-rights are fundamentally important. Maybe we get confused though because the use-rights to some virtual resources, such as a dollar figure in a bank account, seem to be almost entirely "embodied" by the digital location of those virtual resources-- and the transfer of use-rights seems to be embodied by the digital transfer of the virtual resources.
Likewise, we implicitly perceive in most interactions that the use-rights of cash are embodied by possession of the cash. It's not really true though... for instance, I don't transfer cash to a shopkeeper simply because I lay some bills on a countertop. IMO the actual transfer is a social agreement; a mutual understanding. I.e., I'm probably transferring cash to a shopkeeper if I lay some bills on a countertop after some purchases have been added up, and I walk away after receiving a receipt and some change. (Social agreements are often implicit, not explicit.)
Hope this makes sense? Sorry @elf-pavlik for the big focus on money, lol.
danalexilewis
bhaugen
fosterlynn
elf-pavlik
almereyda
Ah, walks are so good for the thinking process! Bob and I just did our walk'n'talk up and down the hill. :)
I hope this is a helpful thought. Let's orient our definitions of all these REA concepts away from current relations of production towards new ones. Immediately, let's get rid of the term "ownership" from the vocabulary.
I think we can do this by making the definitions neutral and just recording what happens. The vocabulary has to work for transitional forms of exchange in all its range from selling on the market to non-market internal transfers between people collaborating on something. Or paraphrasing what @elf-pavlik said somewhere, we need to know how many apples we can eat out of the pile without making someone else hungry or sad.
This is helpful for me, because I don't like having to spend all this time on exchange as it works for capitalists, because I'm trying to get beyond that. But I do think that coordination, and in some cases very tight coordination, will be desirable for any foreseeable future of economic activity in a community or society.
So, Transfer, the current focus. How about instead of the focus on ownership, we focus on the functionality of the transfer. Which is something like giving the receiving agent the ability to do whatever they want with that resource, like consume it in a process or transfer it to someone else. It enables the resource to continue in a flow because some other agent now has the rights to consume, use, or transfer. I think this should cover the most capitalist to the most post-capitalist transfer.
I think some of the REA definitions that people use within that ontology community will be neutral already. Others will need to be evolved.
So, thinking about some typical exchanges, let's see if we can make this work. Here is a sale in the marketplace, with a transfer of a custom built computer with serial #1234 from agent A to agent B, and a reciprocal transfer of $1000 from agent B to agent A. Let's say that B sent the $1000 to A by bank transfer first. I think the data that is created from that is: A transfer with a Give and Receive event, with the bank account resources decremented and incremented respectively. That transfer of rights is done. At the same time though, the computer is no longer available to A to sell or use, even though A still has it in possession. So a transfer is also created for the computer. This transfer has no events yet but should have a commitment to Give the computer to B. When the computer is shipped, maybe A creates a Give event for the commitment. When the computer is received, maybe B creates a Receive event. There may be different points here where legally the ownership changes, governed by specific contractual stuff or policy. But that doesn't have to be part of this recording of transfer data with commitments and events, I don't think. There is also more complexity involving the shipping, which I'm ignoring to keep this simple, but which we should detail at some point because it is important to sorting this out. But do we have everything we need to know here? Can anyone define what they need to around ownership based on these facts on the ground?
What do you all think?