Economic Events (valueflows)

[ahdinosaur]

much like activity streams, it seems the fundamental data structure we want to support are events, in this case economic events.

questions:

• what are examples of events?
• what use cases do we want to support?
• do we care about non-economic events?
• how do events relate to exchange and process? are they the same or different?

when i think events i think streams of data over time, where each piece of data is an immutable message, which makes me think events are everywhere. but i'm wondering what others think. :cat:

[bhaugen]

@ahdinosaur - great topic for discussion! Also potentially deep. I'll do shallow pass at first.

I wrote a bit about value streams as a specialization of activity streams a long time ago, and they have been on our radar ever since, awaiting something like the open vocab project: https://github.com/valnet/valuenetwork/wiki/Value-Streams

"Event" must be one of the most overloaded words in the English language. Which is why REA always says "Economic Event" with initial caps when that is what they mean. (I don't do so consistently, but then I am inconsistent...)

An economic event is a non-trivial change in an economic resource.

Lots of other kinds of events would want to be included in an activity stream. The REA community often calls them Business Events, where an Economic Event is a Business Event, but not all Business Events are Economic Events. I don't like the word Business for anything in this vocabulary because I think it might give the wrong idea of the world we are trying to engender, but I don't have a ready substitute, so I'll just use "other value stream events" for now.

I'll reformat your questions a bit, if that's ok, because first I want to differentiate economic events from other events that we might be interested in.

• what are examples of economic events?
  • a transfer of an economic resource from one agent to another
  • creation of economic resource
  • consumption, citation or use of an economic resource
  • repair of an economic resource
  • destruction or damage to an economic resource (e.g. polluting the water)
• what are examples of other value stream events that we might want to publish?
  • a new offer
  • a new want
  • a new recipe
  • a new plan
  • a change to any of the above
  • a reply to an offer or want (the start of a conversation for action)
  • the conclusion of a conversation for action, in a new agreement or failure
  • the formation of a new organization
  • a new member joins an organization
  • a new relationship between agents is formed
  • a planned process has input resource requirements
  • etc etc etc
• what use cases do we want to support?
  • an agent publishes any of the above events to a value stream
  • an agent subscribe to value streams from another agent
  • an agent responds to a value stream event from another agent
  • for example, an agent responds to an offer or want
  • an agent commits to do some work that is required by a process
• do we care about non-economic events?
  • yes, see other value stream events above
• how do events relate to exchange and process? are they the same or different?
  • exchanges include economic events that transfer resources between agents
  • processes include economic events that are either inputs to or outputs from the process
  • an agreement on an exchange following a conversation for action might be one of the other value stream events that could be published
  • scheduling a process could be another value stream event that could be published
  • likewise, the planned resource inputs and outputs for a process are plans for events that have not yet happened. Those could also be published in value streams.

[elf-pavlik]

I think we need to make sure to keep clear distinction between Social Events, Economic Events, Activities (eg. workshop, concert, b-day party). Also relevant issue: https://github.com/w3c-social/social-vocab/issues/9

[ahdinosaur]

i reckon let's use the term stockflow for Economic Events, or flow for short. :smile_cat:

[bhaugen]

@ahdinosaur - as I said in some other context, I am reluctant to divorce this vocab from the REA community, because I think some of those people will join us sooner or later. Lots of them in Europe, by the way. When we get this vocab a little more defined, I'll ping a couple, including Bill McCarthy who started the whole thing. If the people I ping don't get it, then I'm good with a divorce.

[fosterlynn]

@ahdinosaur Actually, I don't like the term Stockflow, it is very old-school manufacturing oriented. For example, if you're creating translations, do you think of the steps your translation goes through as stockflow? Even if you're in a fablab, I suspect people won't get that as a concept from the name.

(Not saying it isn't good to think about the naming of Economic Event, or at least figuring out how to make it clear. "Flow" is kind of interesting. But I also agree with @bhaugen that we need a really good reason to divorce from REA.)

[bhaugen]

We've been talking about @ahdinosaur's suggestion of a name change and wonder if ValueFlow would be a good rename for EconomicEvent.

Would not have the physical inventory connotations of stockflow, does not already mean something else in the REA community, focuses the vocab better, and I think ties into how a lot of people are talking about the next economy.

And at least would get us out of the overloaded "event" word trap. And as Lynn says, economic event suggests a point, flow says movement.

We''re trying to figure out the implications and possible drawbacks to see if the whole model still ties together. But if so, and if everybody likes the change, I'll do my best to find all of the references in related docs and pictures and change them.

[ahdinosaur]

wonder if ValueFlow would be a good rename for EconomicEvent.

yay, :+1:. could we still shorten it to Flow in our formal vocab, or do you think that loses too much meaning? also tied in with this name is our name for what is now Commitment, which i agree with what's been said before of using Plan instead.

[bhaugen]

I'm not sure about shortening to Flow. Thinking about it.

I think on the Reality or Event layer, we'd have, for processes, Inflow and Outflow, and for Exchanges, maybe just Transfer, but they would all be subclasses(?) of ValueFlow.

On the Plan layer, we might have PlannedInflow, PlannedOutflow and PlannedTransfer, which would all be subclasses(?) of PlannedFlow..

On the Type layer(?), we might have InflowType, OutflowType and TransferType, which would all be subclasses(?) of FlowType.

The (?)s mean I am not sure I am using the correct LOD terminology there, but hope the idea comes through anyway.

[elf-pavlik]

How about starting with just few (1-4) concrete examples and focus on modeling first? If it turns out that we end up with something similar to as:Activity we could also consider simply vf:Activity - where vf: prefix makes it obvious that we stay in context of ValueFlows...

Most likely we will have some sort of N-ary Relation with timestamps. I started collecting various examples of existing N-ary relations

[bhaugen]

@elf-pavlik - I was ready to start renaming the various diagrams. Seems like you advocate holding off.

I had warmed up to @ahdinosaur 's suggestion to rename EconomicEvent to __Flow and thought it fit with the whole theme. Would help the ideas come together. I think we will end up with differences and mappings between e.g. models, code in various languages, LOD, and other formats like CSVs (which I think we should support). This also relates to some of the ideas in Connor's presentation.

And at least for us, when we code, we want operational systems, so the various things floating around in LOD-land need to connect to concrete behaviors. For example, value equation treatment of different event types. We do want them to float in LOD-land, but we also need them to be grounded in real economic life.

(P.S. I'll write up a bunch of behavioral diffs as examples. Not today, though...)

An interesting conversation is going on about floating in LOD-land in some emails around the new intent repo that I'll surface in an issue over there. Short excerpt:

Our longer term aim is to separate the ads function from CES and have it independent, where anyone can advertise irrespective of which system they use to record their transactions.

Do you have ideas/design for how intents would be separated from transactions? What do you imagine that would look like?"

[bhaugen]

@elf-pavlik re concrete examples: I'd like to set up a place where I can write up concrete examples in fairly plain language that explains what is going on, which could be mapped to LOD expressions. Just the LOD expressions, especially if framed in (for example) schema.org or activity streams vocabs, lose some of the real-world semantics, at least for me. I may just not get it yet, but I won't be the only such person. And some of the real-world semantics might actually be lost in the translation.

For example:

The book on the library shelf that I can check out and read.

The car I can drive.

The application of the potter's skills to making the pot, followed by selling the pot.

The application of the potter's skills to making a pot on a job for an employer who then sells the pot.

Borrowing a tool from the tool lending library, and then returning it.

[elf-pavlik]

I'd like to set up a place where I can write up concrete examples in fairly plain language that explains what is going on, which could be mapped to LOD expressions.

@bhaugen you could start adding .md files in /use-cases directory in valueflows repo e.g. https://github.com/valueflows/valueflows/tree/master/use-cases

[bhaugen]

Shd we do one file per use case, where the LOD expression (and an object model, and maybe some code in a programming language or two) could all be combined?

[elf-pavlik]

I would say that everyone could start with whatever make sense to her/him and once we have few use cases there, we can start harmonizing format and updating those existing use cases to follow it.

[bhaugen]

@elf-pavlik and all: I'm going for one file per use case.

• somewhat natural language description
• object model
• LOD representation (e.g. json-LD, but I don't care)
• some code in one of Connor's listed languages

All in the same file, representing the same use case. Congruent(?) or at least harmonious.

[ahdinosaur]

@bhaugen sounds great :sweet_potato:

[elf-pavlik]

@bhaugen if you prefer to wait with getting you hands dirty with writing JSON-LD, could you consider trying to at least sometimes add an equivalent graph diagram like ones in this GDrive folder?

[bhaugen]

@elf-pavlik - as soon as I have headspace, I will study and comment on your bus trip diagrams. Then I will follow them into the json-ld representations. I'll get started before our meeting, and have something to report.

[elf-pavlik]

@bhaugen I just added second example, after my own selfdogfood exercise (writing first example of a process, while on a bus from Paris to Lille), we can now enjoy selfdogfood feast all together - .jsonld example of our very next meeting :dog: . I'll try also make equivalent diagrams with Google Draw very soon!

[bhaugen]

@elf-pavlik - that's recursive! I didn't realize that the example was written while riding on the example.

[almereyda]

We have moved the ValueFlows organization from GitHub to https://lab.allmende.io/valueflows.

This issue has been closed here, and all further discussion on this issue can be done at

https://lab.allmende.io/valueflows/forum-valueflo-ws/-/issues/16.

If you have not done so, you are very welcome to register at https://lab.allmende.io and join the ValueFlows organization there.