Social Impact of ValueFlows

[simontegg]

What impacts do you think valueflows will have, or would you like it to have? Why is it important to you?

[bhaugen]

Really necessary question. First thoughts, may rethink later.

I have impossibly grandiose hopes for this project, but it will require that it become invisible.

Overall, I want this project to help people live better lives and prevent dystopia. But it will not do that directly.

This is an enabling technology. It will first speak to software developers, not end users. And even then, only to the bold*. It may eventually have direct benefits to end users, but that will be because bold software developers build benefits on top of it.

My motivation in working on this is to solve a problem, creating a new and better economic system, because the one we are in is dying. I see lots of other people trying to do the same thing, and think it would be better if we all did it together as much as possible. The internet offers new potential to do that.

I am not alone. I see lots of other people who understand the potential and are working on it, but often in separate projects. So I thought it would be better if we all got internetworked. So this project is to figure out how to do that, and then do it.

So the social impacts I would like this project to have, are to gather and collaborate with and internetwork a lot of different social-economy/new-economy/next-economy/solidarity-economy projects that are working on the ground to improve the livelihoods of their members, supported by software developers. The social impacts will come from those projects on the ground, enabled by being connected to many other companion projects around the world. And this project will help them invisibly.

P.S. while I think the changes I want will need to be done by groups (networks) of people, I also want the enabling technologies we develop to be usable by individuals with existing easy-to-get technologies (Web browsers, email, messages, command lines, etc.) to engage with networks that are doing things together.

*Why we need to be bold:

• Semantic Web technologies have been immanent for at least 20 years without actually arriving, so lots of software people don't believe in them anymore. But we boldly think we can make them work.
• There's no money in this project. No way to monetize it. And I don't think we are grant-friendly. So we need to do this out of love.
• Even Enspiral is skeptical about the Open Apps Ecosystem that they originated, that we still want to play in.
• The scope of this project is larger than any of us realizes, and if we did realize it, we would probably go and hide.

[ahdinosaur]

thanks @simontegg for starting this discussion. my personal theory of social change, which brings me here and now working on Value Flows, is roughly (and i'll probably edit this):

the underlying social and digital infrastructure we use has a deep impact on our lives, yet we often don't question it since it's so ingrained, e.g. the made-up game called "the economy" that everyone in society plays together. this infrastructure is the space in-between the working parts, and we need this infrastructure to operate as a society, but what if made up better infrastructure that enabled better ways of organizing.

said another way: i think the most important problem for society to solve is the coordination problem. if we think about human society as we would a bee hive or an ant hill, how we currently act is self-destructive, e.g. our foot is hurting our hand and our stomach is restricting resources from our intestines, it's silly. the social and digital infrastructure we use is what makes up our nervous system, which coordinates the different organs and limbs of human society to act as one body, so improving our infrastructure improves our ability to coordinate, which is the only chance we have at surviving and hopefully thriving.

similar to @joshuavial in the story of his learning journey, i dream of open ecosystem-level protocols, like the ones that brought us the internet, which support transparent, democratic and decentralised organising.

similar to Will Lau in the story of Bucky Box, i dream of open supply chains (resource production, distribution, and consumption) which "as a consequence redirect control away from the centre and towards the edges... away from the middlemen and towards the ones that grow our food and the ones that enjoy it."

[gcassel]

Awesome clarifying/grounding question @simontegg ; I'll try to reply later. Thanks Bob and Mikey for your wonderful answers :)

[elf-pavlik]

I see it as just set of recommendations in form of blueprints, which one can use together with other similar recommendations to build various interoperating systems for assisting our socioeconomic activities, and this way we can get closer to visions described in

• Spaceship Earth
• World Peace Game
• Holopticism

etc.

[bhaugen]

Afterthoughts that I woke up with this morning, somewhat triggered by this linkdump from @simontegg (do follow the link).

My vision and that vision of the galactic federation and all of the visions I have seen in this and related threads require a global economic network with the universality of the Internet, where everybody in the world can potentially connect and interact, and it doesn't require any specific software or language (lots of software and any language will work).

At this stage of technical evolution, Linked Open Data is the only way I can think of to make that happen.

I see a lot of projects thinking that if only everybody uses their glorious software, it will all work. No it won't. Everybody will not do that. If they did, it would be captured. (This is not directed at anybody in the present company.)

All of the abovel assumes the Internet survives the ongoing global debacle, but if it goes, we're in bigger trouble anyway.

[elf-pavlik]

I see a lot of projects thinking that if only everybody uses their glorious software, it will all work. No it won't. Everybody will not do that. If they did, it would be captured. (This is not directed at anybody in the present company.)

I see common ground on level of common references - specs, vocabularies (ontologies/taxonomies) which all need to support gradual evolution (eg. Representational State Transfer (REST)). And while of course we do need software application, just as we need various tools like hammers and wrenches, I have impression that nowadays many people tend to get drifted into some kind of 'next killer app' trip :disappointed:

[bhaugen]

Yup. Next killer app. How can we monetize this? Special sauce! Unicorn!

I should probably clarify that when I am thinking "global economic network", I mean a utility like (or actually on) the Internet that everybody can plug into and use, but they don't need to interact with everybody on the planet, they can interact with whoever they want. If that's in their local neighborhood (which I often want to do), so much the better.

[simontegg]

This link is about washing machines, but it seems kinda related https://medium.com/@ryanfinlay/they-used-to-last-50-years-c3383ff28a8e#.qm3oc7vrm

[simontegg]

Ethereum and SSB are in a similar social impact space https://medium.com/@ConsenSys/programmable-blockchains-in-context-ethereum-s-future-cd8451eb421e#.pdej1v2vg cc @mixmix

[mixmix]

yeah kinda different implementation and focus though. I find it harder to want to engage because of the hype.

On Sat, 24 Oct 2015 at 13:46 simontegg notifications@github.com wrote:

Ethereum and SSB are in a similar social impact space https://medium.com/@ConsenSys/programmable-blockchains-in-context-ethereum-s-future-cd8451eb421e#.pdej1v2vg cc @mixmix https://github.com/mixmix

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/valueflows/valueflows/issues/75#issuecomment-150849573 .

[bhaugen]

@mixmix

I find it harder to want to engage because of the hype.

No kidding! A lot of magical thinking going on. You don't get a decentralized system just because you got a distributed consensus mechanism. Which is being recentralized, in the case of Bitcoin...

[bhaugen]

See also #82

[ahdinosaur]

from Enspiral Slack #integrations_interop, removed a couple comments in between:

​Derek Razo I'm still pondering on the value and theory of change behind such an effort. To be blunt, I'm not entirely convinced of the p2p collaborative technology approach to social change right now. Being in the heart of it has made me a bit skeptical, but I'm still optimistic.

Greg Cassel Thanks for sharing that @derekrazo. For context, are you currently perceiving any specific alternatives to the p2p collaborative tech approach to social change in a favorable light? (i'm sure there are approaches which wouldn't even come to mind for me right now)

Derek Razo @gcassel: in particular im interested in complex problem solving using social processes and multi-stakeholder organizational platforms

jargon alert

things I've been interested in are : social labs, platform cooperatives, cross-sector org platforms for collaboration, social capital and social network building across value chains using social processes, somplex problem solving, systems thinking for social change. Mainly my recent question are about how to build power in groups and across / between orgs.

truth is, technology that we are building tends to be aimed at the already privileged... which is fine, but I'm still mulling on what it means for the value of what we do

p2p collaborative tech is most interesting to me at the financial level - like community credit systems, p2p banks etc. But the reason those things don't exist at scale and in abundance is largely not because of technology barriers, it's because of the power systems they exist in making them impossible to run and operate legally.

Cryptocurrency and blockchain stuff is really vauge to my in how it can actually create social change. I see lots of ideas but little impact.

I'm aware the last two statements are related to each other, but the focus of tech and crypto communities tends to be highly technical and not very community focused, and almost never tackling issues of ownership, commons, etc in insightful ways. Ie lots of tech approaches seem blind or ignorant to power and privilege (my own efforts included). There's a lot of hand waving for why that's okay (again me included) but in the end we all must make our choices about how we spend our hours and thats just that. :simple_smile:

In general, I would love to see more testable hypothesis about how these tactics will create value or social change. WHY is making existing interrelations visible important? How will it lead to impact or change or more learning etc etc.

Right now we're testing : "If people are involved in shaping an initiative funded by their community, they will be more likely to help other's shape and participate in their community initiatives in the future" It's totally subjective, but people can at least self report and we can try to learn something.

:bouquet:

[bhaugen]

I wonder if we could discuss this with @derekrazo sometime, someplace.

@fosterlynn and I have been working on software with living groups on the ground for about 8 years. We consider them to be experiments in what @almereyda calls "action research". Some of them were multi-stakeholder cooperatives, one (Sensorica) is an open value network, another is a very loosely organized network with no particular theoretical framework, with a couple more cooperatives coming up. We are testing hypotheses in the real world. (Or really, they are; we are just helpers). That's where all of the stuff we bring to Value Flows comes from. You can read about some of that here. Short version of results: sometimes works out fairly well, sometimes fails.

I think a lot of the participants in the TransforMap project are more active in real-world organizations than they are in the software project.

In terms of the Value Flows project, our hypothesis here was about organizing programmers, not the organizations on the ground. We saw that we were attracting very few people to work on our NRP software, although the software is being adopted by more living networks. The Open Apps Ecosystem, as total vaporware, just an idea, attracted a lot more people. LIkewise the Value Flows project (a spinoff of Open Apps) has attracted a lot more people. So we think this is due to a positive influence of the software architecture ideas on the forms of human (human programmer) organization (i.e. Conway's Law in reverse). It's another action research experiment. We'll see how it goes.

But if and when it starts to work technically, we will find more human organizations to try it out with.

[bhaugen]

P.S. I wonder why Enspiral sponsored Michel Bauwens' tour of NZ?

[simontegg]

@bhaugen Alanna met Michel in Thailand. There's recognition of the P2P Foundation as an aligned group and its seen as worthy to bring him out here, but there's not much visible engagement with any P2P theory. That might be explain some of the disjuncture.

I think what's going on here is that (at least in holodex's case), I'll say superficially (but that's probably too negative) to a user a software project like holodex is about "making existing interrelations visible". I think while it will be nice for non-hierarchical group's to have group visualisation software that works for them that's not really the main social impact of holodex as I see it.

For me its more that's its built in a particular way, rather than allows people to take a particular (socially impactful) action. Ie. by conforming to valueflows vocab we allow modular reuse in other projects, making collaboration between open-source developers more effective and (I hope) providing a countervailing alternative to VC-funded/startup-type capitalist development. As you say, "organising programmers". Groking this requires more engagement with economic theory than most people want to do.

Loomio and Cobudget identities are more about performing particular actions rather than being in a particular way. This is often how social impact gets framed and in my view the root of some of the miscommunication with some people in enspiral.

I think its great that you're doing action research with all kinds of groups. Unfortunately, the visible parts of valueflows are technical material and abstractions, so perhaps there's assumption is that this disconnected from "the real world"

[gcassel]

Nice to see you here @simontegg .

For me its more that's its built in a particular way, rather than allows people to take a particular (socially impactful) action.

This has practically become my crusade: to build for genuine communications, information and self-organization, under the general premise that this will decrease coercion, exploitation and deception. Of course that only works if non-coercive, honest objectives are properly resourced; but I think many cascading effects are possible, often starting with grassroots processes which require few material resources.

One key challenge is that most people don't think critically enough about economics and money to realize why something like valueflows matters deep down. I hope I can gradually learn how to engage the general public on that.

[bhaugen]

@simontegg lotta uninvestigated assumptions floating around.

We find that communities (e.g. the Mutual Aid Network) grok what we are doing in value flows a lot faster than most programmers or theorists of change. The potential they see is help in figuring out how to interconnect the various software tools they use. (That's the first use case, interconnecting current apps, on this wiki page).

Some of them (e.g. Sensorica) are positively interested in radically decentralized systems for their own sake. They are experimenting with Ethereum, for example. I don't think they understand all the implications yet, but at least one of them is actively trying stuff. (That's the networks of VF-native apps use case).

[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/31.

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