search

valueflows / forum.valueflo.ws

forum.valueflo.ws has moved to https://lab.allmende.io/valueflows/forum-valueflo-ws
3 stars 1 forks source link

Sensorica examples to explore REA and traditional accounting #73

Closed bhaugen closed 4 years ago

bhaugen commented 8 years ago

@TiberiusB @serapath here's one starting point that I copied from a Sensorica document: https://github.com/valueflows/valueflows/blob/master/use-cases/sensorica-custodian.md

Tibi, maybe you could fill in with more of Sensorica's details and concerns?

bhaugen commented 8 years ago

@serapath - that's amazing! Lotta work! We got family visitors and limited time, but we'll study more deeply as soon as we can. In the meantime, getting some errors, for example:

      "contract/Sensorica/Ali/membership": "\n    undefined 

is member of Sensorica starting with a \"capital account of\

" undefined.\n    undefined can work on authorized tasks and

 get paid at a task specific rate.\n    undefined can fill u

p a \"capital account\" through contributions by acting as i

ndependent micro investors (investing money into a Sensorica

 cause) and/or micro entrepreneurs (=investing time into a S

ensorica cause).\n    undefined will receives dividends base

d on revenue directly or indirectly caused by such a cause.

and in firefox, but not in chrome:

  "msg": "ReferenceError: buyer is not defined",

  "url": "blob:http://requirebin.com/a8f733db-0c07-4639-b80f

-c25e251861ce",

  "lineno": 6753,

  "col": 1,

  "error": {}

}
serapath commented 8 years ago

Oh, there seems to be a bug in the affiliate contract and the membership contract. I'll updated http://requirebin.com/?gist=01d39d31f218a6a4f429cccbe7b91e80 and the comment above with the new code.

Otherwise, it's using new es6 features that work in up2date google chrome versions, but maybe not in other browsers. I recommend copy&pasing the code into chrome developer tools - consle (press f12 or ctrl+shift+i to open). Not all browsers support all the es6 features yet, but the code can later be used with https://github.com/babel/babelify or others to transpile es6 to es6 code that works across browsers.

serapath commented 8 years ago

I've one question - what to do next?

I see in general, there is a lot of stuff that exist (http://www.sensorica.co/value-networks)

@fosterlynn

I propose we scale this example back to something where the main network is formally registered, let's say as a cooperative, and get rid of the CAKE / Exchange Firm baggage. We could call it '3D Coop' or something like that. And they could still use the contributory accounting scheme (although that is independent of the REA question too).

I'd like to keep Sensorica and Exchange Inc. as virtual organizations, because in a transitional phase, that is probably a scenario that many people might have to deal with before they eventually create a more "network like structure" :-) ...so i'm fine with that - and maybe this example can be used to actually try to solve the accounting issues too if we are already on it :-)

@fosterlynn You described here (above in this issue) how to write the scenario in terms of REA or value flow language.

I think the whole thing to me looks pretty close to "english". It says stuff like

Then it mentions:
(leaving out orders / commitments, considering this cash accounting method)
(the first set if vf:Transfers, the last is nrp:NonProductionLogging)
...with "processes" and/or "economic events"
They have the form of:

Questions:

@bhaugen

slide6+ feels complicated. A lot of new words get introduced, but in my head it all feels like splitting revenue based on contracts

The slide about the buckets and rules? That's the minimum structure it took to handle all the variations people wanted.

So I'll check the slides again, but if it could be expressed in syntax instead of slides, that would be nice :-)

bhaugen commented 8 years ago

if it could be expressed in syntax instead of slides, that would be nice :-)

That's what we need to do here. (But you did see that google doc with algorithm notes, right? And here are the tests: https://github.com/valnet/valuenetwork/blob/master/valuenetwork/valueaccounting/tests/value_equation_test_objects.py https://github.com/valnet/valuenetwork/blob/master/valuenetwork/valueaccounting/tests/test_value_equations.py

Beyond that, a walk through the code?

bhaugen commented 8 years ago

@serapath - we got guests until tomorrow morning, and then some commitments to another project, but we should be able to get back into value flows more heavily some time tomorrow and more yet on Wednesday.

serapath commented 8 years ago

ok :-) great

TiberiusB commented 8 years ago

Hi all, This thread became huge! Can't finish it all now, but I can make some general comments. I am sorry for being so late to it. I think no one that knows me well can say that I am not interested in all this, or that I am wasting my time with usless stuff. I am actually spending every second to make this unique model for commons-based peer production a success. On this success hinges everyone's work, including yours. Bob, we don't need to love each others to benefit from each others. Steve, Bob and Lynn know very well, as you do, that anyone who works on infrastructure development can log their conributions, which are trated as debt in our system. I am in the same boat, with countless hours logged and tens of thousands of dollars invested, in a project that I cannot formally control. Others in my place would be very possesives, would want to secure for themselves a position of power and control. But no one is abliged to log, and Lynn and Bob have chosen not to log. I find your intervention here again inapropriate. You try to divide and after you ask for their help. Another one added to my memory.

Back to work now.

Everything I read from Lynn is correct! She really understands how SENSORICA operates. So does Bob. I don't see anything to add, unless you have unsolved issues.

Here's the general attitude. We are changemakers. Real changemakers don't work from what exists. They just build something new and just after they try to reconcyle it with what exists. Bob is right. All these legal structures that we have created at the periphery of the network are just interfaces. They need to be understood as tools to plug into the actual system. They are hacks. They will disapear in the future and what will remain will be individuals, affiliates (not members) using different protocols to co-create and to distribute. Isn't only that what is real?

If the worst comes to worst, ... well... let it come. We are changemakers and we know we are in the gray zone. This is the risk we are taking. As for sensoricans, our more than 5 years of reseliance demonstrate that together we are doing something good.

Time has came for us to advice the Federal Government on how to change the law for us. That's not nothing, and one can only get there with the attitude we have.

So, the exercice of trying to reconcyle SENSORICA with the current accounting practices has value, because it allows us to function during the transition. In other words, we are not a fly in a soup. We can get by. For now they need us. We are not paniking, they are, very visibly. We are in a leadrship position, they are trying to catch up.

Some effort should go into reconcyling our model with the legacy system and some should go into desiging a new accounting system tailored for a p2p society.

Thank you all for your work and please send me more questions if you have. On Jun 29, 2016 7:41 AM, "Lynn Foster" notifications@github.com wrote:

@serapath https://github.com/serapath I have some thoughts about this exercise. I think we are mixing two issues - one is the question of how a group like Sensorica can best do their accounting, when they want to maintain different legal entities to meet their legal requirements but also want their main group to be a much looser open network. The other is to look at how REA accounting works vs pre-REA standard accounting.

The legal complications of Sensorica make this example more painful in terms of just seeing how REA works, which was the initial objective (I think).

I propose we scale this example back to something where the main network is formally registered, let's say as a cooperative, and get rid of the CAKE / Exchange Firm baggage. We could call it '3D Coop' or something like that. And they could still use the contributory accounting scheme (although that is independent of the REA question too).

If we want to also look into Sensorica's situation to see if we can be of help there, maybe that could be a separate issue?

What do you think?

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/valueflows/valueflows/issues/142#issuecomment-229332046, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe/ADu2SRiBaUYF1LKFD5lQtGMRZgHrOhSeks5qQlnxgaJpZM4I-g8A .

bhaugen commented 8 years ago

I personally have no time to fully deal with Sensorica's interface with the government etc. And I don't know how deep Value Flows should get into it. I think we got a lot to do here, and that is probably borderline at best. I think the REA vs conventional accounting discussion is useful in general, and will continue with that theme later today and tomorrow. To get deeper into Sensorica territory, I think will require some deep participation from Sensoricans. But the REA-accounting discussion might help them anyway when they get time to deal with it.

bhaugen commented 8 years ago

I copied the output from @serapath 's fascinating Sensorica accounting experiment into a file in the use-cases directory so I can study it more easily. Hope that helps other people, too.

Alex, let me know if I butchered anything. More questions and comments to come.

fosterlynn commented 8 years ago

@serapath

I will try to answer the questions, but also want you to know the stage of the VF right now. So, in this discussion of REA accounting, I am mostly using our software (NRP) as a basis to formulate things (or you can check the prefixes to see what is VF more-or-less and what is not). REA is a starting point for NRP, NRP is a starting point for VF, but several improvements have been made through discussion already for VF. Several VF contributors are not coming from NRP experience. I think REA core concepts will remain as the core for VF with a number of tweaks and clarifications, but again, this is all under discussion.

I don't want to write code for this discussion; already did that in NRP and it took a long time :). Here is that code https://github.com/valnet/valuenetwork/tree/master/valuenetwork/valueaccounting, look in models.py for the type of thing you are thinking about, although there is a lot there that could be confusing. Could do code walk thru, or model walk thru. And/or we can get you a login to a test site.

Or, new code will be written for VF based apps, @ahdinosaur is doing some of that and there are other proposals.

How many different version are there?

These are all economic events (don't have a VF name yet). Some kinds have some data more important than to other kinds, so I emphasized some things differently. And in particular, the transfer events and the process events tend to be a bit different. Transfers (exchanges) are probably the least complete in VF, and are the subject of the most variety of proposals. But in REA, all the types of economic events are more alike than different. (There is missing data that we will need too, like dates.)

Is it always a set of process steps or economic events? followed by a set of updates to economic resources?

It is always economic events. Sometimes they are part of a process, sometimes part of a transfer / exchange, sometimes just on their own as part of a project or other context. An economic event increments or decrements a resource. Or not, for some types of events, like citations or work. But in any case an economic event references an economic resource, which could be inventoried or not, and can be identified in different ways, as decided within the context they live in.

I skimmed through the slide deck about value equations but again some explanation would be helpful - ideally using the language used by @fosterlynn in the example above. How do those "contracts" called value equations get specified? When and how does the accounting happen?

In NRP, you just specify the value equations in a UI. Not all groups using NRP use value equations. Enspiral uses some different kinds of agreements. Other groups will use other methods I'm sure.

The accounting happens when the income (some resource, often money but doesn't have to be) is actually distributed. I suspect this is the important part for us to focus on. I don't know if VF will cover any internals of value equations or other types of agreements, maybe will just reference the agreement.

Hope this helps!

serapath commented 8 years ago

@bhaugen Actually, the link: http://requirebin.com/?gist=01d39d31f218a6a4f429cccbe7b91e80 ...is already saved on github in the form of a gist

What you saved seemed to be an "artifact" that was logged by the executed code i guess.

You can play around on the requirebin and after you are confident in the changes, you can just click on Actions/Save gist and it will be saved. For example, the current version, I have saved here:

bhaugen commented 8 years ago

Actually, the link: http://requirebin.com/?gist=01d39d31f218a6a4f429cccbe7b91e80 ...is already saved on github in the form of a gist

Is that different from your previous version, which I could not run from my browser? Did you make it less needy of the latest JS?

What you saved seemed to be an "artifact" that was logged by the executed code i guess.

Yeah, I had to use Lynn's computer to do it.

For example, the current version, I have saved here: https://gist.github.com/serapath/01d39d31f218a6a4f429cccbe7b91e80

Thanks. I was just looking for something I could print and mark up for study. I'm old skool.

If the version I posted in use-cases is obsolete, I'll delete it.

serapath commented 8 years ago

@fosterlynn If there was a small tutorial or example that gives an easy introduction to some "Specification" for this NRP/VF/REA stuff, that would be great. I'd love to eventually use it, but i would like to implement the core in javascript instead. If that is done right, it might even be compatible with system written in other langauges :-) ...hopefully.

Sadly I'm not familiar with python, but from looking at it, it seems complex - but maybe that comes from it being actually embedded in a real system and not just the core idea :-) If @ahdinosaur is writing some code, that sounds super :-) I guess it might even be javascript then and probably high quality code too :-)

Maybe for now I can try to code something based on my understanding. So in this language it's possible to "emphasize" things differently? ..i guess for the beginning it would be easier to have a canonical way of writing things, even though variations are possible.

serapath commented 8 years ago

@TiberiusB

Hey :-) I saw your TED talks and found them inspirational :-)

They need to be understood as tools to plug into the actual system. They are hacks. They will disapear in the future and what will remain will be individuals, affiliates (not members) using different protocols to co-create and to distribute. Isn't only that what is real?

I like that vision. I find all these "umbrella organizations" and stuff unnecessary complication which hopefully go away. I was thinking, the closest would be to "encapsulate" each individual into a 100% owned company (e.g. UK Ltd. or USA LLC. or german GmbH, etc...) and then do all the relations based on "contract law". ...ideally you would not even need this garbage and just start with the individual directly - but for now it feels encapsulating everyone into a "single person company" using "contract law" to design relations is maybe the closest to it...

But even that could get complicated - again - because of some existing laws ...so some prototyping might be easier if an umbrella organizations shields from all this legal complexity - even though i would prefer to not have "umbrella organizations".

Time has came for us to advice the Federal Government on how to change the law for us. That's not nothing, and one can only get there with the attitude we have.

That sounds awesome. So you do that in canada? What are you proposing?

Some effort should go into reconcyling our model with the legacy system and some should go into desiging a new accounting system tailored for a p2p society.

Totally agree - I think the main problem is all the tons of "accounting rules" which basically are about what kind of "journal entries" are allowed and what they mean. Some things cannot be assets and some can, some require taxes, some others not and there are so many constantly changing rules and that's what I see as the main problem.

Accounting itself feels to me as a universal tool, but while trying to write down the javascript code, i figured that my preferred "basic unit" of writing down whats happend would be contracts and the "journal entries" for the balance sheet get generated from those "contracts".

serapath commented 8 years ago

@bhaugen

So the code here:

can be edited here:

You can make changes and click on Actions/Save gist to save it to your github gists.

A friend of mine had similar problems and we figured out it was an old version of google chrome. I have version 51+ and she was using version 47.

The reason why it's better to use all this new javascript features is, because it makes the code way more readable for people who dont know javascript yet - so i would like to keep it like that :-) You can see your version in chrome under Settings/About in google chrome. Maybe you just update it?

bhaugen commented 8 years ago

Sadly I'm not familiar with python, but from looking at it, it seems complex - but maybe that comes from it being actually embedded in a real system and not just the core idea :-)

I suspect that is the case. Python itself was designed as a teaching language, and is fairly simple as programming languages go. On the other hand, we may not have written the code in the most readable fashion.

The reason why it's better to use all this new javascript features is, because it makes the code way more readable for people who dont know javascript yet - so i would like to keep it like that :-) You can see your version in chrome under Settings/About in google chrome. Maybe you just update it?

Unfortunately, it also requires me to update my operating system. Too much monkey business given my workload.

So economic events is the important part and whether they are part of something or not and how that is called is secondary?

Economic events is the main REA primitive, the counterpart to journal entries in double-entry bookkeeping. So I suppose that makes everything else secondary.

Do value equations (which to my understanding are "contracts") generate the "economic events"?

No. Income distributions using value equations do generate economic events, though. An economic event is any economically-significant change in an economic resource.

serapath commented 8 years ago

For me it all sounds like:

bhaugen commented 8 years ago

economic event === journal entry

False. Economic event between two agents would update two journals. [Edit: but the journals are no longer necessary.]

T-accounts, balance sheets, etc, are from the viewpoint of one and only one agent. I'll have more to say about this after I go thru your code results in more detail. I think they will make the point more clear.

income distribution using value equations === executing contracts

True.

fosterlynn commented 8 years ago

I think the whole thing to me looks pretty close to "english". It says stuff like is affiliate of or is exchange firm of or is custodian of or is supplier for.

For more detail on the Agent vocab, see https://github.com/valueflows/agent.

It goes on with specifying accounts like: ResourceType + Quantity + Location or ResourceType + Quantity + Location + AgentResourceRelationship or ResourceType + Quantity + UnderlyingResource or ResourceType + Quantity

For where we are at on Resource vocab, see https://github.com/valueflows/resource. You might like the section called Identification and Behaviors of Resources.

serapath commented 8 years ago

I see :-) True - I was imagining the journal as something global, where individuals or organizations only have parts of the journal entries relevant to their balance sheet, while a tax office might actually have all of them.

And regarding T-accounts, it's from the perspective of one agent, but in case of a countries balance sheet, that includes multiple agents - and there could be a global one - even though in practice this is something that probably only economists do - and they often do not have all the data :-)

I actually dont have a feeling how "readable" the javascript code is, but it would be awesome if we could do iterations on it. @bhaugen have you maybe tried firefox instead? :-) maybe that would do the trick? :P

ahdinosaur commented 8 years ago

If there was a small tutorial or example that gives an easy introduction to some "Specification" for this NRP/VF/REA stuff, that would be great.

@serapath you might be interested in #102 and #115.

bhaugen commented 8 years ago

have you maybe tried firefox instead? :-) maybe that would do the trick? :P

Did try firefox. That's where those error messages came from. The last time I tried it in Chrome (yesterday) it worked fine, so maybe you fixed something, or it was cosmic rays or something the first time, when it did not work correctly in either browser.

bhaugen commented 8 years ago

in case of a countries balance sheet, that includes multiple agents - and there could be a global one - even though in practice this is something that probably only economists do

We're actually trying to do something like that for local/regional economic ecosystems in this project. I'm not sure that "global" T-accounts are the proper analytical method, but I'll think about it. It's also based on REA, but at an aggregate level.

fosterlynn commented 8 years ago

Still catching up....

I'd love to eventually use it, but i would like to implement the core in javascript instead. If that is done right, it might even be compatible with system written in other langauges :-) ...hopefully.

Just want to say that implementing the VF core in js would be awesome. And I'm guessing @ahdinosaur would agree. :)

serapath commented 8 years ago

@bhaugen I also do not know how to think about all this stuff in general. For me, a global T-account means simply.

I think about them as "state". It's a snapshot of a moment in time. At any point in time, changes in the form of "economic events" (a.k.a "journal entries") are pouring in producing new snapshots.

Of course, if this global T-account is useful to anyone is questionable, so instead having multiple seperate T-accounts, where "economic events" touch one or more of them makes more sense i guess.

Maybe a good way to thinkg about it would be, that a set of "journal entries" represent an "economic event" and a chain of "economic events" could come from "contract" being executed by people/organizations or they just happen by spontaneous business activity.

So the "immutable log" or "journal", where each new entry is a "journal entry" and where sets of "journal entries" might represent "economic events" which come from "contracts" (some of them might be "value equations") ... maybe that would be a good way to think about it?

serapath commented 8 years ago

@ahdinosaur #115 is interesting. I think a vocabulary is important, but i'd love to see a very minimal set of words. I have a feeling it's already to many words. Once a basic set of general words to describe stuff exists, people or organizations can define their custom vocab on to of it, which is described in terms of the basic vocabulary so that this basic vocabulary can be used to translate between different vocabs.

Maybe what you have for now is necessary, but while reading through it already started to feel comlicated - but maybe i'm wrong :-) But i had a hard time of seeing the bigger picture behind the proposed words and how they relate and why they are necessary at all.

From @fosterlynn it feel to me nothing is necessary beside:

maybe everything on top of that can be expressed in terms of these basic words?

Reading #115 overwhelmed me ...for now :-)

bhaugen commented 8 years ago

Bill McCarthy thought he had reduced it to the minimum number of moving parts: http://www.msu.edu/user/mccarth4/Alabama.pdf

In other words, you need all that stuff. His first version was smaller: http://www.msu.edu/user/mccarth4/McCarthy.pdf

Grew from continued practice. The first paper above seems to be the stable set of components.

serapath commented 8 years ago

is there a "gist" - those pdfs are pretty long to be the "minimum number of moving parts" :-)

fosterlynn commented 8 years ago

From @fosterlynn it feel to me nothing is necessary beside: --resource (and some universal properties of resources) --economic events (in terms of how they change the above) --contracts (some templates that can relate to other templates and describe conditions that once they trigger, causes a series of "economic events" to happen) --agents (people or organizations that interact in terms of the 3 words above)

I think that is a great distillation. One more: There are also planning objects that mirror the event objects, in between contracts and REA. Some of those can be contractual, but not always, sometimes they are just plans for economic events, like plans to make something.

A lot of the discussion you see is about which of many words would be best for the simple concepts, so they may appear more confusing than they are. :( And they include a bunch of properties too.

See https://github.com/valnet/valuenetwork/wiki/Core if you like models. (These are NRP based, we are improving them here in VF).

bhaugen commented 8 years ago

I think the type objects are also essential.

bhaugen commented 8 years ago

those pdfs are pretty long to be the "minimum number of moving parts" :-)

Don't blame the model for the length of the pdfs. McCarthy et al needed to prove their point to the American Acccounting Association journal, through many months of sometimes hostile peer review.

In the end, they elected Bill to be a vice president.

serapath commented 8 years ago

@bhaugen @fosterlynn thx for the nice feedback. Maybe i'll take some time to read into the pdf's into the near future once other options that require less reading don't move things forward anymoe :-)

@ahdinosaur thx for the links to the other issues, i read them and i like what i read :-) From that, what i got so far is:

Question: How does the following fit in?

bhaugen commented 8 years ago

REA defines contracts as bundles of commitments.

Not sure what you mean by "template". NRP has recipes, so far mostly for making stuff our of other stuff. Might be generalizable more. They are composed of REA type objects. See Lynn's Core model referenced upthread.

bhaugen commented 8 years ago

P.S. officially, REA does not have contract templates that I know of. But a couple of REA practitioners have done a lot of work on composable computable contracts.

fosterlynn commented 8 years ago

Question: How does the following fit in? economic events = they change resources

Economic events = flow (transfer or transform), we at one point were trying out calling economic events "flows".

serapath commented 8 years ago

What about "stream" instead of "flow"? When i hear flow i associate it with liquids and something that is continuous, while when i hear stream, it can be connected to a liquid and something continuous, but I easily imagine it as a series of discrete events to, as in:

fosterlynn commented 8 years ago

What about "stream" instead of "flow"?

Interesting idea, thanks! We actually started looking at VF as a complement / contrast to Activity Streams, another vocabulary. Will put it in the naming mix. After trying "flow" out, I was kind of dropping it because it felt not discrete enough so was confusing. This is a tough one to name.

Economic events = flow (transfer or transform), we at one point were trying out calling economic events "flows".

I should further explain, and maybe complicate a bit, sorry: :wink:

Transfer and Transform contain flows or economic events.

Transform and Transport we have modeled as subclasses of Process. So really we are talking about Transfers and Processes.

There are input and output flows/events related to processes. This is a standard Input-Process-Output paradigm but it looks like this:

R > I > P > O > R > I > P > O > R (R is resource)

All of this creates directed graphs of IPOs, which can travel through space and time. You could get your global view eventually. :)

Process is more operational, and although it is needed for the flows, it probably doesn't show up in standard accounting reports, where you could just pull the events.

Transfers contain Give and Receive events. Or some people model Transfer as one event with 2 agents and possibly 2 resources (in different contexts they may have different identifiers, thinking of them more in the accounting sense and less in the physical sense). Transfers can be grouped by an Exchange, like when one transfer is reciprocal for another transfer. We are still discussing how transfers work in the flows graph because they document changes in ownership or control, vs. material transformation or change of location.

serapath commented 8 years ago

Thx :-) I'll try to wrap my head around this jungle of words. Luckily the examples and discussions around it are a very nice source of inspiration. I'll try to continue to iterate my understanding of this REA/VF/NRP stuff.

bhaugen commented 8 years ago

@serapath thanks for engaging. Been interesting so far. Don't get too hung up on the names, though. It's a bottomless pit. Understand the concepts.

serapath commented 8 years ago

Sure :-) I try to see "through" the words and put whats actually going on into concepts with names that hopefully communicate everything nice. But I guess that's in general the hard part.

Personally, I'd love to come up with something like a "byte code" or "assembly language" to express the economy and everything that is going on in general and leave more abstract but easier to digest wording to userland by allowing ways to come up with arbitrary contracts and/or communication and whatever ... but it's compilable into the "byte code". This "byte code" layer which is what i imagine you people try to figure out would make the translation of meaning easy in business contexts.

Maybe the tricky part is where to draw the line when it comes to "features" of the language. What should be left to "userland", thus communities or business people and what should be a core language feature :-)

stevebosserman commented 8 years ago

Not to leap in too late, my sense of "flow" encompasses rate as in a volume of events occurring within a period of time. A query into rate leads to the possibility of tweaking the processes that contain events to increase / decrease their flow or improve efficiency and / or effectiveness. A "stream," whether it be visitors, news, and coverage as in the examples by @serapath, certainly suggests flow, but does not necessarily lead to questions about rate. In my opinion, rate and its first cousins, repeatability and adaptability, are of keen interest to the adoption of REA and NRP. for that reason, I prefer "flow."

serapath commented 8 years ago

Interesting :-) I always imagine "streams" as elements or containers, better pipes, that i can stick together in all kinds of ways and then data "flows" through. The streams might have buttons attached to change how the data flows. That's probably a very biased view on it that doesnt make a lot of sense, so maybe it's more a matter of taste. I'm actually cool with flow too :P

bhaugen commented 8 years ago

@serapath where are you at with this thread now? I'm not engaging in the renaming conversations. I would just get in the way.

"assembly language" to express the economy

That's interesting.

I also need to study your program output some more. Got buried in another project for a few days after our guests left. But I'll get on it by tomorrow latest.

serapath commented 8 years ago

I'm trying to write down a summary of all the words that come up in different issues here and how they relate to describe whats going on in the economy and in businesses :-) I'll try to post it in the next days - maybe even later today - dont know how fast i can make progress :-)

...i hope that would be the basis on which it's easy for me get to the common understanding of REA/VF/NRP/etc... ...and it's then easier for me to take input from you people to adapt my understanding.

For a long time i kind of avoided going into the issue of something i normally call "contract language". A popular example is http://ethereum.org and how to program "smart contracts". For me - this sounds great in theory - but in practice i do not have an opinion yet how to approach "smart contracts" in general and how that would translate to "financial accounting" in a standardized way? ...but trying to put this sensorica example of 3d printers into accounting language made me realize, that contracts or "value equations" seem to be a better way of approaching it and then just derive the "accounting" from them.

fosterlynn commented 8 years ago

@TiberiusB I do have a question I am a bit fuzzy on in terms of documenting this accounting.

Does the exchange firm take legal ownership of a product that it sells? Or does it sell kind of as a service, as an affiliate of Sensorica, and take a cut just like any affiliate who contributed? In the latter case, CAKE would be a custodian for the product just like any other Sensorica asset, from when it is produced until it is sold?

I think I pretty much understand how CAKE works. All the basic accounting and required reporting to the government would be by CAKE, as I understand it. Affiliates are responsible for their own taxes, etc. Actually one question: Does CAKE issue anything to affiliates saying how much they got paid? (Like in the US this would be a 1099 form for independent contractors.)

Thanks in advance for your help.

bhaugen commented 8 years ago

@serapath - Want more to read, or not? I dropped some links about contracts over in https://github.com/valueflows/valueflows/issues/144 so you can ignore it if you want.

bhaugen commented 8 years ago

Working over @serapath 's code and results in this google doc which is open for comments. Probably getting things wrong...

taking a break, more later.

serapath commented 8 years ago

I'm also coming closer to a personal summary of this REA/VF/NPR vocabulary stuff. Still need to wrap my head around the "signals/communication/conversation" part. The hardest part is to draw a border, what is considered "core" and what are tools for users to use the core to come up with their custom use case related specializations :-) I currently think, what is really missing is "contracts" ...a way for people to write their custom contracts.

fosterlynn commented 8 years ago

I'm also coming closer to a personal summary of this REA/VF/NPR vocabulary stuff.

Excellent, I'll be very interested in that! :)

serapath commented 8 years ago

Puh, it's not easy. I could need some help. I came up with a list of sentences about CAPITALIZED WORDS that i would love to get some feedback on. ...it's a long list, sry for that... I do not need so much feedback for those which are less clear, ideally a "true" or "false" answer is enough, but if you think some explanation helps, then sure, why not :-)

I'd like to just know which sentences in our context are for sure "true" and then slowly derive or adapt the rest of the words in our "domain specific language" to those sentences about well defined words :-)

Please feel free to add words and sentences if i missed important ones :-)

All CAPITALIZED words should be imagined to be prefixed with economic