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Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Permaculture Principles | Design Principles - 1 views

permacultureprinciples.com/principles_business.php

permaculture principles design business resilience paper

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 07 Sep 11 - Cached
  • how the principles of permaculture might apply to business.
  • The shift will be from merely prioritising output to thinking more widely.
  • how to build resilience for business
  • ...64 more annotations...
  • observation
  • A post-peak world will depend on detailed observation and good design rather than energy-intensive solutions.
  • not rely on weather forecasts but to learn to read the clouds,
  • “instead of researching the market, be the market”
  • businesses should be out there observing.
  • larger businesses tend to rely more on surveys and on second-hand information.
  • direct contact with customers.
  • move our idea of ‘capital’ from what we have in the bank, to the resources we have around us
  • not running a business on a constant high speed cash throughput with little or no capital reserves
  • lack of resilience in the just-in-time supply approach
  • a shift to storages of parts and materials, as well as the need to financially not be so dependent on debt financing
  • work slower with more financial reserves and take less risks, not building beyond what the company’s financial resources can support.
  • either to not borrow any money at all, or to borrow so much money that you can’t fail, being bigger than the people you borrow money from, so they have a vested interest in your succeeding!
  • energy efficient
  • long term
  • Looking to make buildings as autonomous as possible in a world entering energy descent is critical
  • see things that are flowing past and through the business that others don’t see as being a resource and having no monetary value as being valuable.
  • any intervention we make in a system, any changes we make or elements we introduce ought to be productive
  • This is instinctive to businesses
  • Obtain a Yield, in this context, is out of balance
  • much of business
  • have taken this to extremes
  • A well-designed system using permaculture principles should be able to self-regulate, and require the minimum of intervention and maintenance, like a woodland ecosystem, which requires no weeding, fertiliser or pest control.
  • moving from “we’re just obeying the law” to being proactive, acting before you get hit over the head with regulation and other vulnerabilities.
  • be able to put a foot on the break, not just going hell for leather on profit maximisation.
  • apply applied restraint, avoiding excessive, overfast growth that hasn’t been consolidated
  • looking for the negative feedbacks, from customers and from the environment in general
  • We need to increase the tightness of feedbacks.
  • Where nature can perform particular functions
  • we should utilise these attributes, rather than thinking we can replace them
  • Where nature can take some work off our hands we should let it.
  • a shift towards renewable resources
  • The emerging opportunities for businesses are things that are renewable. Renewable energy sources are the ones that will ensure a business’s stability in the long run. We can also broaden the concept of renewable resources to include things like goodwill and trust, things which a business can rebuild with good husbandry. Most business doesn’t just depend on law and competition, trust is at the heart of much business and it is very much a renewable resource.
  • The concept of waste is essentially a reflection of poor design. Every output from one system could become the input to another system. We need to think cyclically rather than in linear systems.
  • looking at our work from a range of perspectives
  • wider context
  • keep a clearer sense of the wider canvas on which we are painting, and the forces that affect what we are doing.
  • being strategic is important too
  • ask how is what we are doing part of a bigger picture, the move away from globalisation and towards the local, taking steps back from the everyday.
  • This can be done firstly by allowing space for Devil’s advocates, for black sheep, for hearing the voices of those outside of the dominant culture of the organisation and secondly by looking from a holistic perspective of how things interconnect, rather than just relying on experts who are embedded in detail. It emphasises the need to value the generalist, to give value to holistic thinkers.
  • allowing people to imagine different possibilities.
  • scenario planning
  • Permaculture has been described as the science of maximising beneficial relationships.
  • Solutions are to be found in integrated holistic solutions rather than increased specialisation and compartmentalisation
  • The challenge here is to move to seeing business as being part of the geographical community, as being rooted in place, rather than just part of a globalised community. At the moment for many larger businesses, the local is something one pays lip-service to as a source of good PR, something one is passing through, rather than actually being an integral part of the community.
  • This is a profound structural challenge for large organisations. Part of the resilience of the organisation comes from the degree of lateral integration. Resilience is in all solutions, it is the characteristic of ecological systems. If we apply these principles, resilience is one of the emergent properties
  • the notion that big is best needs to be challenged
  • new opportunities are very hard to understand and exploit from a macro level perspective, and are much better done from small scale perspective. It is here that the idea of appropriateness of scale becomes key.
  • more diverse systems have much more inbuilt resilience
  • have a diversity of small businesses, local currencies, food sources, energy sources and so on than if they are just dependent on centralised systems, globalisation’s version of monoculture.
  • not having all your eggs in one basket.
  • In the short term this kind of diversification could reduce profits, but in the longer term it will be more secure
  • this is about the reverse of specialisation, about having a mixed portfolio, and presents a big culture change for businesses.
  • it is a good strategy for business to keep a diverse portfolio of what sustains the business, keep some things that appear to be peripheral. They may not at this stage appear to be a serious part of how the business is run, but in this new world they will increasingly become so
  • ‘edge’
  • the point where two ecosystems meet is often more productive than either of those systems on their own.
  • overlap systems where possible so as to maximise their potential.
  • recognising that innovation doesn’t come from the centre but from fringe thinkers.
  • giving status to the marginal
  • It is important that the business has as many fingers in as many pies as possible, as many interfaces, and recognises that every person working for the business represents it in the community.
  • Natural systems are constantly in flux, evolving and growing.
  • Remaining observant of the changes around you, and not fixing onto the idea that anything around you is fixed or permanent will help too.
  • be flexible, lean and adaptable
  • A healthy approach is to start with no complete plan, to allow the process to be emergent. This is not a time when we can work to a rigid plan as conditions will change so fast. Organisations will need to stay on their toes, without rigid management.
Kurt Laitner

UK Indymedia - WOS4: The Creative Anti-Commons and the Poverty of Networks - 0 views

www.indymedia.org.uk/...350884.html

@ukindymedia commons free material vs immaterial exchange value use value rival goods non-rival goods

shared by Kurt Laitner on 31 Jan 14 - Cached
  • Something with no reproduction costs can have no exchange-value in a context of free exchange.
  • Further, unless it can be converted into exchange-value, how can the peer producers be able to acquire the material needs for their own subsistence?
  • For Social Production to have any effect on general material wealth it has to operate within the context of a total system of goods and services, where the physical means of production and the virtual means of production are both available in the commons for peer production.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • "All texts published in Situationist International may be freely reproduced, translated and edited, even without crediting the original source."
  • The website of the creative commons makes the following statement about it's purpose: "Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright -- all rights reserved -- and the public domain -- no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work -- a 'some rights reserved' copyright."
  • The website of the creative commons makes the following statement about it's purpose: "Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright -- all rights reserved -- and the public domain -- no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work -- a 'some rights reserved' copyright."
  • Or more specifically, who is a position to convert the use-value available in the "commons" into the exchange-value needed to acquire essential subsistence or accumulate wealth?
  • All texts published in Situationist International may be freely reproduced, translated and edited, even without crediting the original source
  • The point of the above is clear, the Creative Commons, is to help "you" (the "Producer") to keep control of "your" work. The right of the "consumer" is not mentioned, neither is the division of "producer" and "consumer" disputed.
  • Creative "Commons" is thus really an Anti-Commons, serving to legitimise, rather than deny, Producer-control and serving to enforce, rather than do away with, the distinction between producer and consumer
  • specifically providing a framework then, for "producers" to deny "consumers" the right to either create use-value or material exchange-value of the "common" stock of value in the Creative "Commons" in their own cultural production
  • Thus, the very problem presented by Lawrence Lessig, the problem of Producer-control, is not in anyway solved by the presented solution, the Creative Commons, so long as the producer has the exclusive right to chose the level of freedom to grant the consumer, a right which Lessig has always maintained support for
  • The Free Software foundation, publishers of the GPL, take a very different approach in their definition of "free," insisting on the "four freedoms:" The Freedom to use, the freedom to study, the freedom to share, and the freedom to modify.
  • The website of the creative commons makes the following statement about it's purpose: "Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright -- all rights reserved -- and the public domain -- no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work -- a 'some rights reserved' copyright
  • In all these cases what is evident is that the freedom being insisted upon is the freedom of the consumer to use and produce, not the "freedom" of the producer to control.
  • Moreover, proponents of free cultural must be firm in denying the right of Producer-control and denying the enforcement of distinction between producer and consumer
  • where a class-less community of workers ("peers") produce collaboratively within a property-less ("commons-based") society
  • Clearly, even Marx would agree that the ideal of Communism was commons-based peer production
  • the property in the commons is entirely non-rivalrous property
  • The use-value of this information commons is fantastic
  • However, if commons-based peer-production is limited exclusively to a commons made of digital property with virtual no reproduction costs then how can the use-value produced be translated into exchange-value?
  • Further, unless it can be converted into exchange-value, how can the peer producers be able to acquire the material needs for their own subsistence
  • The root of the problem of poverty does not lay in a lack of culture or information
  • but of direct exploitation of the producing class by the property owning classes
  • The source of poverty is not reproduction costs, but rather extracted economic rents, forcing the producers to accept less than the full product of their labour as their wage by denying them independent access to the means of production
  • So long as commons-based peer-production is applied narrowly to only an information commons, while the capitalist mode of production still dominates the production of material wealth, owners of material property, namely land and capital, will continue to capture the marginal wealth created as a result of the productivity of the information commons.
  • Whatever exchange value is derived from the information commons will always be captured by owners of real property, which lays outside the commons.
  • For Social Production to have any effect on general material wealth it has to operate within the context of a total system of goods and services, where the physical means of production and the virtual means of production are both available in the commons for peer production
  • For free cultural to create a valuable common stock it must destroy the privilege of the producer to control the common stock, and for this common stock to increase the real material wealth of peer producers, the commons must include real property, not just information
  • Kurt Laitner on 31 Jan 14
     
    Strong grasp of the issues, not entirely in agreement on the thesis that the solution is the removal of producer control as this does not support the initiation of an economy, only its ongoing function once established, and the economy is continuously intiating itself, so it is not a one time problem. I do support the notion that producers are in fact none other than consumers of prior art but also that effort is required to remix as much as the magical creation out of nothing. In order to incent this behavior then (or even merely to allow it) the basic scarce needs of the individual must be taken care of. This may be done by ensuring beneficial ownership, but even that suffers from the initiation problem, which the requires us to have a pool of wealth to kickstart the thing by supporting every last person on earth with a basic income - that wealth is in fact available...
Kurt Laitner

Crowding Out - P2P Foundation - 1 views

p2pfoundation.net/Crowding_Out

crowding out p2p Michel Bauwens financial reward incentive

shared by Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • The curve indicates that while workers will initially chose to work more when paid more per hour, there is a point after which rational workers will choose to work less
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      in other words, people are financially motivated until they are financially secure, then other motivations come in
  • "leaders" elsewhere will come and become your low-paid employees
  • At that point, the leaders are no longer leaders of a community, and they turn out to be suckers after all, working for pittance, comparatively speaking
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      so part of the dynamic is that everyone is paid fairly, if not there is the feeling of exploitation
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • under certain structural conditions non-price-based production is extraordinarily robust
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      which are... abundance?
  • There is, in fact, a massive amount of research that supports the idea that when you pay people to do something for you, they stop enjoying it, and distrust their own motivations. The mysterious something that goes away, and that “Factor X” even has a name: intrinsic motivation.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      the real question though is why, and whether it is the paying them that is the problem, or perhaps how that is determined, and who else gets what on what basis..  if you have to have them question the fairness of the situation, they will likely check out
  • giving rewards to customers can actually undermine a company’s relationship with them
  • It just is not so easy to assume that because people behave productively in one framework (the social process of peer production that is Wikipedia, free and open source software, or Digg), that you can take the same exact behavior, with the same exact set of people, and harness them to your goals by attaching a price to what previously they were doing in a social process.
  • Extrinsic rewards suggest that there is actually an instrumental relationship at work, that you do the activity in order to get something else
  • If you pay me for it, it must be work
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      only because a dichotomy of work and play exists in western culture
  • It’s what we would call a robust effect. It shows up in many contexts. And there’s been considerable testing to try to find out exactly why it works. A major school of thought is that there is an “Overjustification Effect.” (http://kozinets.net/archives/133)
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      yes, why is key
  • interesting examples of an effect called crowding
  • Offering financial rewards for contributions to online communities basically means mixing external and intrinsic motivation.
  • A good example is children who are paid by their parents for mowing the family lawn. Once they expect to receive money for that task, they are only willing to do it again if they indeed receive monetary compensation. The induced unwillingness to do anything for free may also extend to other household chores.
  • Once ‘gold-stars’ were introduced as a symbolic reward for a certain amount of time spent practicing the instrument, the girl lost all interest in trying new, difficult pieces. Instead of aiming at improving her skills, her goal shifted towards spending time playing well-learned, easy pieces in order to receive the award (Deci with Flaste 1995)
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      this is a more troubling example, as playing the harder pieces is also practicing - I would take this as a more complex mechanism at work - perhaps the reinterpretation by the girl that all playing was considered equal, due to the pricing mechanism, in which case the proximal solution would be to pay more for more complex pieces, or for levels of achievement - the question remains of why the extrinsic reward was introduced in the first place (unwillingness to practice as much as her parents wanted?) - which would indicate intrinsic motivation was insufficient in this case
  • Suddenly, she managed to follow the prescription, as her own (intrinsic) motivation was recognized and thereby reinforced.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      or perhaps the key was to help her fit the medication into her day, which she was having trouble with...
  • The introduction of a monetary fine transforms the relationship between parents and teachers from a non-monetary into a monetary one
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      absolutely, in some sense the guilt of being late is replaced by a rationalization that you are paying them - it is still a rationalization, and parents in this case need to be reminded that staff have lives too to reinforce the moral suasion
  • "The effects of external interventions on intrinsic motivation have been attributed to two psychological processes: (a) Impaired self-determination. When individuals perceive an external intervention to reduce their self-determination, they substitute intrinsic motivation by extrinsic control. Following Rotter (1966), the locus of control shifts from the inside to the outside of the person affected. Individuals who are forced to behave in a specific way by outside intervention, feel overjustified if they maintained their intrinsic motivation. (b) Impaired self-esteem. When an intervention from outside carries the notion that the actor's motivation is not acknowledged, his or her intrinsic motivation is effectively rejected. The person affected feels that his or her involvement and competence is not appreciated which debases its value. An intrinsically motivated person is taken away the chance to display his or her own interest and involvement in an activity when someone else offers a reward, or commands, to undertake it. As a result of impaired self-esteem, individuals reduce effort.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      these are finally very useful - so from (a) as long as self determination is maintained (actively) extrinsic reward should not shut down intrinsic motivation AND (b) so long as motivations are recognized and reward dimensions OTHER THAN financial continue to operate, extrinsic reward should not affect intrinsic motivation
  • External interventions crowd-out intrinsic motivation if the individuals affected perceive them to be controlling
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      emphasis on "if" and replacing that with "in so far as"
  • External interventions crowd-in intrinsic motivation if the individuals concerned perceive it as supportive
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      interesting footnote
  • In that case, self-esteem is fostered, and individuals feel that they are given more freedom to act, thus enlarging self-determination
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      so effectively a system needs to ensure it is acting on all dimensions of reward, or at least those most important to the particular participant, ego (pride, recognition, guilt reduction, feeling needed, being helpful, etc), money (sustenance, beyond which it is less potent), meaning/purpose etc.  If one ran experiments controlling for financial self sufficiency, then providing appreciation and recognition as well as the introduced financial reward, they might yield different results
  • cultural categories that oppose marketplace modes of behavior (or “market logics”) with the more family-like modes of behavior of caring and sharing that we observe in close-knit communities (”community logics”)
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      are these learned or intrinsic?
  • this is labor, this is work, just do it.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      except that this cultural meme is already a bias, not a fact
  • When communal logics are in effect, all sorts of norms of reciprocity, sacrifice, and gift-giving come into play: this is cool, this is right, this is fun
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      true, and part of our challenge then is to remove this dichotomy
  • So think about paying a kid to clean up their room, paying parishioners to go to church, paying people in a neighborhood to attend a town hall meeting, paying people to come out and vote. All these examples seem a little strange or forced. Why? Because they mix and match the communal with the market-oriented.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      and perhaps the problem is simply the conversion to money, rather than simply tracking these activities themselves (went to church 50 times this year!, helped 50 orphans get families!) (the latter being more recognition than reward
  • Payment as disincentive. In his interesting book Freakonomics, economist Steven Levitt describes some counterintuitive facts about payment. One of the most interesting is that charging people who do the wrong thing often causes them to do it more, and paying people to do the right thing causes them to do it less.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      and tracking them causes them to conform to cultural expectations
  • You direct people _away_ from any noble purpose you have, and instead towards grubbing for dollars
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      and we are left with the challenge, how to work to purpose but still have our scarce goods needs sufficiently provided for?  it has to be for love AND money
  • When people work for a noble purpose, they are told that their work is highly valued. When people work for $0.75/hour, they are told that their work is very low-valued
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      so pay them highly for highly valued labour, and don't forget to recognize them as well... no?
  • you're going to have to fight your way through labour laws and tax issues all the way to bankruptcy
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      this is a non argument, these are just interacting but separate problems, use ether or bitcoin, change legislation, what have you
  • Market economics. If you have open content, I can copy your content to another wiki, not pay people, and still make money. So by paying contributors, you're pricing yourself out of the market.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      exactly, so use commonsource, they can use it all they want, but they have to flow through benefit (provide attribution, recognition, and any financial reward must be split fairly)
  • You don't have to pay people to do what they want to do anyways. The labour cost for leisure activities is $0. And nobody is going to work on a wiki doing things they don't want to do.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      wow, exploitative in the extreme - no one can afford to do work for free, it cuts into paid work, family time etc.  if they are passionate about something they will do it for free if they cannot get permission to do it for sustenance, but they still need to sustain themselves, and they are making opportunity cost sacrifices, and if you are in turn making money off of this you are an asshole.. go ahead look in the mirror and say "I am an asshole"
  • No fair system. There's simply no fair, automated and auditable way to divvy up the money
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      this is an utter cop out - figure out what is close enough to fair and iterate forward to improve it, wow
  • too complicated to do automatically. But if you have a subjective system -- have a human being evaluate contributions to an article and portion out payments -- it will be subject to constant challenges, endless debates, and a lot of community frustration.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      yes to the human evaluation part, but "it's too complicated" is disingenuous at the least
  • Gaming the system. People are really smart. If there's money to be made, they'll figure out how to game your payment system to get more money than they actually deserve
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      yes indeed, so get your metrics right, and be prepared to adjust them as they are gamed - and ultimately, as financial penalties are to BP, even if some people game the system, can we better the gaming of the capitalist system.. it's a low bar I know
  • They'll be trying to get as much money out of you as possible, and you'll be trying to give as little as you can to them
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      it doesn't have to be this way, unless you think that way already
  • If you can't convince people that working on your project is worth their unpaid time, then there's probably something wrong with your project.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      wow, talk about entrepreneurial taker attitude rationalization
  • People are going to be able to sense that -- it's going to look like a cover-up, something sleazy
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      and getting paid for others free work isn't sleazy, somehow...?
  • Donate.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      better yet, give yourself a reasonable salary, and give the rest away
  • Thank-you gifts
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      cynical.. here have a shiny bobble you idiot
  • Pay bounties
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      good way to get people to compete ineffectively instead of cooperating on a solution, the lottery mechanism is evil
  • Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
     
    while good issue are brought up in this article, the solutions offered are myopic and the explanations of the observed effects not satisfying
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Beyond Blockchain: Simple Scalable Cryptocurrencies - The World of Deep Wealth - Medium - 0 views

medium.com/...-cryptocurrencies-1eb7aebac6ae

blockchainaccess_project paper Holochain Arthur Brock

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 01 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • I clarify the core elements of cryptocurrency and outline a different approach to designing such currencies rooted in biomimicry
  • This post outlines a completely different strategy for implementing cryptocurrencies with completely distributed chains
  • Rather than trying to make one global, anonymous, digital cash
  • ...95 more annotations...
  • we are interested in the resilience that comes from building a rich ecosystem of interoperable currencies
  • What are the core elements of a modern cryptocurrency?
  • Digital
  • Holdings are electronic and only exist and operate by virtue of a community’s agreement about how to interpret digital bits according to rules about operation and accounting of the currency.
  • Trustless
  • don’t have to trust a 3rd party central authority
  • Decentralized
  • Specifically, access, issuance, transaction accounting, rules & policies, should be collectively visible, known, and held.
  • Cryptographic
  • This cryptographic structure is used to enable a variety of people to host the data without being able to alter it.
  • Identity
  • there must be a way to associate these bits with some kind of account, wallet, owner, or agent who can use them
  • Other things that many take for granted in blockchains may not be core but subject to decisions in design and implementation, so they can vary between implementations
  • It does not have to be stored in a synchronized global ledger
  • does not have to be money. It may be a reputation currency, or data used for identity, or naming, etc
  • Its units do not have to be cryptographic tokens or coins
  • It does not have to protect the anonymity of users, although it may
  • if you think currency is only money, and that money must be artificially scarce
  • Then you must tackle the problem of always tracking which coins exist, and which have been spent. That is one approach — the one blockchain takes.
  • You might optimize for anonymity if you think of cryptocurrency as a tool to escape governments, regulations, and taxes.
  • if you want to establish and manage membership in new kinds of commons, then identity and accountability for actions may turn out to be necessary ingredients instead of anonymity.
  • In the case of the MetaCurrency Project, we are trying to support many use cases by building tools to enable a rich ecosystem of communities and current-sees (many are non-monetary) to enhance collective intelligence at all scales.
  • Managing consensus about a shared reality is a central challenge at the heart of all distributed computing solutions.
  • If we want to democratize money by having cryptocurrencies become a significant and viable means of transacting on a daily basis, I believe we need fundamentally more scalable approaches that don’t require expensive, dedicated hardware just to participate.
  • We should not need system wide consensus for two people to do a transaction in a cryptocurrency
  • Blockchain is about managing a consensus about what was “said.” Ceptr is about distributing a consensus about how to “speak.”
  • how nature gets the job done in massively scalable systems which require coordination and consistency
  • Replicate the same processes across all nodes
  • Empower every node with full agency
  • Hold this transformed state locally and reliably
  • Establish protocols for interaction
  • Each speaker of a language carries the processes to understand sentences they hear, and generate sentences they need
  • we certainly don’t carry some kind of global ledger of everything that’s ever been said, or require consensus about what has been said
  • Language IS a communication protocol we learn by emulating the processes of usage.
  • Dictionaries try to catch up when the usage
  • there is certainly no global ledger with consensus about the state of trillions of cells. Yet, from a single zygote’s copy of DNA, our cells coordinate in a highly decentralized manner, on scales of trillions, and without the latency or bottlenecks of central control.
  • Imagine something along the lines of a Java Virtual Machine connected to a distributed version of Github
  • Every time this JVM runs a program it confirms the hash of the code it is about to execute with the hash signed into the code repository by its developers
  • This allows each node that intends to be honest to be sure that they’re running the same processes as everyone else. So when two parties want to do a transaction, and each can have confidence their own code, and the results that your code produces
  • Then you treat it as authoritative and commit it to your local cryptographically self-validating data store
  • Allowing each node to treat itself as a full authority to process transactions (or interactions via shared protocols) is exactly how you empower each node with full agency. Each node runs its copy of the signed program/processes on its own virtual machine, taking the transaction request combined with the transaction chains of the parties to the transaction. Each node can confirm their counterparty’s integrity by replaying their transactions to produce their current state, while confirming signatures and integrity of the chain
  • If both nodes are in an appropriate state which allows the current transaction, then they countersign the transaction and append to their respective chains. When you encounter a corrupted or dishonest node (as evidenced by a breach of integrity of their chain — passing through an invalid state, broken signatures, or broken links), your node can reject the transaction you were starting to process. Countersigning allows consensus at the appropriate scale of the decision (two people transacting in this case) to lock data into a tamper-proof state so it can be stored in as many parallel chains as you need.
  • When your node appends a mutually validated and signed transaction to its chain, it has updated its local state and is able to represent the integrity of its data locally. As long as each transaction (link in the chain) has valid linkages and countersignatures, we can know that it hasn’t been tampered with.
  • If you can reliably embody the state of the node in the node itself using Intrinsic Data Integrity, then all nodes can interact in parallel, independent of other interactions to maximize scalability and simultaneous processing. Either the node has the credits or it doesn’t. I don’t have to refer to a global ledger to find out, the state of the node is in the countersigned, tamper-proof chain.
  • Just like any meaningful communication, a protocol needs to be established to make sure that a transaction carries all the information needed for each node to run the processes and produce a new signed and chained state. This could be debits or credits to an account which modify the balance, or recoding courses and grades to a transcript which modify a Grade Point Average, or ratings and feedback contributing to a reputation score, and so on.
  • By distributing process at the foundation, and leveraging Intrinsic Data Integrity, our approach results in massive improvements in throughput (from parallel simultaneous independent processing), speed, latency, efficiency, and cost of hardware.
  • You also don’t need to incent people to hold their own record — they already want it.
  • Another noteworthy observation about humans, cells, and atoms, is that each has a general “container” that gets configured to a specific use.
  • Likewise, the Receptors we’ve built are a general purpose framework which can load code for different distributed applications. These Receptors are a lightweight processing container for the Ceptr Virtual Machine Host
  • Ceptr enables a developer to focus on the rules and transactions for their use case instead of building a whole framework for distributed applications.
  • how units in a currency are issued
  • Most people think that money is just money, but there are literally hundreds of decisions you can make in designing a currency to target particular needs, niches, communities or patterns of flow.
  • Blockchain cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies. They create tokens or coins from nothing
  • These coins are just “spoken into being”
  • the challenging task of
  • ensure there is no counterfeiting or double-spending
  • Blockchain cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies
  • These coins are just “spoken into being”
  • the challenging task of tracking all the coins that exist to ensure there is no counterfeiting or double-spending
  • You wouldn’t need to manage consensus about whether a cryptocoin is spent, if your system created accounts which have normal balances based on summing their transactions.
  • In a mutual credit system, units of currency are issued when a participant extends credit to another user in a standard spending transaction
  • Alice pays Bob 20 credits for a haircut. Alice’s account now has -20, and Bob’s has +20.
  • Alice spent credits she didn’t have! True
  • Managing the currency supply in a mutual credit system is about managing credit limits — how far people can spend into a negative balance
  • Notice the net number units in the system remains zero
  • One elegant approach to managing mutual credit limits is to set them based on actual demand.
  • concerns about manufacturing fake accounts to game credit limits (Sybil Attacks)
  • keep in mind there can be different classes of accounts. Easy to create, anonymous accounts may get NO credit limit
  • What if I alter my code to give myself an unlimited credit limit, then spend as much as I want? As soon as you pass the credit limit encoded in the shared agreements, the next person you transact with will discover you’re in an invalid state and refuse the transaction.
  • If two people collude to commit an illegal transaction by both hacking their code to allow a normally invalid state, the same still pattern still holds. The next person they try to transact with using untampered code will detect the problem and decline to transact.
  • Most modern community currency systems have been implemented as mutual credit,
  • Hawala is a network of merchants and businessmen, which has been operating since the middle ages, performing money transfers on an honor system and typically settling balances through merchandise instead of transferring money
  • Let’s look at building a minimum viable cryptocurrency with the hawala network as our use case
  • To minimize key management infrastructure, each hawaladar’s public key is their address or identity on the network. To join the network you get a copy of the software from another hawaladar, generate your public and private keys, and complete your personal profile (name, location, contact info, etc.). You call, fax, or email at least 10 hawaladars who know you, and give them your IP address and ask them to vouch for you.
  • Once 10 other hawaladars have vouched for you, you can start doing other transactions because the protocol encoded in every node will reject a transaction chain that doesn’t start with at least 10 vouches
  • seeding your information with those other peers so you can be found by the rest of the network.
  • As described in the Mutual Credit section, at the time of transaction each party audits the counterparty’s transaction chain.
  • Our hawala crypto-clearinghouse protocol has two categories of transactions: some used for accounting and others for routing. Accounting transactions change balances. Routing transactions maintain network integrity by recording information about hawaladar
  • Accounting Transactions create signed data that changes account balances and contains these fields:
  • The final hash of all of the above fields is used as a unique transaction ID and is what each of party signs with their private keys. Signing indicates a party has agreed to the terms of the transaction. Only transactions signed by both parties are considered valid. Nodes can verify signatures by confirming that decryption of the signature using the public key yields a result which matches the transaction ID.
  • Routing Transactions sign data that changes the peers list and contain these fields:
  • As with accounting transactions, the hash of the above fields is used as the transaction’s unique key and the basis for the cryptographic signature of both counterparties.
  • Remember, instead of making changes to account balances, routing transactions change a node’s local list of peers for finding each other and processing.
  • a distributed network of mutual trust
  • operates across national boundaries
  • everyone already keeps and trusts their own separate records
  • Hawaladars are not anonymous
  • “double-spending”
  • It would be possible for someone to hack the code on their node to “forget” their most recent transaction (drop the head of their chain), and go back to their previous version of the chain before that transaction. Then they could append a new transaction, drop it, and append again.
  • After both parties have signed the agreed upon transaction, each party submits the transaction to separate notaries. Notaries are a special class of participant who validate transactions (auditing each chain, ensuring nobody passes through an invalid state), and then they sign an outer envelope which includes the signatures of the two parties. Notaries agree to run high-availability servers which collectively manage a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) servicing requests for transaction information. As their incentive for providing this infrastructure, notaries get a small transaction fee.
  • This approach introduces a few more steps and delays to the transaction process, but because it operates on independent parallel chains, it is still orders of magnitude more efficient and decentralized than reaching consensus on entries in a global ledger
  • millions of simultaneous transactions could be getting processed by other parties and notaries with no bottlenecks.
  • There are other solutions to prevent nodes from dropping the head of their transaction chain, but the approach of having notaries serve out a DHT solves a number of common objections to completely distributed accounting. Having access to reliable lookups in a DHT provides a similar big picture view that you get from a global ledger. For example, you may want a way to look up transactions even when the parties to that transaction are offline, or to be able to see the net system balance at a particular moment in time, or identify patterns of activity in the larger system without having to collect data from everyone individually.
  • By leveraging Intrinsic Data Integrity to run numerous parallel tamper-proof chains you can enable nodes to do various P2P transactions which don’t actually require group consensus. Mutual credit is a great way to implement cryptocurrencies to run in this peered manner. Basic PKI with a DHT is enough additional infrastructure to address main vulnerabilities. You can optimize your solution architecture by reserving reserve consensus work for tasks which need to guarantee uniqueness or actually involve large scale agreement by humans or automated contracts.
  • It is not only possible, but far more scalable to build cryptocurrencies without a global ledger consensus approach or cryptographic tokens.
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 01 Jun 16
     
    Article written by Arthur Brook, founder of Metacurrency project and of Ceptr.
Kurt Laitner

Asia Times Online :: Nondominium - the Caspian solution - 0 views

www.atimes.com/...MI24Dj01.html

nondominium caspian sea Chris Cook description

shared by Kurt Laitner on 20 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • A Caspian partnership The proposal is that the littoral states should form a Caspian Foundation legal entity, and commit to that entity all existing rights in respect of the use, and the fruits of use (usufruct), of the Caspian Sea, and everything on it, in it, or under it. The Caspian Foundation would act as custodian or steward and the nations would have agreed governance rights of veto. This negative or passive veto right of stewardship is very different from conventional property rights of absolute ownership and temporary use under condominium. Moreover, it does not have the active power of control held under common law by a trustee on behalf of beneficiaries, and the legal complexities and management conflicts which go with it. The Caspian Foundation would be a subscriber to a Caspian Partnership framework agreement between the nations, investors of money or money's worth, and a consortium of service providers. This Caspian Partnership would not be yet another international organization, with everything that goes with that. It would not own anything, employ anyone or contract with anyone: it would simply be an associative framework agreement within which Caspian nations self-organize to the common purpose of the sustainable development of the Caspian Sea.
  • Nondominium - the Caspian solution By Chris Cook Twenty-first century problems cannot be solved with 20th century solutions. Nowhere is that saying so true as in territorial disputes where oil and gas are involved. The riches of the Caspian Sea have been the subject of dispute for years, and relatively simple - but still intractable - binary issues between Iran and Russia are now multiplied by the conflicting claims of what are now five littoral Caspian nations: Azerbaijan, Iran; Kazakhstan; Russia and Turkmenistan. Their claims relate not just to rights on the Caspian Sea surface, but to rights in the sea, and above all to the rights to the treasures that lie under it. There are two 20th century legal approaches: international law //ad information var tf_adModel = "FEV"; var tf_adType = "InBannerVideo"; var tf_commonLocation = "http://cdnx.tribalfusion.com/media/common/expand/"; //leave this variable as it is var tf_cookieFlash = "http://cdnx.tribalfusion.com/media/common/TFSObj_v2s"; var tf_isExpansionHandle = true; var tf_floatAdScriptPath = "http://cdnx.tribalfusion.com/media/common/floating/TF_FloatAdLibrary.js"; var tf_zoomFlash = "http://cdnx.tribalfusion.com/media/common/floating/TFScale_v1"; var tf_banner = { "flag" : "inBanner", "width" : 300, "height" : 250, "widthExpanded" : 600, "heightExpanded" : 450, "widthFloating" : 950, "heightFloating" : 570, "iWin" : [ ], "flashFile" : "http://cdnx.tribalfusion.com/media/4523336/Glow_Banner_Square_Template_V201", extraFlashVars:"tf_showPanelonLoad=true&tf_phase2=false", "video_expand" : "http://cdnx.tribalfusion.com/media/4523336/video.flv", "imageFile" : 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  • A Caspian partnership The proposal is that the littoral states should form a Caspian Foundation legal entity, and commit to that entity all existing rights in respect of the use, and the fruits of use (usufruct), of the Caspian Sea, and everything on it, in it, or under it. The Caspian Foundation would act as custodian or steward and the nations would have agreed governance rights of veto. This negative or passive veto right of stewardship is very different from conventional property rights of absolute ownership and temporary use under condominium. Moreover, it does not have the active power of control held under common law by a trustee on behalf of beneficiaries, and the legal complexities and management conflicts which go with it. The Caspian Foundation would be a subscriber to a Caspian Partnership framework agreement between the nations, investors of money or money's worth, and a consortium of service providers. This Caspian Partnership would not be yet another international organization, with everything that goes with that. It would not own anything, employ anyone or contract with anyone: it would simply be an associative framework agreement within which Caspian nations self-organize to the common purpose of the sustainable development of the Caspian Sea.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • A Caspian partnership The proposal is that the littoral states should form a Caspian Foundation legal entity, and commit to that entity all existing rights in respect of the use, and the fruits of use (usufruct), of the Caspian Sea, and everything on it, in it, or under it. The Caspian Foundation would act as custodian or steward and the nations would have agreed governance rights of veto. This negative or passive veto right of stewardship is very different from conventional property rights of absolute ownership and temporary use under condominium. Moreover, it does not have the active power of control held under common law by a trustee on behalf of beneficiaries, and the legal complexities and management conflicts which go with it. The Caspian Foundation would be a subscriber to a Caspian Partnership framework agreement between the nations, investors of money or money's worth, and a consortium of service providers. This Caspian Partnership would not be yet another international organization, with everything that goes with that. It would not own anything, employ anyone or contract with anyone: it would simply be an associative framework agreement within which Caspian nations self-organize to the common purpose of the sustainable development of the Caspian Sea.
Francois Bergeron

Applications & Solutions - 0 views

www.ocrobotics.com/applications--solutions

robotic

shared by Francois Bergeron on 27 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Francois Bergeron on 27 Jun 12
     
    snake robots with applications in nuclear, aerospace, security, industry
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

What is an ontology and why we need it - 1 views

protege.stanford.edu/...ntology101-noy-mcguinness.html

protege ontologies infrastructure tutorial

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 29 Jul 12 - Cached
  • an ontology designer makes these decisions based on the structural properties of a class.
  • an ontology is a formal explicit description of concepts in a domain of discourse (classes (sometimes called concepts)), properties of each concept describing various features and attributes of the concept (slots (sometimes called roles or properties)), and restrictions on slots (facets (sometimes called role restrictions)). An ontology together with a set of individual instances of classes constitutes a knowledge base. In reality, there is a fine line where the ontology ends and the knowledge base begins.
  • Classes describe concepts in the domain
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • A class can have subclasses that represent concepts that are more specific than the superclass.
  • Here we discuss general issues to consider and offer one possible process for developing an ontology. We describe an iterative approach to ontology development: we start with a rough first pass at the ontology. We then revise and refine the evolving ontology and fill in the details. Along the way, we discuss the modeling decisions that a designer needs to make, as well as the pros, cons, and implications of different solutions.
  • In practical terms, developing an ontology includes: �         defining classes in the ontology, �         arranging the classes in a taxonomic (subclass–superclass) hierarchy, �         defining slots and describing allowed values for these slots, �         filling in the values for slots for instances.
  • We can then create a knowledge base by defining individual instances of these classes filling in specific slot value information and additional slot restrictions.
  • Slots describe properties of classes and instances:
  • some fundamental rules in ontology design
  • There is no one correct way to model a domain— there are always viable alternatives. The best solution almost always depends on the application that you have in mind and the extensions that you anticipate. 2)      Ontology development is necessarily an iterative process. 3)      Concepts in the ontology should be close to objects (physical or logical) and relationships in your domain of interest. These are most likely to be nouns (objects) or verbs (relationships) in sentences that describe your domain.
  • how detailed or general the ontology is going to be
  • what we are going to use the ontology for
  • concepts in the ontology must reflect this reality
  • We suggest starting the development of an ontology by defining its domain and scope. That is, answer several basic questions: �         What is the domain that the ontology will cover? �         For what  we are going to use the ontology? �         For what types of questions the information in the ontology should provide answers? �         Who will use and maintain the ontology?
  • plan to use
  • domain
  • If the people who will maintain the ontology describe the domain in a language that is different from the language of the ontology users, we may need to provide the mapping between the languages.
  • One of the ways to determine the scope of the ontology is to sketch a list of questions that a knowledge base based on the ontology should be able to answer, competency questions
  • These competency questions are just a sketch and do not need to be exhaustive.
Francois Bergeron

Dolomite presents new range of Piezoelectric Pumps (July 2013) - 0 views

www.dolomite-microfluidics.com/...w-range-of-piezoelectric-pumps

tools lab-on-chip

shared by Francois Bergeron on 22 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Francois Bergeron on 22 Oct 13
     
    "Piezoelectric Pumps providing a flexible solution for handling of small volumes of fluid within microfluidic systems."
Kurt Laitner

Did the Other Shoe Just Drop? Big Banks Hit with Monster $250 Billion Lawsuit in Housin... - 0 views

www.resilience.org/...lion-lawsuit-in-housing-crisis

credit collapse alternative economic system

shared by Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • The reason for this is that credit is merely one way by which a society manages the distribution of goods and services. . . . A credit collapse . . . doesn’t make the energy, raw materials, and labor vanish into some fiscal equivalent of a black hole; they’re all still there, in whatever quantities they were before the credit collapse, and all that’s needed is some new way to allocate them to the production of goods and services.
  • Better would be to have an alternative system in place and ready to implement before the boom drops.
  • On a national level, when the Wall Street credit system fails, the government can turn to the innovative model devised by our colonial forebears and start issuing its own currency and credit—a power now usurped by private banks but written into the US Constitution as belonging to Congress
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The chief problem with the paper scrip of the colonial governments was the tendency to print and spend too much.
  • he Pennsylvania colonists corrected that systemic flaw by establishing a publicly-owned bank, which lent money to farmers and tradespeople at interest
  • To get the funds into circulation to cover the interest, some extra scrip was printed and spent on government services.
  • The interest returned to public coffers, to be spent on the common weal.
  • The result was a system of money and credit that was sustainable without taxes, price inflation or government debt
  • Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14
     
    "The reason for this is that credit is merely one way by which a society manages the distribution of goods and services. . . . A credit collapse . . . doesn't make the energy, raw materials, and labor vanish into some fiscal equivalent of a black hole; they're all still there, in whatever quantities they were before the credit collapse, and all that's needed is some new way to allocate them to the production of goods and services." and  "Better would be to have an alternative system in place and ready to implement before the boom drops." taken together may imply something other than the article's proposed solution of  "On a national level, when the Wall Street credit system fails, the government can turn to the innovative model devised by our colonial forebears and start issuing its own currency and credit-a power now usurped by private banks but written into the US Constitution as belonging to Congress"
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

SIE-01-2014 - 0 views

ec.europa.eu/...2590-sie-01-2014.html

horizon 2020 proposal

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Jun 14 - No Cached
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Jun 14
       
      I don't see how this fits with SENSORICA or the OVN model. 
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Jun 14
     
    "Specific Challenge: SMEs play a crucial role in developing resource-efficient, cost-effective and affordable technology solutions to decarbonise and make more efficient the energy system in a sustainable way. They are expected to strongly contribute to all challenges outlined in the legal base of the Horizon 2020 Societal Challenge 'Secure, Clean and Efficient Energy'[1],"
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

How Peer to Peer Communities will change the World - 0 views

meedabyte.wordpress.com/...bauwens-p2p-foundation-founder

p2p Michel Bauwens learning paper

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 30 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • role of p2p movement
  • historical role
  • horizontalisation of human relationships
  • ...55 more annotations...
  • allowing the free aggregation of individuals around shared values or common value creation
  • a huge sociological shift
  • new life forms, social practices and human institutions
  • emergent communities of practice are developing new social practices that are informed by the p2p paradigm
  • ethical revolution
  • openness
  • participation
  • inclusivity
  • cooperation
  • commons
  • the open content industry in the U.S. to reach one sixth of GDP.
  • political expressions
  • the movement has two wings
  • constructive
  • building new tools and practices
  • resistance to neoliberalism
  • we are at a stage of emergence
  • difficulty of implementing full p2p solutions in the current dominant system
  • At this stage, there is a co-dependency between peer producers creating value, and for-profit firms ‘capturing that value’, but they both need each other.
  • Peer producers need a business ecology to insure the social reproduction of their system and financial sustainability of its participants, and capital needs the positive externalities of social cooperation which flow from p2p collaboration.
  • peer producing communities should create their own ‘mission-oriented’ social businesses, so that the surplus value remains with the value creators, i.e. the commoners themselves, but this is hardly happening now.
  • Instead what we see is a mutual accomodation between netarchical capital on one side, and peer production communities on the other.
  • the horizontal meets the vertical
  • mostly hybrid ‘diagonal’ adaptations
  • For peer producers the question becomes, if we cannot create our own fully autonomous institutions, how can we adapt while maintaining maximum autonomy and sustainability as a commons and as a community.
  • Why p2p have failed to create successful alternatives in some areas?
  • In commons-oriented peer production, where people aggegrate around a common object which requires deep cooperation, they usually have their own infrastructures of cooperation and a ecology combining community, a for-benefit association managing the infrastructure, and for-profit companies operating on the market place; in the sharing economy, where individuals merely share their own expressions, third party platforms are the norm. It is clear that for-profit companies have different priorities, and want to enclose value so that it can be sold on the marketplace. This in fact the class struggle of the p2p era, the struggle between communities and corporations around various issues because of partly differential interests.
  • Even commercially controlled platforms are being used for a massive horizontalisation and self-aggregation of human relationships, and communities, including political and radical groups are effectively using them to mobilize. What’s important is not just to focus on the limitations and intentions of the platform owners, but to use whatever we can to strengthen the autonomy of peer communities.
  • requires a clever adaptation
  • use for our own benefit
  • The fact today is that capital is still capable of marshaling vast financial and material resources, so that it can create,
  • platforms that can easily and quickly offer services, creating network effects
  • without network effects, there is no ‘there’ there, just an empty potential platform.
  • p2p activists should work on both fronts
  • using mainstream platforms for spreading their ideas and culture and reach greater numbers of people, while also developing their own autonomous media ecologies, that can operate independently, and the latter is an engagement for the ‘long haul’, i.e. the slow construction of an alternative lifeworld.
  • The commons and p2p are really just different aspects of the same phenomena; the commons is the object that p2p dynamics are building; and p2p takes place wherever there are commons.
  • So both p2p and the commons, as they create abundant (digital) or sufficient (material) value for the commoners, at the same time create opportunities to create added value for the marketplace. There is no domain that is excluded from p2p, no field that can say, “we wouldn’t be stronger by opening up to participation and community dynamics”. And there is no p2p community that can say, we are in the long term fully sustainable within the present system, without extra resources coming from the market sector.
  • One trend is the distribution of current infrastructures and practices, i.e. introducing crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, social lending, digital currencies, in order to achieve wider participation in current practices. That is a good thing, but not sufficient. All the things that I mention above, move to a distributed infrastructure, but do not change the fundamental logic of what they are doing.
  • we are talking about the distribution of capitalism, not about a deeper change in the logic of our economy.
  • No matter how good you are, no matter how much capital you have to hire the best people, you cannot compete with the innovative potential of open global communities.
  • the p2p dynamics
  • the new networked culture
  • the opposite is also happening, as we outlined above, more and more commons-oriented value communities are creating their own entrepreneurial coalitions. Of course, some type of companies, because of their monopoly positions and legacy systems, may have a very difficult time undergoing that adaptation, in which case new players will appear that can do it more effectively.
  • the corporate form is unable to deal with ecological and sustainability issues, because its very DNA, the legal obligation to enrich the shareholders, makes its strive to lower input costs,  and ignore externalities.
  • we need new corporate structures, a new type of market entity, for which profit is a means, but not an end, dedicated to a ‘benefit‘, a ‘mission’, or the sustenance of a particular community and/or commons.
  • abundance destroys scarcity and therefore markets
  • open design community
  • will inherently design for sustainability
  • for inclusion
  • conceive more distributed forms of manufacturing
  • entrepreneurs attaching themselves to open design projects start working from an entirely different space, even if they still use the classic corporate form. Prevent the sharing of sustainability designs through IP monopolies is also in my view unethical and allowing such patents should be a minimalist option, not a maximalist one.
  • The high road scenario proposes an enlightened government that ‘enables and empowers’ social production and value creation and allows a much smoother transition to p2p models; the low road scenario is one in which no structural reforms take place, the global situation descends into various forms of chaos, and p2p becomes a survival and resilience tactic in extremely difficult social, political and economic circumstances.
  • accelerated end of capitalism
  • Making sure that we get a better alternative is actually the historical task of the p2p movement. In other words, it depends on us!
  • I don’t really think in terms of technological breakthroughs, because the essential one, globally networked collective intelligence enabled by the internetworks, is already behind us; that is the major change, all other technological breakthroughs will be informed by this new social reality of the horizontalisation of our civilisation. The important thing now is to defend and extend our communication and organisation rights, against a concerted attempt to turn back the clock. While the latter is really an impossibility, this does not mean that the attempts by governments and large corporations cannot create great harm and difficulties. We need p2p technology to enable the global solution finding and implementation of the systemic crises we are facing.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Designing the Void | Management Innovation eXchange - 0 views

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OVNi infrastructure OVN contribution accounting

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15 - No Cached
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      This is about self-organization, putting in place bounderies and internal mechanisms to make the the system self-organize into something desirable.  You can see this from a game theory perspective - how to set a game which will drive a specific human behavior. 
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      This is about self-organization, putting in place bounderies and internal mechanisms to make the the system self-organize into something desirable.  You can see this from a game theory perspective - how to set a game which will drive a specific human behavior. 
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      Very similar to SENSORICA, an environment of entrepreneurs. The argument against this is that not everyone is a risk taker or has initiative. The answer to it is that not every role in the organization requires that. 
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      Very similar to SENSORICA, an environment of entrepreneurs. The argument against this is that not everyone is a risk taker or has initiative. The answer to it is that not every role in the organization requires that. 
  • The system is not made up of artifacts but rather an elegantly designed void. He says “I prefer to use the analogy of rescuing an endangered species from extinction, rather than engaging in an invasive breeding program the focus should be on the habitat that supports the species. Careful crafting of the habitat by identifying the influential factors; removing those that are detrimental, together with reinforcing those that are encouraging, the species will naturally re-establish itself. Crafting the habitat is what I mean by designing the void.”
  • ...75 more annotations...
  • It is essential that autonomy is combined with responsibility.
  • staff typically manage the whole work process from making sales, manufacture, accounts, to dispatch
  • they are also responsible for managing their own capitalization; a form of virtual ownership develops. Everything they need for their work, from office furniture to high-end machinery will appear on their individual balance sheet; or it will need to be bought in from somewhere else in the company on a pay-as-you go or lease basis. All aspects of the capital deployed in their activities must be accounted for and are therefore treated with the respect one accords one’s own property.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      So they have a value accounting system, like SENSORICA, where they log "uses" and "consumes". 
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      ...
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      So they have a value accounting system, like SENSORICA, where they log "uses" and "consumes".  
  • The result is not simply a disparate set of individuals doing their own thing under the same roof. Together they benefit from an economy of scale as well as their combined resources to tackle large projects; they are an interconnected whole. They have in common a brand, which they jointly represent, and also a business management system (the Say-Do-Prove system) - consisting not only of system-wide boundaries but also proprietary business management software which helps each take care of the back-end accounting and administrative processing. The effect is a balance between freedom and constraint, individualism and social process.
  • embodiment of meaning
  • But culture is a much more personal phenomenon
  • Culture is like climate- it does not exist in and of itself- it cannot exist in a vacuum, it must exist within a medium.
  • underlying culture
  • Incompatibility between the presenting culture and the underlying one provide a great source of tension
  • The truth of course is that when tension builds to a critical level it takes just a small perturbation to burst the bubble and the hidden culture reveals itself powered by the considerable pent-up energy.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      SENSORICA had this problem of different cultures, and it caused the 2 crisis in 2014. 
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      SENSORICA had this problem of different cultures, and it caused the 2 crisis in 2014. 
  • Consider again the idea that for the health of an endangered species; the conditions in their habitat must be just right. In business, the work environment can be considered analogous to this idea of habitat.
  • A healthy environment is one that provides a blank canvas; it should be invisible in that it allows culture to be expressed without taint
  • The over-arching, high-level obligations are applied to the organization via contractual and legal terms.
  • But it is these obligations that the traditional corporate model separates out into functions and then parcels off to distinct groups. The effect is that a clear sight of these ‘higher’ obligations by the people at the front-end is obstructed. The overall sense of responsibility is not transmitted but gets lost in the distortions, discontinuities and contradictions inherent in the corporate systems of hierarchy and functionalization.
  • employees are individually rewarded for their contribution to each product. They are not “compensated” for the hours spent at work. If an employee wants to calculate their hourly rate, then they are free to do so however, they are only rewarded for the outcome not the duration of their endeavors.
  • Another simplification is the application of virtual accounts (Profit and Loss (P&L) account and Balance Sheet) on each person within the business.
  • The company systems simply provide a mechanism for cheaply measuring the success of each individual’s choices. For quality the measure is customer returns, for delivery it is an on-time-and-in-full metric and profit is expressed in terms of both pounds sterling and ROI (return on investment).
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      They have a value accounting system. 
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      They have a value accounting system. 
  • The innumerable direct links back to an external reality -like the fragile ties that bound giant Gulliver, seem much more effective at aligning the presenting culture and the underlying embodied culture, and in doing so work to remove the existing tension.
  • With a culture that responds directly to reality, the rules in the environment can be “bounding” rather than “binding”- limiting rather than instructive; this way individual behavior need not be directed at all. The goal is to free the individual to express himself fully through his work, bounded only by the limits of the law. With clever feedback (self-referencing feedback loops) integrated into the design, the individuals can themselves grow to collectively take charge of the system boundaries, culture and even the environment itself, always minded of the inherent risks they are balancing, leaving the law of the land as the sole artificial boundary.
  • the conventional company, which, instead of rewarding enterprise, trains compliance by suppressing individual initiative under layer upon layer of translation tools.
  • apply accountability to the individual not command-and-control.
  • without the divisive and overbearing management cabal the natural reaction of humans is to combine their efforts
  • a new member of staff at Matt Black Systems
  • recruited by another staff member (sponsor) and they will help you learn the basics of the business management system- they will help you get to know the ropes.
  • jobs are passed to new staff members, a royalty payment can be established on the work passed over.
  • Along with that job you will be given a cash float (risk capital), P&L Account, a Balance Sheet and computer software to help plan and record your activities. Your operation is monitored by your sponsor to see if you increase the margin or volume, and so establish a sustainable operation. Training and mentoring is provided to support the steep learning curve - but without removing the responsibility of producing a return on the sponsor’s risk capital.
  • You will, in the meantime be looking to establish some of your own work for which you will not have to pay a commission or royalty to your sponsor and this will provide you with more profitable operations such that eventually you might pass back to the sponsor the original operation, as it has become your lowest margin activity. It will then find its way to a new employee (along with the associated Balance Sheet risk capital) where the process is repeated by the sponsor.[4]
  • Remuneration for staff is calibrated in a way that reflects the balance of different forces around ‘pay’
  • there is an obligation upon the company to pay a minimum wage even if the profitability of the operation does not support this
  • there are therefore two aspects of the basic pay structure: one is “absolute” and reflects the entrepreneurial skill level of the employee according to a sophisticated grading scale
  • A further 20% of the original profit will be paid into his risk capital account, which will be his responsibility to deploy in any way he sees fit as part of his Balance Sheet. Of the three remaining 20% slices of the original profit, one is paid out as corporation tax, another as a dividend to the shareholders and the last retained as collective risk capital on the company’s balance sheet- a war chest so to speak.
  • Julian Wilson and Andrew Holm sell products / services to their staff (such as office space and software) they have an identical customer/supplier relationship with the other employees.
  • Naturally there are some people that can’t generate a profit. The sponsor’s risk capital will eventually be consumed through pay. After a process of rescue and recovery- where their shortcomings are identified and they are given the opportunity to put them right, they either improve or leave, albeit with a sizeable increase in their skills.
  • there is a gradual process of accustomisation; the void of the new employee is surrounded by others dealing with their particular activities, offering both role models and operations they may wish to relinquish. One step at a time the new employee acquires the skills to become completely self-managing, to increase their margins, to make investments, to find new business, to become a creator of their own success. Ultimately, they learn to be an entrepreneur.
  • responsible autonomy as an alternative vision to traditional hierarchy
  • Matt Black Systems it is not simply commitment that they targeted in their employees, rather they aim for the specific human qualities they sum up as magic- those of curiosity, imagination, creativity, cooperation, self-discipline and realization (bringing ideas to reality).
  • a new form of association of individuals working together under the umbrella of a company structure: a kind of collective autonomy
  • The business is called Matt Black Systems, based in Poole in dorset
  • Turning an organisation on its head- removing all management, establishing a P&L account and Balance Sheet on everyone in the organisation and having customers payment go first into the respective persons P&L account has revolutionised this company. 
  • This innovative company’s approach views business success as wholly reliant upon human agency, and its wellspring at the individual level.
  • problem (of unnecessarily high overheads placed on production) that arguably is behind the decline in western manufacturing
  • over-managed business
  • Autonomy Enables Productivity
  • organizational design brings to light the unconscious socio-philosophical paradigm of the society in which it exists, organizational development points to how change occurs.
  • a mechanistic approach to organization
  • scientific management employs rationalism and determinism in pursuit of efficiency, but leaves no place for self-determination for most people within the system.
  • Command and Control
  • today, a really “modern” view of an organization is more likely to be depicted in terms that are akin to an organism.
  • When it comes to getting work done, the simple question is: are people the problem or the solution?
  • the Taylorist approach may be more real in theory than in practice: its instrumentalist view of the workforce is cursed by unintended consequences. When workers have no space for their own creative expression, when they are treated like automata not unique individuals, when they become demotivated and surly, when they treat their work as a necessary evil; this is no recipe for a functional organization.
  • The natural, human reaction to this is unionization, defiance and even outright rebellion; to counter this, management grows larger and more rigid in pursuit of compliance, organizations become top heavy with staff who do not contribute directly to the process of value creation but wield power over those who do.
  • voluntary slavery of ‘wagery’
  • Even when disgruntled employees strike free and start their own businesses they seem unable to resist the hegemony of the conventional command-and-control approach
  • Making the transition involves adherence to a whole new sociology of work with all the challenging social and psychological implications that brings.
  • first principal that people in the business have the ability to provide the solution
  • In the “theory of constraints” the goal is to align front-line staff into a neat, compact line for maximum efficiency. Surely the most considered approach is to have front-line staff self-align in pursuit of their individual goals?
  • The removal of hierarchy and specialization is key to a massive improvement in both profitability and productivity. In summary: there are no managers in the company, or foremen, or sales staff, or finance departments; the company is not functionally compartmentalized and there is no hierarchy of command. In fact every member of staff operates as a virtual micro-business with their own Profit & Loss account and Balance Sheet, they manage their own work and see processes through from end to end
  • Formal interaction between colleagues takes place via “customer and supplier” relationships.
  • autonomy enables productivity
  • if one creates a space in which staff pursue their own goals and are not paid by the hour, they will focus on their activities not the clock; if they are not told what to do, they will need to develop their own initiative; if they are free to develop their own processes, they will discover through their own creative faculties how to work more productively- in pursuit of their goals
  • The human qualities which are of greatest potential value to the business are: curiosity, imagination, creativity, cooperation, self-discipline and realization (bringing ideas to reality)
  • These qualities are the very ones most likely to be withheld by an individual when the environment is ‘wrong’.
  • Any elements in the business environment that undermine the autonomy and purpose of the individual will see the above qualities withheld
  • High on the list of undermining elements come power-hierarchy and over-specialization
  • the responsibility of the individual is formalized, specified and restricted. An improved system is not one where responsibility is distributed perfectly but rather one where there is simply no opportunity for responsibility to be lost (via the divisions between the chunks). Systems must be reorganized so responsibility -the most essential of qualities -is protected and wholly preserved.
  • Matt Black Systems believe this can only be done by containing the whole responsibility within an individual, holding them both responsible and giving them ‘response-ability’
  • The experience of Matt Black Systems demonstrates that radical change is possible
  • productivity is up 300%, the profit margin is up 10%[3], customer perception has shifted from poor to outstanding, product returns are at less than 1%, “on time and in full” delivery is greater than 96%, pay has increased 100%.
  • staff develop broader and deeper skills and feel greater job security; they get direct feedback from their customers which all go to fuel self-confidence and self-esteem.
  • the staff manage themselves
  • “only variety can absorb variety”.
  • What is particular about their story is that behind it is a very consciously crafted design that surrounds the individualism of each person with hard boundaries of the customer, the law and the business. It is these boundaries rather than the instructive persona of ‘the boss’ that gives rise to the discipline in which individuals can develop. Autonomy is not the same as freedom, at least not in the loose sense of ‘do as you please’. An autonomous person is a person who has become self-governing, who has developed a capacity for self-regulation, quite a different notion from the absence of boundaries. Indeed, it is with establishing the right boundaries that the business philosophy is most concerned. The company provides the crucible in which the individual can develop self-expression but the container itself is bounded. Wilson calls this “designing the void”. This crucible is carefully constructed from an all-encompassing, interconnecting set of boundaries that provide an ultimate limit to behaviours (where they would fall foul of the law or take risks with catastrophic potential). It is an illusion to think, as a director of a company, that you are not engaged in a process of social conditioning; the basis of the culture is both your responsibility and the result of your influence. The trick is to know what needs to be defined and what needs to be left open. The traditional authoritarian, controlling characters that often dominate business are the antithesis of this in their drive to fill this void with process, persona and instruction. Alternatively, creating an environment that fosters enterprise, individuals discover how to be enterprising.
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