Valueflows and contribution accounting

Per request, I’m starting a new topic, coming here from “Evolution 1”…

@EduMerco wrote:

Do you believe that a small (90 min), realtime VF workshop could be useful to start to imagine what form could this federation could take? In my case (and I offer it in case it could be useful) I model with SysML that focuses in more concrete actions, but I feel that a value flow model could be enlightening…

I’d be happy to do something like that. I tend to think that we would want to have some good ideas of how people might want the economic side to work, ahead of time. In fact, if we had that, I could do a first draft ahead of time.

Or is that the wrong direction to think about it? I could also do a 20 minute intro to VF, maybe 30 minutes if we include some examples of contribution economies, and we could just see if that triggers some thinking towards how it might work.

I had to look up SysML, I guess I’ve been out of it too long. :slight_smile: I’m happy to have whatever modeling techniques people want to bring, although I think we’d have to mesh that with Valueflows in some way, which will bring its own limitations. In case this helps you assess that, here’s a write-up intended to help people think about how to translate their resource flows to VF, although it is more of a supply chain example: How to model resource flows in networks — Economic Networks.

Here’s the presentation to the Commons Hour series on contribution accounting, more about our experience than about VF directly: Session#6 discussion

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Here’s a graphic rendering of the BBB provisioning regime based on meet. coop admins description Nextcloud. It constitutes part of a description of contribution accounting in meet. coop (the Tech Circle part). It shows contributions in kind (non-human material entities like live platforms/servers, documents) and contributions in work.

This diagram also has a zoomable pdf version here Nextcloud which has a matching second layer, showing contributions in money and recognition of contributions thro money.

Admins regard the operational regime as being pretty OK, stable, hackable But the diagram perhaps shows the tacit complexity of relationships being handled, and the interdependency of a whole slew of contributions of several kinds. Why does this matter? Well, the political economy of meet. coop is basically where we’ve come unstuck - insufficient contributions in money to sustainably support contributions in work (including both care work and livelihood work) and rental payments on servers.

Of course this can be understood without a picture. But calculating the balance of contributions does require some kind of explicit mapping? Mapping the ‘commons of running code’ all the way thro, from gitHub to the Users’ browsers and devices, matters too? The web of contributions in this multistakeholder commons is more complex than the geek commons of free software?