A Public Resource Management System

How can we benefit the cooperative, peer-to-peer, open source design community, and social enterprise and more broadly apply it to our living environments? How can the web can better engage people with the material world, while also enriching the social, strengthening personal bonds.

This briefer proposes the development of a public resource management widget for Loomio.

This can start by:

Building a knowledge and design database and library of ‘things’, ‘services’, ‘transport networks’, and the ‘places’ they inhabit that link to top facilitators that theorize, build, and maintain them.  

As leading facilitators are identified, the hunt for the dream development team can begin—a team that may include some of these fields:

Operations Managers | UX Designers / Data Visualizers / Sensory Artists | Engineers: Software / Automation & Robotics | Product Designers | Materials Scientists | Hospitality | Architects | City Planners | Agriculturists & Landscape Artists

Those disciplines and more would address the following areas:

Agriculture and Fishing | Manufacturing | Repair and Installation of Machinery and Equipment | Electricity, Gas, and Water | Construction | Wholesale and Retail Trade | Transport Storage and Communication | Accommodation and Food Services | Information and Communications | Financial and Legal Activities | Professional, Scientific, and Technical Activities | Rental and Leasing Activities | Administrative and Support Services | Public Administration and Defense | Human Health and Social Work Activities | Community / Voluntary Services

The daunting complexity of the task can be narrowed by starting with a single location and a small set of processes. Company partners can distribute the workload while working in tandem. The framing can start with a single shop, factory, or transport route—and once templates are formed—expand to include city blocks, districts, and whole cities. From the beginning of development, the design principles must enable models flexible enough as not to require continuous work from scratch, by identifying core elements that can transfer to a variety of designs. 

Loomio was based on saving time by making decisions more efficiently. This proposal shares the principle of time efficiency with the insanely ambitious goal of a publicly owned resource management application. It will require extensive modeling, roadmapping, and coordination of practically every known discipline on an unprecedented scale. It is here Loomio can leverage the talent of corporations and governments, with the aim of streamlining and integrating the processes of production, service, and decision making better aligned with user feedback, particularly with products and services in mind.  

With this a public project, all processes should be made as transparent as possible, so long as it does not endanger any individuals. Mirror worlds generated by participants contributing 3D imagery, sound, and location data, in addition to other ways of data visualization and sensory output, will better enable the cooperation of both users and experts to accelerate innovation, not only for the Loomio platform, but in every field the platform facilitates. Placed in map view, logistics channels can be color coded with icons to provide clarity in depicting the type of good or service when observing streams.

Building this now is important. Facing the pandemic, with the need for lockdown measures, a publicly observable management system can greatly reduce the need for workers, reducing the spread of contagion, and enable the monitoring of processes, including the use of telerobotics to perform tasks, in a variety of locations from the safety of one’s home. Were this system already in place, thousands of lives would have been saved, as a single platform that coordinates a variety of efforts with ability to observe and anticipate demands, items such as ventilators and personal protective equipment, including the ability to direct the person in need to go to locations that can meet medical requirements, could have been utilized. A public resource management system would prevent corrupt governments and opaquely ineffective companies from holding the people that depend on their services to ransom and instead hold them to account. Just as materials, processes, and places become public knowledge, so too, those executing orders and fulfilling tasks. Having such a tool would not only save lives, but enrich life.

Once the proper connections from this proposal are made, with a list of lead developers and projects onboard, a document can be written up and collectively signed to make a proposal to a city, like Amsterdam, that is keen on implementing these ideas. Amsterdam seems like a good partnership considering they have recently expressed an effort to pursue Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics framework. (https://bit.ly/34MlwQ0) Madrid and Barcelona may also be interested, given it has a healthy social centre culture. This would obviously include the use of Loomio to facilitate municipal decision making, and more ambitiously, may work to democratize the European Union itself, rapidly spanning the globe as an international framework. (See: DiEM25)

One pilot project can involve the partnership with or something like MIT's OpenAg initiative, able to provide food sustainably for the city, while reducing transport miles from imports. The various aspects of manufacturing, warehousing and feedstocks, transport, and construction can follow, outfitting the city with sensors that provide dashboards for non-experts to assess the health of the city, including the ability to participate in planning, product design, and all the other functions required to operate and manage a city.

OpenAg can be one of many partners that supply the open source restaurant, a concept demostrated by the Waag community in 2009. (waag.org/en/project/instructables-restaurant) Local farm and supply partners will be aware of each open restaurant, while the resturant will be aware of all participating projects that might serve it.

In simple terms, this proposal is advocating to become something like Docker in that it provides a framework for any variety of projects to launch quickly and work and communicate with everyone else in the ecosystem, while also retaining a vision, roadmap, and collective mentorship that encourages the thriving population of that ecosystem, including mobilization to attract interest from and to convert legacy systems. Widgets or design elements must be assembled into an intuitively navigable library similar to that of Git, also coupled with a prediction engine that automatically draws up a list of widgets for each problem area as it is pursued within the design process.

Hack on! Such systems can develop using a planned staging of hackathons. The following tools assembled by the hackathon team at EUvsVirus are a go-to for making viable products from hackathons:

• Miro: team collaboration, charts and planning

• Airtable: collect data via a form view and manipulate it via table view

• Bubble: build full apps without coding (database, view, logic)

• Glide: build mobile web apps in minutes

• Firebase: powerful and easy to setup backend with api and websocket support

• Backendless: powerful and easy to setup backend with api and websocket support

• InVision: easy to use design tool with click-dummy features

• Workstreams: results-oriented, data-driven task management solution & kanban board app integrated to Slack

A number of hackathons can be planned to take on each sector and each area within a sector. It can start with the most vital areas such as energy, agriculture, manufacturing, logistics, services, and the most labor intensive aspect of the economy: maintenance.

Business plan. Once people and projects are onboard, having remotely and collectively developed a white paper and roadmap, we can then work to drum up funding. The funding would go to 'core support': cloud services, a core programming and design team, marketing/promoting/outreach and customer support. The program would be open source and free to use, enabling rapid adoption and networking of users within the ecosystem. Donation campaigns can be tried, as they seem to work for the Wikimedia and Mozilla foundations, but if needed, a monthly fee can be introduced to high volume users, with free use for low volume, small business/governments until, in time, the protocols are tweaked and usable without need for core support nor funding.

Thank you for considering and discussing this proposal. Feel free to contact me at [email protected]. You can find me on Twitter: @nwcrav. For further context, see my writings at https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Nathan_Cravens. I'm up for a video chat. Once we have a sizeable group: brainstorming, outlining-detailing, and roadmapping can begin with an experienced facilitator or two privy to remote collaboration. Or, one can quietly apply this information to one's own work. I hope it inspires further development in the directions mentioned!

Compatible projects mentioned in the discussion below include:

• Mozilla Hubs - summarize

• commonspub.org - summarize

• decko.org/ - summarize

• fiware.org/ - summarize

• github.com/holo-rea - summarize

• gitlab.com/openengiadina - summarize

• murmurations.network - summarize

• https://solidproject.org/ - summarize

Projects that may adopt one or more of the above tools:

• https://www.metabolic.nl/: reflowproject.eu/ - summarize

• https://materiom.org/ - summarize

• https://www.communecter.org/ - Open data, linking people to commons
  https://github.com/pixelhumain/communecter

• Metabolism of Cities - summarize

• www.aemslab.org.nz/from_the_ground_up - summarize

• Waag - summarize

• gitlab.com/openengiadina - summarize

What other people or projects might be helpful?

Concluding on a meditation:

Inspiration:

Eva Gladek: Sustainable Urban Systems and Circular Cities of the Future

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7o0qpe0vDwk&feature=emb_logo