'new economy' ontology - working group

It may be worthwhile stepping back a little from the technologies in this conversation and thinking about what kind of impact and value we want to achieve from the exercise of developing an ontology, dictionary and semantic wiki. I’ve worked a lot professionally with these technologies as my interest has long been on enabling more effective knowledge sharing in large organizations, hopefully leading to more timely and focused team actions and desired outcomes. 

Having a common new economy glossary and a wiki to navigate and understand those terms, perhaps with examples if people can put in the time to develop and curate those, does seem like it could help. This doesn’t really require a robust ontology and can be developed quickly using a semantic wiki. The trick comes in using it to build out a useful tool for learning, and keeping it updated. We had a team of four people doing the latter, part time, to help a client understand and keep track of progress with a major initiative, and this required a lot of time collaborating across numerous subject matter experts involved in the initiative to ensure what we had accurately reflected and applied the terms.

If there’s interest and energy in going further, a robust ontology and supporting dictionaries can be applied to enable, at a minimum, rapid searching and review of practices, techniques, tools and lessons learned in implementing the new economy. Natural language understanding and analysis tools exist to facilitate this across a corpus of documents, even when that content is not well organized for navigating manually. Taking this another step, it’s possible to apply AI to the challenge of organizing and delivering content based on people’s specific goals, interests and immediate needs. At Find My Way, we have this ultimate vision in mind and are starting to build a knowledge sharing platform cooperative, with content owned by, controlled by and benefiting the members.

Given clarity on what’s most valuable to achieve first, we would be glad to help.

This sounds like a good approach - we should learn from this and other experiences. Perhaps a first step would be to see who might be interested in joining a working group to help develop, currate and maintain an ontology / glossary for the new / commons economy? Then, if there's enough interest we define a place to work on this and a way of working ...?

OUTCOMES~

@RobertD - as for outcomes, I'd say something like "the working groups aims to create a continually-evolving common reference point, in which the building-blocks (operating principles, values, concepts, terms) of the new economy can be succinctly and accessibly defined with concrete examples, and linked together, particularly for the benefit of newcomers to the field, but also for the sake of 'same-paging' those already working in this space.

Not, as @Danyl Strype has pointed out "a single, fixed meaning for each term", but as a functional starting place. @mike_hales' suggestion of a pattern language could be a powerful one in this regard, with linked entries each consisting of a context, problem and solution, but it would be nice to see some really beautifully visualised and highly navigable working examples online of this, to consider whether this format should define the project going forward. Any suggestions of such examples?

Then there is the question of how and where, if at all, video should be involved... I had thought (back when this was an offline event) that filming in situ could generate some good material,. but now we're all going to be on webcams and screens, I'm inclined to think that we are unlikely to be generating the sort of content that would serve to entice the uninitiated. A shareable, well-made animation could be transformative for laying the foundations, with a few primary definitions, but to do well I imagine we are looking at a lot of money here, unless there are any animators in OCN

WORDING~

Also, I think the word 'ontology' isn't helpful, maybe a tad esoteric. It's the kind of language used by people who already know what this stuff is about. Quite aside from how the word itself has been pushed and pulled from philosophy to computing, it is not used in everyday life. Compared to something like 'what is the New Economy?', I would wager that the word "ontology" in the headline would be cause for many of the people we want to be talking to to tune out and switch off within seconds. I see the virtue of the 'new' economy as it being something for everyone to understand and participate in, but that means at every turn we have to be conscious about who it is we are speaking to. To that end, I see part of the (very challenging) work we ought to be doing with said 'ontology' as distilling, translating, and paring down the nitty-gritty (where possible) into something devoid of jargon, scientific terminology, and pre-requisite knowledge.

Jumping to @John Waters' brilliant point about the liability of 'New Anything' to age quickly, perhaps we should consider conjuring another (ACCESSIBLE) metaphor to sit atop this whole field, as the exponents of 'circular economy', 'social economy', 'doughnut economics' all have. This is, admittedly, a task unto itself. Perhaps 'ecological economics', 'community economics' or 'solidarity economics', as existing terms, can be borrowed to provide the umbrella we need, perhaps this is bastardising and muddying their original meanings. Perhaps we could start afresh with a term not yet in currency (to my knowledge!), like 'planetary economics' or 'plural economics'. Perhaps we strike while the iron is hot and call it post-corona economics. Or... (showing my bias here for the value of 'the future' in our thinking about 'the present') simply 'the economy of the future' - although this is perhaps a move too far towards 'colonising the future' with a dominant conception of what is possible, and also liable to age quickly. All just provocations, not ideas per se. My vote would probably go to something centring on the commons, it's just that 'the commons economy' is a bit of a mouthful!

Yes - please do - and post any answers / advice back here :)

These are all brilliant comments... I agree with all the sentiment and wonder if (building on, and cutting down @Ollie Bream McIntosh 's ideas again) a possible shared purpose might be:

The working groups aims to curate an evolving reference point, in which the principles, values, concepts and terms of the commons economy can be defined and linked together for the benefit of newcomers and those already working to build the commons.

That's probably still a bit too wordy - Please evolve and improve or suggest other ideas... I think the sooner we can agree (or at least get to the point that nobody objects) a shared purpose, then the easier it will be to move on to 'the work'...

Oli,

Yes, we could move forward that way and I do want to make sure the working group starts by defining the outcomes we want to achieve before delving into the technology.

Can you take the ball on polling the community to see who wants to participate in the working group, and collating the responses?

Robert

Hello Oli and all members of the group.

Thank you for your invitation.

I am John. I am a native French speaker from Belgium living confined in London. Sorry for probably a few mistakes in my English.

I have been selected for OpenCoop 2018 with ‘tokenisation as a language’, an R&D initiative I carry, promoting a new coded symbolics of co-operative calculus for values issued from organic consensus; organic means before signing any contract of associations. Signed written contracts are the way we imagine associations, their formalization for recording their existence when our connectivity is based on writing techniques. Coding techniques offer much better, mostly when we think out of the box for numbers. Shortly, coded symbolics with co-operative calculus offer to go investing, to go jobbing, to go shopping in each exchange for an economy we don’t need to count anymore. I will detail on demand. I am focusing on the research making this possible.

About the current invitation for defining an ontology for economy,  let’s pin some contextual elements nurturing needs for a ‘new economy’, for revisiting the sense we have for economy, avoiding ecological and inequity problematics in front argumentations – a move to better address them.

Connected by code, humankind moves to a global world before having nurtured the decision. And Western democratic values– as good and universal we have matured them -  experiment a crucible of painful experiences. Traveling is, of course, welcome to test the universality of our values and now, from colonizers, it is the world coming to us. We travel staying at home. Although not always desired, it’s certainly a joyful opportunity to reinvent us!

Connected by code, we live an end of civilization, the civilization of writing techniques – literacy and numeracy included. What will be economy in the ‘codacy’ era? A code era for which notions like the country as a shared territory, the nation as a shared destiny, and the state as share governance, do not overlap anymore. And in this context, Money is Law for Economy and Science is Law for Nature are two correlated vanishing mantras, resisting and resilient as they can. They are both funded in our operating beliefs in numbers for realities as measurable entities – I am mathematician, I have nothing against numbers. They just fail to identify and codify our wealth of co-operation for sustaining abundance and life openness.

Fortunately, with code, we are moving from objectivity defined as what is measurable by numbers to objectivity to what is codifiable by code. Moreover, we lose in a world of software, of soft goods, with instant communication, the weight as referential magnitude for the organic consensus about our values. Statistics about Millenials witness it. It will make less and less sense to weight things of any nature, to price them, in order to share a consensus on their values.  The language of money as mass (cf. Pound) is losing its body, its embodiment in a shared tangible experience,  and for the same reasons too,  sciences are losing measuring magnitudes as referential reality. Indeed,  programming does not require symbolics of magnitudes to implement a multimedia world, much richer and tangible than mechanics, having promoted disenchantment narratives. No mass, no time, no space to implement a world in coded symbolics. Language features hold new symbolics for a world we implement before being observable and observed; also any coding tutorial for beginners educates to reflect ‘Hello World!’ on their freedom of implementing. And a world we implement, reflecting our freedom, it is the world of economy. Software engineering incubates for decades epistemic values which will soon usurp physics as referential authority for natural realities. An invaluable wealth sowing our present! I work on this non-conventional research. The connected world is currently incubating a new sense of reality, silently, embodying people in connectivity by code for their socialization, the way they work, they play and project their existence. Our global consciousness of life will make a bigger shift in the coming decades that the one we knew with Copernic, Gutenberg, Galileo, and Newton revolutions together.

Let’s point that Open Coop is a child of this connectivity by code,  boosting co-operative socio-community trends, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, decentralized internet as Holochain.

Let’s project us. Important to be able to do that. What can be economy in a context of ‘codacy’, when we drop our beliefs in number and written contracts? What are the intrinsic components of economy when we forget money, magnitudes, and numbers? That’s not anymore an academic question as coded symbolics of value is already circulating in the so-called crypto-tokens, conflicting with share equities for instance among various utilities. It opens the just-in-time question for the cooperative economy, what can be the coded symbolics of value in order to enrich the organizational value connecting diversity in the respect of freedom for life. How freely exchanging connects us into natures, whatever we exchange? It’s not first a software problem - I am a computer scientist too. It’s a programming language paradigm problematics, more precisely revisiting the concept of type in programming techniques to drive it to the epistemic value of nature, in order to identify and account the ecology of our organic associations. Economy is ecology when we know that we don’t eat gold! And a sustainable concept of economic language goes with a good concept of nature. In a connected world, it is a distributed language paradigm that must be targeted for economy. We don’t have to think in terms of money. It deeply amputates the potential of identifying our co-operative wealth by code. Software implementation of the paradigm comes in a second step in this R&D. It will be the same language paradigm to do economy or common knowledge in cognitive environments sustaining distributed rationalities.

I received an invitation to search for an ontology for economy. We have to be conscious here that, with code, we even don’t need to share a common language as 1+1=2 to reflect to each of us a common social body on the co-operative rationalities driving economy. Most probably, gamification, once driven to universal principles, will usurp stochastic models for economy. When live simulations will allow playing our global organizations, reflecting the social body connecting our diversity to our perceptive consciousness, predicting will lose its sense. We will live in the world we implement. None operative calculus can reach that. Another civilization! Clearly belonging to our sowed present. Each decade will certainly bring huge disruptions in our beliefs. I will detail on demand. The potential of a better world has never been so high! The end of civilization gives the place for the next one…A lot of joyful work in perspective…

Thank you for your reading. How do the members of the group think to organize the session?

Kind Regards.

John.

@Johnny Firmin Robert - I have a sense that what you have written is important, but I'm struggling to understand. Do you have some links to share, so I can do some reading around the subject? Then I might be better able to comment...

Hello Mr. Steve Huckle,

Thank you for your interest.
I should publish, but I am so busy with research that I postponed always publications. Also, I authorize myself to write something in a so noisy world if tool implementations are on the way. (I only wrote one book in my life and it was an accident; I published the two first chapters of a refused master thesis in philosophy., encouraged to do so ...)

A lot of material for public events, conferences, and small committee seminars have been produced, however not structured content on the transversal subject on the web.
What I suggest at this stage, is to do a skype as we are confined and meeting prohibited, and you will motivate me to initiate propaedeutic material - planned in fact, and in progress.

Your request comes just in time as my non-conventional research arrives at maturity.
johnf.robert is my skype id. Don't hesitate to contact me. It will be a pleasure for me to sustain any explanation.

I can also share with you 4 pages of a recent grant request for research, but it will be a pleasure to go more in-depth if you wish it. This text is also an introduction as a narrative was asked without technical aspects. For technical aspects, it will depend on your background.

Few comments

I understand your struggle - I apologize - there are of course required skills for some 'doctor' underlying challenges concerning symbolics of calculus, but the difficulty first derives from the new sense of reality when we move from an observer position for our symbolics of the world to an implementer position, the prevalent position when we come globally connected by code before written techniques, literacy and numeracy included. (And this move has brought me on the way across my tribulation for research about new paradigms for common knowledge, as at 56, I am a guy having received an education in the civilization of the book.)

In-depth, silently, our global civilization is incubating a new sense of reality. Cooperative trends are in fact a child of these facts, people explore the freedom of their implementer position. And you see coded platforms for communities, coded protocols for connecting them, a lot of bubbling initiatives expressed with the concepts and tools of a connected word - platforms, open protocols - and all of these enthusiast initiatives are usually mobilized as political projects for a ' better world', promoting the cooperative values, using the political procedures, the vote at Open Coop on Loomio for instance, to drive them.

But we have to be conscious that an economy in a connected world by code is not a community problem, it has become a socio-community problem in a sense to re-invent - connected communities does not form a community - so obvious to show functionally and anthropologically... I will detail it if time permits

And so, before going with proposed solutions with tools of our times, triggering the welcome effervescence, what is the socio-community problem domain for our anthropology in a connected world should be the first question for figure out its economy. That's the ABC of any analysis: questioning what is the problem domain before addressing it with solutions - that's what I had to learn, teach, and repeat to analyst-developers when I was ICT consultant and trainer;-)

We see that unlikely when we come to consider a better world in terms of cooperative values, that people claimed to be co-operative are not prompt to use a common platform...

That's not disappointing for me. It just shows that the economy, when we come to the effectiveness of tool implementations, can't be host by a common political project for cooperative values. Diversity triumphs, cant' be tamed
I would avoid charging people of individualism and call for a soul conversion, not my cup of tea even after 7 years of monastic life.

The raised question, anthropologically, for socio-community problematic, for the economy of life, when we come global by code, is inherited from the domain itself: how code can connect diversity without a call for a common language. The economy for the anthropology of socio-community deeply exhausts the 'political' promotion of cooperative values. Addressing the question within the boundary of the language of open cooperative values can even be counter-productive to promote them.

It is an old story for human anthropology. I invite people in my previous post to project themselves. It is very important.

And a better world with a common language to get the best fruits of life, humankind has already projected itself in such a world. He did it projecting itself in the past - past or future, it changes nothing for the consciousness of the experience. Humankind did it and write it in the Babel Tower narrative. Humankind imagines itself in the past, speaking a common language for building a tower reaching life by excellence, God. And God put the diversity of languages, the diversity of ways to understand the world between human beings. And the project collapsed. By the hand of God, what could be a stronger way to say it! The millenary narrative, selected to be transmitted, witnesses that path to a common language is not a path of life...In modern terms, we would say, the path to a common language is a dystopia.

Not a reason, of course, to give up wishes and hopes for a better world, to drive ahead life for it, but a common language is not the path, even a language for cooperative values.

Happily conscious of that, the question if for me: can code help us to connect diversity without the requirement for a common language - a book can't do that even digitalized? Can coding techniques be used to objectify our socio-community body - currently in search of birth - for opening our consciousness to its condition?

Can coding techniques help to offer hospitality to diversity, even people not sharing co-operative values?
The connectivity by code pushes the challenge of sustainability for globalization very high, deeper than generating new narratives for the world, we have to deepen the core of the irreducible diversity sustaining life and so connecting economy and nature - I am formally very advanced on a coded symbolics of a co-operative calculus - probably alone on the forefront in this domain, alone in the formulation, not alone as an incubated experience of a connected world. The core delivery will be an operative symbolics of calculus as new paradigms of coding languages to unify epistemic and economic values, identifying organizational values for code-keeping, before signing an ethical contract.

Judgments for values come in a second step and are always a consensus problem and so result from what we can put in circulation. Let's time judging if cooperative values are good.

So, the way I receive the problem domain of a socio-community economy is connecting diversity to ease the circulation of life and celebrating it with loving-kindness - the latter being free from a political project.

And if you go in-depth into coding techniques and the forefront of exploration from any political orientations, we see the open road of symbolizing 'semantic silence' - cf. the language paradigm above I will detail to you - for connecting and celebrating diversity with tools for the economy of life very different than what we can imagine from the political perspectives of our time.

I work on them! The present is sowed by its potential. Time is joyful in my garage ;-) as I touch with my hand the opportunity to transcend the mantras 'money is law for economy' and 'science is law for nature'. Both mantras are deeply correlated. You can't change one without the other one. Asking politics for a monetized economy listening to science is asking two killers of diversity - respectively bio-diversity and credo-diversity - for finding a better agreement to respect life. Clearly an unsustainable conjuncture! Good if we find an adaptation of the conjuncture for transitioning but the underlying belief in number behind the symbolization of reality will collapse in a connected world, will lose its embodiment, its tangible experience. See below Angela Merkel as a witness of the world we leave.

For the little story, I was pointing the organic consensus of mass in our beliefs, economic and scientific, eroded day after day in a software world, where socialization is first performed by instant communication before exchanging weighting goods - a dominant protocol in the past, triggering social exchanges. (Take a bitcoin for instance. The distributed protocol proposes to miners a competitive game to play a consensus and it becomes the new gold even if a bitcoin has no mass. Enthusiasts have poured a lot of old wine in the novelty - competition for instance, but it is a first fundamental experience of how we substitute a protocol as a consensus ground for share object-value, a consensus ground replacing in some way the field of gravity with mass as organic consensus.) And about mass as organic consensus, it was emblematic to hear last week German Chancellor Angela Merkel telling in an interview one of her mantras: 'without mass, no depth'. Clearly a respectable person, witnessing with excellence a vanishing age.

Let's schedule a Skype. I listen to you, collect your questions and will write private and/or public answers.

Kind regards,

John Robert
Tokenomics Artisan
www.opentokenomics.io ( http://www.opentokenomics.io )

LinkedIn ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnfrobert ) | [email protected] | skype: johnf.robert | +32 (0)496 580 535 | +44(0)7501644724

@Johnny Firmin Robert I wouldn't even know where to begin with a Skype call - I'd need more references even to be in the same chapter, let alone on the same page. I'm not giving up, though...

> a coded symbolics of a co-operative calculus

I think that's the important bit amongst all that. Are you working on a kind of lambda calculus for community protocols? It's a fascinating idea.