Before we begin, it is probably important to mention that, to my recollection, the author has never contacted any Sensorica affiliate before publishing this paper. I also don't know what sources of information Nancy has used to learn about Sensorica, apart from one paper written by Pazaitis, A. (2020), provided as reference (Breaking the chains of open innovation: Post-blockchain and the case
of Sensorica) and a link to a P2PFoundation wiki page on Sensorica.
In short
The main weaknesses of the paper are:
- Conceptual imprecision (especially “value”)
- Misclassification of Sensorica’s economic nature (an OVN)
- Over-reliance on Web3 framing
- Lack of formal modeling of the system
- Treats developmental limitations as structural failures
The left vs right paradigm
I find that this is an overarching frame of the paper and it deserves to be addressed at length.
"Practices, behavior, and motivations inside a commons may align more with libertarian than communitarian values, a problem from which both projects suffered. For example, when the market crashed and the external price of FairCoin dropped, members used the opportunity to buy FairCoin at the low external rate to make expensive purchases for themselves (Dallyn & Frenzel, 2020); reinvestment in the commons was not on the agenda by ordinary citizens of the community, and further, non-members bought huge quantities of FairCoin to sell for Bitcoin (O'Leary, 2018)."
First and foremost, Nancy's paper is constructed around the libertarianism vs communitarianism dichotomy, which has its roots in sociopolitical competitive dynamics, which stem from the wide-spread representative democracy, usually anchored in a constitution. This type of social governance is divisive by design, due to the fact that it requires the choosing of representatives among the population, which compete against each other and use rhetoric based on constructed ideologies to gain the sentiment of the people, and to differentiate themselves from the rest of the contenders. Thus, ideologies, which are designed to form constituencies of thought, focus on some aspects of humanity, build systems of values and draw a ridge between these systems. They are reductive in nature as they don't conceive humans as complex beings embracing a wide arrays of values, forcing a population with continuous range of propensities into a very small number of discrete categories. Therefore, the aforementioned dichotomy is an artificial construct created by this sociopolitical competitive dynamic.
It is my belief that the resilience and strength of a society reside in its diversity of worldviews, psychological predispositions, economic practices, spiritual expressions, etc. This diversity should be understood on a continuum, in all its complexity, not as a limited number of competing categories, which is reductive and handicapping. Society cannot be understood in its entirety by emphasizing individualism while downplaying communitarianism and viceversa. The main reason d'êtres of these ideologies is not to explain and build understanding but to divide and form loyal political constituencies. It is my belief that the individual cannot be understood in abstraction of a social context. Thus, individual and community are aspects of the same reality, of humans as a gregarious species.
Nancy's statement "align more with libertarian than communitarian values" is not completely uncorrelated with reality. Since most people's minds are formatted through education to think in terms of existing ideologies, they reproduce patterns based on these integrated systems of beliefs. When it comes to technology development, these worldviews are reflected in specific design features. The use of technology is also influenced or predetermined by people's beliefs systems and by the system of their social and economic relations. Thus, a web app that allows people to find a place to stay while traveling will most probably take two forms:
- mutual benefits (Couchsurfing)
- microservice (Airbnb).
To make these observations more concrete, here's a third option for the sheltering solution mentioned above, that you may find intuitive: public sheltering, i.e. real estate owned by the government, offered for free to everyone, or at a price that depends on the person's social and economic status, below market price. This was widely spread in the so-called socialist / communist countries, perhaps less common in capitalist countries. This pattern is widely applied to public transportation, largely subsidized (operating below market prices / km), with great reductions for kids and elderly, even free in some cases.
A fourth option, which you may find less intuitive, widely practiced in the p2p realm is nondominium. This is a real estate asset that cannot be owned. It is not public property, nor private property, it cannot be owned, but can be accessed by anyone, under a set of conditions / rules. In this case, occupancy of a room may cost some money, but the funds don't go to an owner or a manager, they go instead to a smart contract, to be passed to service provider agents for maintenance work. A maintenance agent can be anyone with the proper credentials. This is how blockchain networks operate, using utility tokens to reward agents who maintain the network, miners and other types of validators and infrastructure providers.
For instance, Sensorica can be described as follows:
- Not purely “communitarian”
- Not anti-market
- Not fully commons-based in the classical sense
- Hybrid post-capitalist production system
- Market-integrated commons-oriented network
Forcing Sensorica into a binary (capitalist vs communitarian) is analytically weak. This miss-categorization is even a deeper fallacy, as this dichotomy is presented as being natural, instead of being attributed to a worldview that has emerged from our competitive and divisive social governance systems.
Elitism and p2p
Moving forward, Nancy stated:
"In the case of Sensorica, everyone is high-skilled even if not necessarily highly paid. The welfare function is inadequate for members while the high-skilled nature of the membership signifies that it is out of reach for individuals with lower-level skills; Sensorica is an elite organization, even if the procedures and goals are communitarian."
Saying that Sensorica is an elitist organization, ruled by highly skilled individuals with no programs for education or upscaling within the organizational structure is demonstratively false. The Sensorica OVN model is built on top of open source development methodologies, which are open / permissionless, anticredencialist processes.
- There is no requirement to show any academic credentials to contribute to processes / project / ventures. Moreover, contributors can remain anonymous.
- Tasks are radically collaborative, no individual can monopolyze a task
- Benefits are distributed to participants based on results, not badges.
- There are tasks designed specifically for learning, which are formally acknowledged in benefit redistribution.
- The community is culturally tuned for mutual help and Sensorica is recognized for its excellent documentation, providing easy access to up-skilling.
- The distribution of benefits does not take in consideration where contributors live, providing the same access and rewards to individuals living in developing countries.
Anecdote: Jim Anastassiou was self-trained software and hardware developer who contributed to tasks that are only given to trained engineers in traditional organizations. Within a few months of contributing to projects, Jim became a core affiliate of Sensorica. He leveraged Sensorica as a launching pad to more lucrative assignments in traditional organizations as a blockchain developer.
Who created Sensorica?
The genesis of Sensorica presented in the paper is misleading. It is stated that Sensorica was created as an "on-demand agile network of companies, freelancers, non-profits and governmental organizations".
The order of enumeration leads the reader to believe that companies were the main instigators of the network and that non-profits and governmental organizations were constitutional parts. In reality, Sensorica is a grassroots organization composed of freelancers. The initiators saw themselves forming a p2p collaborative network, interfacing with the mainstream economy, meaning establishing relations (partnership and sponsorship) with companies, non-profits and governmental organizations, while maintaining full autonomy. Sensoricans have created companies and a non-profit organization under their control as legal interfaces to other mainstream organizations, not as loci of development, production or governance of the network. This is very well documented, as can be verified in the TEDx video produced in 2014.
Open source vs open innovation
It is stated in the paper that:
"Sensorica represents a means by which ‘open innovation,’ which evolved in the mainstream market with capitalist imperatives, can be adapted to principles of CBPP through mechanisms such as the value accounting system to transform a capitalist strategy into a paradigm for the co-construction and sharing of knowledge (Pazaitis, 2020)."
This representation of the open source culture and its innovation model is only partially accurate, since it only acknowledges one side of the famous free vs open source debate. Historically speaking, the corporate world cooped and greenwashed the free software movement initiated by Richard Stallmen, leading to the instrumentalization of free online collaboration for various corporate needs (creation of standards, reduction of development costs, increased speed of innovation, increased adoption, etc.). But the open culture continued to develop despite this capitalist capture. Sensorica was built on the values of the free software movement. As a matter of fact, Richard Stallmen was informed about the plans to create Sensorica, but he failed to recognize the possibility of transfer of the principles developed for the collaborative production of software to hardware. Sensoricans adopted the "open source" and "open innovation" terms, as opposed to "free", for strategic economic reasons, to ease its interface with traditional organizations, including for-profit. Also, as our historical debate on licensing demonstrates, Sensoricans have always seen greater economic potential in commons-based peer production than traditional production, therefore they have rejected defensive mechanisms provided by copy-left licenses.
It is true though that Sensorica has a market-based component, designing technological solutions to problems that are packaged as products / services. At the same time, every artifact produced by the network is also offered as an open source DIY solution, to be disseminated through non-market mechanisms. Over the years, Sensoricans moved progressively deeper into non-market-based models. This can be verified on Dissemination documents of the most recent open ventures, such as Greens for Good and PEP Master. Furthermore, Sensoricans rationalize the interface with the traditional economy as a necessity, as a bridge through which assets from the traditional economy are transferred or transmutatated to the p2p economy, enabling a process of socioeconomic metamorphosis. This is not just discourse. In practice, everything that Sensorica creates is offered as an open source DIY artifact, increasing the overall global capacity of the commons. Moreover, a portion of this flow is utilized to build infrastructure for material peer production, which is also designed for maximum diffusion and adoption. The portion that is returned back into circulation within capitalism is related to sustaining the lifestyle of contributors, since the p2p economy lacks maturity, or to acquire production assets that are not available in the commons. The Sensorica lab also has a procurement policy that requires first to consider alternatives in the commons, together with sharing, recycling and re-purposing practices, before buying. Although this transfer and transmutation processes that happen at the interface of CBPP and the mainstream economy is recognized later in the paper, the paper doesn't seem to provide an overall coherent representation of Sensorica in this respect.
Recently, Sensorica moved beyond the free and open source debate, drafting the OVN license.
Sustainability
The critique that Sensorica cannot provide substantial livelihood to its participants is misconstrued and not fair at the same time.
We can also say that the paper frames Sensorica in organizational terms, but not in coordination-system terms, which is a major conceptual omission. Sensorica should not be seen as a providing entity. It is not legally constituted as a moral entity, but as a loose association of freelancers. It can be seen as an environment in which individuals leverage shared assets and collaboration to provide for themselves. To use another formula: don't ask what Sensorica can provide for you, but ask what you can do for Sensoricans and for yourself. The flip is from an organization as provider to freelancer, which is the reality of an ever increasing population of digital nomads today.
Moreover, Sensorica is an early-stage ecosystem, a live experiment, pioneering new models for material peer production, operating without legitimacy and lacking recognition. It is only recently that some blockchain ecosystems have received the attention of governments. If digital currencies can benefit today from some policy clarity, material peer production is still under the radar of our institutions. The paper treats this as a model flaw, rather than a developmental phase issue, development for Sensorica as well as for society as a whole, as it moves out of the post-industrial era into a more networked and decentralized era, increasingly recognizing and legitimating peer production. This claim is supported, for instance, by the recent increase in institutional adoption of cryptocurrency and other blockchain-related primitives, such as NFT and RWA, after a series of regulatory approvals and new bills in the US.
Another important point related to the sustainability issue is the metric by which this perceived incapacity is evaluated. I like to say that if Sensoricans were rich from their activities within the network we would have completely missed our target. In other words, Sensorica develops the model for peer production, which operates largely outside of the market and even tries to escape the dependency on monetary currency. This doesn't mean that Sensorians aren't interested in making a decent living from their involvement. It means that they imagine a near future in which access to the necessities of life will largely not be mediated by monetary currency, but mostly by ledgers of economic activity. We see society migrating to a post-monetary world, where the market and money don't play a major role for coordinating economic activity. This is not utopia and it is also not a call to digress as a civilization, or as some say, to go back to barter. Quite the contrary, the p2p culture has already demonstrated that our modern digital infrastructure can support economic primitives that make the p2p economy (peer production) superior to capitalism and socialism, or any combination between them. For example, within less than a decade, the Bitcoin network had bootstrapped 50 times more computing power than Google Global, without angel investors, governmental contracts or grants. Yes, crypto markets have been created to facilitate the conversion between Bitcoin and fiat, which helps miners to access goods and services within the traditional economy, but this is only a necessary hybridization between a nondominium-based peer production system and the traditional system, seen as a transmutation of assets from one economy to the other, as most resources are locked within the transactional, market-based, currency-mediated economy. The situation can be reversed, the dependency can flip on day, i.e. resources still trapped within the traditional economy can become dependent on the p2p economy. This already happened a few times in history, for example during the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism. In conclusion, Sensoricans accumulate new forms of wealth, which may not be perceived as valuable today, and develop new skills and understanding that may be in very high demand in the near future. Meanwhile, they create wealth for society at large, either through open source designs or by paving the way for material peer production. Should we measure the success and wealth of Sensoricans in $ amounts?
Surveillence
The paper states that reputation systems act as social control mechanisms (panopticon-like). This is overstated or partially misleading. Yes, reputation systems encode norms, but Sensorica’s system is not fully automated surveillance, it is socially negotiated and contextual. For examples, in the Nondominium infrastructural project reputation relies on private data, partial disclosure or zero-knowledge proof. Even in the this project was launched in 2025, the main design features were developed in 2017-18. A comparison to the Chinese social credit system is analytically excessive.
Scalability
The paper states that Sensorica fails to scale or address broad societal needs. This is a premature conclusion, as the observed limitation is not a structural impossibility. The paper ignores modularity as a scaling strategy and federation across OVNs. The author assumes scaling must resemble centralized expansion rather than network-of-networks growth. The new Nondominium infrastructure project allows for both these modalities for scaling. Even in the this project was launched in 2025, the ideas were proposed during 2014-15 and were already implemented in the web2 NRP-CAS, see more on networks of networks.
Economic fundamentals: “Value”
The paper repeatedly uses expressions like “value”, “value equation” and “value accounting”. This is terminology that Sensorica was using before 2014-15. "Value accounting" has been replaced with "contribution accounting" and value equation by "benefit redistribution algorithm", as Sensoricans have adopted a new value model, as subjective, relational, not measurable directly. This leads to confusion between measurement and meaning and incorrect interpretation of incentives.
Overemphasis on technology
The paper attributes too much explanatory power to blockchain / Web3, while Sensorica’s functioning depends primarily on social protocols, governance processes and contribution tracking. Technology is supporting infrastructure, not the core driver.
Weak treatment of coordination mechanisms
The paper is missing important concepts from Sensorica's OVN model, such as: stigmergic coordination, event-based accounting (REA / Valueflows), agent-centric architecture. These are central to understanding why Sensorica works at all.
Generic critiques
Many criticisms are valid but non-specific. For example, freeloading, power asymmetry, inequality and governance drift apply to any commons, organization or socio-technical system. The paper does not isolate what is unique to Sensorica.
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