Open value networks and global economic fairness

Disclaimer: This blog entry reflects the thoughts of the author and does not speak on behalf of the Sensorica OVN. 

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davidsluka

In February 2011, economic fairness became a real possibility with the launch of SENSORICA. The new economic model proposed by this network promised open access to economic activities for everyone in the world, with a system for fair redistribution of benefits, based on merits. 

SENSORICA is an open value network. People propose projects and develop them in collaboration with others. The affiliates use open project development methodologies and generate tasks that are made available for anyone in the world. The time, the cash and any material resource that are used during the execution of a task are logged. A contribution accounting system compiles all the input to projects and displays a profile of the economic activity. If the project becomes a commercial venture the revenues are redistributed to all the participants, without exception, in proportion to everyone's contribution. The venture belongs entirely to the participants, anyone can join, any time. We call these ventures open enterprises. SENSORICA is an incubator of many open enterprises. 

Since the inception of SENSORICA we spent a lot of time developing the open value network model, building infrastructure, designing new methodologies, refining the open governance, implementing a proper legal structure, and developing open new technologies. In 2015, SENSORICA is closer than ever to become an economic success, with a few projects to be crowdfunded during the summer and a few service offerings that have already generated revenue.

This post is not about revenue generation and sustainability. The main goal is to illustrate economic fairness, to show the world how we are fulfilling our promise. 

In January 2015 Atelier Barda, a group of architects and designers from Montreal, trusted SENSORICA with a contract to design an interactive imaging system, to be installed in Forillon National Park, in Gaspesie QC, Canada, which is administered by Parks Canada, a branch of the federal government. The project was executed in an open way. Three SENSORICA affiliates answered the call and delivered successfully, exceeding the client's expectations, who was a bit skeptical in the beginning, knowing that he was dealing with a new type of organization. One of these affiliates, Abran, lives in Pakistan. The project was coordinated using SENSORICA's new open service providing methodology, mediated by our virtual infrastructure.

In the end, the revenue was distributed according to everyone's contribution, and Abran was paid as if he was working and living in Canada. 

credit to Massimo Sestini—Polaris

Europe is now dealing with a major social problem caused by waves of immigrants coming from Africa. This crisis is exacerbated by the drama surrounding the death of a few hundreds of these unfortunate people, who are desperate enough to put their lives in danger by crossing the Mediterranean sea, using inadequate means, lead by human traffickers who are mostly interested in profiteering. A social problem coupled with a humanitarian crisis that keeps politicians on their toes and pushes them to use extreme means, to militarize the Mediterranean sea using UN forces. Are these desperate human beings invaders? Are they the new enemies of Europe? Or are they the result of colonialism and victims years of political interference and economic exploitation? Are guns the solution to this problem? Or more economic fairness?

While our western governments, who created the problem in the first place, make it even worse, we are developing infra-national economic structures, a peer to peer economy, to address the problem at its core.

Problems in peer production

Disclaimer: This blog entry reflects the thoughts of the author and does not speak on behalf of the Sensorica OVN. 

Hybrid models, trying to bridge corporate models with open innovation

Disclaimer: This blog entry reflects the thoughts of the author and does not speak on behalf of the Sensorica OVN.  

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On May 14th SENSORICA and the OVN model were presented (by Tibi) at POINT - Atelier de cocréation et d’innovation. We also actively participated in a workshop where attendees were given the chance to understand the value accounting system and to apply it to a fictional case (see embedded document below). Five workshops were running in parallel on different topics around open innovation. We got great feedback and we were pleased to see that other groups picked up the value accounting system concept and integrated it into their own cases, along with other ideas.  

Among the participants, we had representatives of companies and consortia, as well as academics, all eager to learn more about open innovation. The working definition of open innovation was very broad. I (Tibi) presented the more restricted concept of open source innovation. 

One interesting observation

People are trying to bridge open source with the corporate model by creating hybrid models. It seems to me (Tibi) that the proposed hybrid models were lacking a deep understanding of the organic nature of open communities. Almost all of them featured mechanisms of control and value capture that can compromise the sustainability of the open community, which is narrowly instrumentalized to supply innovation to the box (i.e. a classical entity, corporation or other, that has well-defined boundaries such as a fixed number of employees bounded by contractual relations, limited budgets, limited production capacity, etc.). Arduino, a working hybrid model, seems to work well. But not everyone is able to walk that fine balance between extracting value from an open community and nurture this open community. 

In the end, these people are invested in the box and their natural reaction is to preserve it, while they are trying to rip the benefits of open innovation. The natural state of open innovation is open source. This happens within communities or networks, which are open (access to participation), transparent (access to information), decentralized (allocation of resources) and horizontal (access to governance and decision making). All this is fundamentally incompatible with corporate models. 

During this event I realized that you can have 3 main attitudes with respect to open source innovation (open innovation in its pure sense).

1. tabula rasa - Find a new self-sustainable system of production and distribution that fits on top of open source innovation. This assumes that this new mode of innovation dominates all the other ones and therefore, new modes of production will eventually self-organize around it, leading to a new type of economy. I personally bet on commons-based peer production and more precisely on the OVN model.
2. opportunism - Find a way for existing corporations (or other classical structures or boxes) to capture the value through open source innovation. This leads to a dilution of the open source innovation concept to simply open innovation, and to the creation of hybrid models. This attitude assumes that the corporate model is still viable and that it can co opt the new modes of innovation. I personally think this is the wrong attitude. 
3. pragmatism - Realize that open source innovation is dominating other forms of innovation, and that new modes of production will eventually structure around it (might be the OVN model). But in order to establish flows from the classical economy to the new during the transition period, we can create hybrid structures like Arduino, Adafruit and so on. 

The problem of bridging corporate models with open innovation is a false one, and can only be perceived as a problem during the transition. The new natural state of economic production is, in my opinion, Open Value Networks, because they build on open source.

See also my article Open Source Hardware meets the p2p economy

Value cycle and value equation

Creative Commons (BY NC CA) licence granted by the author(s)

Disclaimer: This blog entry reflects the thoughts of the author and does not speak on behalf of the Sensorica community. Further, the work is built on the work of the Sensorica community on value equation. Moreover, the author has many views on the value equation and this blog represents only of the many perspectives. Lastly, the author assumes that the reader is familiar with concepts of Open-value network.

By Yasir Siddiqui

The current capitalistic economic model was designed in the industrial era to reflect the thoughts, culture, technology, knowledge and processes of that era.  In fact, our current economic model has been optimized to reflect the technological (information processing) capacity of industrial era. The era of internet, however, requires a new economic model and new efficiency mechanisms. In order to understand the notion of value equation, it is important to understand the value cycle and the efficiency mechanisms of the current economy.

Discussion on legal structured and governance

Open value network pedagogical slideshow

Click here for the summary of the document

The future of Marketing

Creative Commons (BY NC CA) licence granted by the author(s)

By Yasir Siddiqui

Industrialization was concerned with the production of good as the primary source of economic growth and hence the marketing followed Goods dominant-logic (GDL). In other words, in GDL, “goods are embedded with value, produced away from the market or consumer, and sold through the manipulation of marketing-mix [(including advertising)] decisions that will maximize firm profit. Under this logic, the market and the customer are things to act upon: to segment, to target, to penetrate, to manipulate, and to control.” (Lusch et al., 2006) [i]