Agents

The agent vocabulary describes people, organizations, and ecological agents.

Types of Agents

Types of agents:

Persons are human beings.
Organizations include formal or informal organizations of all kinds. This also includes groups, as long as they consider themselves to have some agency as a group.
The ecological agent concept is added to expand the scope of REA to do ecological and climate accounting, including impact of various resource flows on the environment.

(The concept of "Agent" could possibly in the future include software/AI-based agents like bots or self-driving vehicles, but this is controversial and somewhat complex. For now, we assume that there is a real agent behind these technologies.)

In Valueflows, we are talking about economic agents, agents who can create or modify or exchange value, and make agreements with each other - who have economic agency. Adding the Ecological Agent also expands the concept of "economic", bringing that kind of activity and impact, and even agency, out to whole living ecosystems, not just the human one.

If people want to define types of organizations (like cooperative, corporation, network, community, etc.) we provide a classification property which people can define as they wish. We do the same for the ecological agent (like ecosystem, forest, etc.).

We have defined the properties of Agents very minimally. There are a number of useful properties in existing vocabularies, such as foaf, vcard, schema.org, and others that can be used. Or projects can create their own properties as needed.

Agent Philosophies

We also want to acknowledge that some people prefer to think of themselves as independent and decentralized agents who interact in different places in the economy as individuals, and some people think of themselves more as members of different groups and networks and communities and interact more in the context of those groups and networks and communities. Many experiments are going on as people strive towards another economy. We want to support all these experiments, so want to support both of these ways of thinking and organizing ourselves. The agent vocabulary is very flexible, and will support these as well as current conventional structures.

So, if people want to form a group that has agency as a group, fine. If people want to consider that their group does not have agency as a group, also fine. Not all groups, and especially not all networks, will be economic Agents in Valueflows. That depends on the agreement of the people in the group, and what the group needs to do as-a-group. For example, does the group need to make agreements as-a-group with other agents? Or exchange resources with other agents as-a-group? Note that within the vocabulary, network formations will emerge, as agents have economic interactions with each other in the world. This does not mean that the network is necessarily a Valueflows Agent, but it could be, if the participants want.