Skip to content

Principles

The "4 opens"

These principles are borrowed from the 4opens, which we embrace for the Valueflows ecosystem, with a bit of clarification for Valueflows purposes. (Of course anyone can create anything using this documentation, there are no legal restrictions, so these are the VF team's aspiration and declaration.)

  • Open source – as in “free software” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software this keeps development healthy by increasing interconnectedness and bringing in serendipity. The Open licences are the “lock” that keep the first two in place, what we have isn’t perfect, but they do expand the area of “trust” that a project needs to work, creative commons is a start here.

  • Open “industrial” standards – this is a little understood but core open, it’s what the open internet and WWW are built from. Here is an outline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard.

  • Open process – this is the most “nebulous” part, examples of the work flow would be wikis and activity streams. Projects are built on linking trust networks so open process is the “glue” that binds the links together, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process.

  • Open data – is the basic part of a project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_data without this open they cannot work. This does not mean that personal data should be open. The goal here is to not let public goods be privatized or enclosed.

Principles for the model

These principles are about the model behind the vocabulary.

  1. The model must enable collaboration between different people in different organizations using different software on different platforms using different human and programming languages.
  2. The model must be able to form global networks which can track the flows of resources (values) forwards and backwards. Or maybe it would be better to say "in any direction", but forwards means in the direction of value creation, and backwards means in the direction of return or compensation.
  3. Corollary: the model must be able to support various fair methods of distribution of resources. The ability to find contributions to the network or the economy regardless of where and when in the network configuration those contributions occurred is key.
  4. The model must also be able to support coordinating work between different people in different organizations. People who are not concerned with rewards may still want to coordinate work.
  5. The model must be able to support circular economies, value flows where resources come full cycle to be fed into the same set or other processes. Recycling, re-use, and other ways to encourage resources not becoming waste, must be supported. Flows currently considered "externalities" should be able to be internalized in the model.
  6. The model must be fractal. It must support global views of networks in aggregate as well as drilling down to lower and lower levels of detail. Those lower levels of detail, for example inside one organization, may require permissions.
  7. The model must also work on the Knowledge, Plan and Observation levels, where the objects on each level are linked appropriately to the other levels.
  8. The model must support non-business-as-usual organizational forms and economic relationships in addition to traditional business organizations and relationships. These organizational forms can be as varied as the people and groups who create them want. VF in particular embraces this experimentation towards next-economy / solidarity-economy / commons-based-economy / P2P-economy/etc. in this transitional time.
  9. The model must support systems where all the people involved can get shares of the outcome to allocate as they wish. The shared outcome could be resources produced by the contributors, like food, or it could be income (reciprocal resources exchanged for resources produced). A group can choose to introduce various monetary currencies into their flows but can also do all the coordination and accounting without introducing such artifacts.