About

I'm Bob Haugen, part of Mikorizal.org, and also author of this blog.

In the 1960's, I was one of those people who thought the revolution was just around the corner. And then it wasn't.

Which was good, because if it had been, we would not have known how to coordinate an economy. People would have starved and died because of our incompetence.

Soon after, I saw signs that the Soviet Union was failing. If they couldn't keep it together, how could we?

So I took a bunch of jobs to learn how the capitalist economy works. Along the way, I learned how to program computers because computer systems were becoming a lot of how the economy works.

In the 1990's, I worked for an ERP software company. ERP means Enterprise Resource Planning, which was the kind of system all the big companies used (in the US, anyway).

Around 1995, I was starting to learn something, and led a skunkworks project to start to redesign manufacturing software around different principles, somewhat influenced by what was going on in Japan at the same time: in particular, the Toyota Production System.

We developed an app for shop floor scheduling called The Quick Response Engine. That wikipedia article is wrong about a lot of the details, but at least we got a wikipedia article...

Later one of my customers and I wanted to spin the same ideas out into whole supply chains. Long story short, we started a company that failed, but learned a lot.

We needed a conceptual model for supply chain operations and found Resources, Events, and Agents.

And also around that same time I started to think I understood something about how a better economic system could be developed, out of cooperative economic networks, that then start internetworking with each other.

So I retired and started to work with other people on a series of experiments with cooperative economic networks that you can read a bit about here.

Which ultimately led to this blog, and I hope lots more experiments. And sooner or later, a better economic system...