Economic Networks

Supply chains and economic networks and open source software go together like peanut butter and jelly (or whatever marriage cliche you like).

We first ran into this marriage when we were working with the Open App Ecosystem (https://www.loomio.com/g/exAKrBUp/open-app-ecosystem). One conclusion from discussions in that group was that we needed shared open vocabularies so the open apps could communicate with each other. That’s when we started to work on the https://www.valueflo.ws/ vocabulary.

Coordinating supply chains are also like that. They operate on resource flows between different network nodes, where one node receives resources from other nodes as inputs and uses them to produce other resources as outputs (which go to other nodes).

The collaborating supply chain nodes need to communicate about their resource flows, to send messages requesting resource inputs and notifying of resource outputs. So unless all of that communication happens manually, they need software that can talk to other software used by their collaborating supply chain nodes.

That’s a lot easier if all of the nodes are using compatible software. One way to do that is for all of the nodes to use the exact same software, but that gets expensive. An easier and cheaper way is for the software be able to communicate with each other, which implies some standard message formats and protocols.

Which leads to freely available open source software.

Lynn Foster, my partner in http://mikorizal.org/about.html and the leader of the Valueflows project, reminds me that open source also allows you to fix obvious bugs in some of the software you are using. With closed source, you can’t do that.

Here’s a list of open source software that implements Valueflows, the vocabulary we work on: https://www.valueflo.ws/appendix/usedfor/

More in the works as more people get the idea and start to work on it.