A series of posts about those things. Oldest posts first.

Developing software for organizing supply chains and economic networks...

…is something we intend to do. This is the start of a plan for us and we hope other collaborators.

…maybe best to start small.

Maybe start with some people who are already exchanging economic resource flows.

…maybe start easy:

Maybe start with some software that the participants already have and use, like email. Add mailing lists. And then add social media.

Best social media to use is based on ActivityPub:

See https://activitypub.rocks/ . It’s an open standard with lots of software that can build on it, as we intend to do. And lots of people using it, for example, in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(social_network)

…then add economic logic to the social media.

One good economic planning logic is MRP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_requirements_planning).

MRP was designed and developed by Joe Orlicky (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Orlicky) in 1964. It was the first system that I know of that did economic planning in a way that could not be done at scale without a computer.

But MRP is usually a big centralized long overnight top-down software process usually run by a big company, because it is expensive and time-consuming to implement. But we want bottom-up peer-to-peer conversational collaborative planning that should be easy and cheap for each participant to implement, as in, just install this app on a personal computer.

One problem with MRP…

…it plans for a single company, not whole supply chains or economic networks. What companies often do is add other expensive and complicated software to their MRP systems and use those add-ons to plan their supply chains. But the add-ons often do not integrate with the MRP system. Awkward, difficult, and even more expensive.

But the design outlined here will plan whole economic networks via each network agent creating their own input and output plans for them and communicating those plans to their network neighbors, as suggested below.

Fortunately, MRP is already a sorta conversational system:

MRP systems usually do not create plans, they sends messages to people suggesting what plans they should make, and the people create the plans by following the MRP suggestions.

So that is perfect for what we want to develop, which is…

P2P MRP:

Where participants in the economic networks send MRP-style messages to their network neighbors suggesting plans and changes to plans.

How would distributed P2P planning work?

Agent-centric? Each Agent (where an Agent can be a person acting for themselves or acting for an organization) could send planning messages to its network neighbors in local conversations (where “local” means not geography but topology. “among network neighbors”

Suppose that Agent A gets resource inputs from Agent D, E, and F, and sends output resources to Agent B and C. So those are the network neighbors involved in planning and executing resource flows. Agent D would be involved with Agent A and Agent G, Agent E with Agent A and Agent H, etc.

How to implement

One software infrastructure would be Holochain (https://www.holochain.org/). As they say, it is an “open source P2P app framework”, and it is serverless. Each agent communicates from its own Holochain app on its own personal computer.

Another infrastructure would be ActivityPub (https://activitypub.rocks/), more server-to-server than agent-to-agent, but you can include the agents in the server interactions. And people could combine their social media conversations with their economic planning interactions, for example:

Use the Valueflows vocabulary

https://www.valueflo.ws/ was designed for these kind of economic conversations, and if anything needs to be added or changed, they are up for the changes.

Next…

I’m still working on this. I want to detail the conversations between the agents in that diagram such that it will make sense to people who know MRP…need to find at least one of them for some early feedback.