At Global Guerillas - Progress Towards Economies As A Service, Meta Currencies, and Resilient Cmmunities - Read This, It's Interesting

This post is kind of an extension of this previous one (the adjacent possible). Check it out.

JOURNAL: Do Resilient Communities Produce EVERYTHING Locally?

No.

People within resilient communities do trade for goods and services they don't produce locally, just like we do today. The difference is that resilient communities produce much more of what they do use locally -- particularly food, energy, and essential products.

This local production means that resilient communities aren't completely and utterly dependent on international trade flows, the stability of the financial system, and global economic performance. A dependence currently so profound that even a minor hiccup could cause our existing communities to shatter (or if the shock is bad enough, become feral). Further, local production means that every resilient community contains a viable local economy that can become the basis for continued prosperity even when the global economy falters (like the slow motion train wreck we are currently experiencing).

Fortunately, almost all of the technology trends are pointing towards producing more locally. Ride that trend.

NOTE: One of the reasons I'm working on building new software economies is that they will come in very handy in the future as things get worse. They make it easy for resilient communities to bootstrap each other economically.

EaaS (ECONOMY as a SERVICE)

Here's something to get your mind working (whether you agree or not)...

EaaS (economy as a service) is likely to be a categorical term that you are going to hear a lot about in the not too distant future. Why? The EaaS is now in the adjacent possible of technological, societal, and economic development. The current situation is begging for it to be developed.

What is an EaaS? In a nutshell, it is a complete economy -- soup to nuts -- as a software service.

These new economies will...

• be bootstraps and new ventures. Self-organizing structures. Top down efforts, even from established social networks won't work.
• in most cases fail. Fortunately, there will be lots of them and those that do succeed can grow very, very quickly (scaling to hundreds of millions of participants in a matter of years).
• be very diverse. Lots of different rule sets will be tried (way beyond the classical *isms).
• operate within the current economy and against it at the same time. Competition with the current economy for participants. Opt-in to the one that suits your values.
• change the nature of immigration -- a flight to zones of connectivity. Also, it creates the potential for 'emigration in place.'
• accelerate the build-out of resilient communities. RCs will often be the local instantiation of the values/rules of the EaaS.
• often combine social rewards with real world rewards.
• often use the reward structures of MMOGs.
• be global. Participants will join from within every country that offers Internet access.
• often arbitrage global legal systems (like corporations) to reduce their exposure to taxes, regulations, etc.
• eventually develop and implement technologies (and by extension wealth) at rates far, far faster than the current economy.
• likely reverse the trend towards urbanization.

• 
  

JOURNAL: Flash Mob Dynamics

This is a fictional presentation of a flash mob that has gone awry by Tom Scott. Worth watching.

The value in this video is its insights into the dynamics (the negative outcomes depicted are merely used to add punch to the presentation) of flash mobs. Think in terms of how this process can be adapted for disruption (open source warfare) or for constructive ends (EaaS or Resilient Community). It's another root toolkit item.

JOURNAL: Social Incentive Structures for an EaaS

Here's a little more of what we can learn from online gaming. Below is a short video on 7 ways games incentivize achievement by Tom Chatfield. It's very good, give it a watch.

Simply, the incentive structures of online games are more attractive than those in our increasingly corrupt economic and social system (heads I win, tails you lose).

Think of these techniques as part of the root toolkit for constructing an EaaS (economy as a service) that provides win-win-win outcomes for participants.

EaaS: Non-rival Goods vs. Rivalrous Goods

Localize production. Virtualize everything else. JR.

This is kind of a lame post in that it doesn't break new ground. It's a simple backgrounder. I thought the concept needed to be aired (at least my spin on it) for those readers that hadn't seen it before.

Here's a conceptual building block (for building an economy as a software-enabled service, EaaS). It is the distinction between rivalrous goods/services and non-rival goods/services. Here are some examples:

Rival goods and services:

• physical goods such as food, consumer products, and raw materials
• personal services such as assembly line work, massage, or lawn care
• service flows such as energy, bandwidth, and water

Non-rival goods and services:

• digital goods such as product designs, music, movies, and books
• digital services (that cost nearly zero to provide on a per user basis) include most software enabled services (i.e. Web sites)
• digital information/sensor flows

As you can see, rival goods and services share a common trait. The original purchaser suffers a tangible loss when they are used by someone else. In contrast, non-rival goods and services can be copied endlessly without significant loss to the original purchaser (although, in some cases it can be argued that exclusive use of these goods and services offers the owner a competitive or status advantage).

Our current economy doesn't differentiate between rival and non-rival goods. Nearly everything is sold or traded as if it is a rivalrous good, even though the transactional volume of non-rival goods is starting to dwarf the trade in rival goods.

Something to think about.

EaaS JOURNAL: Behavior Blocs

Here's a simple way to regularize demand and rationalize patterns of consumption (for rivalrous goods): behavior blocs.

A behavior bloc:

• Is an opt-in service.
• Is a set of behaviors (things you do and buy) that are connected to a specific goal/objective that you aspire to. i.e. Local food/production. Efficient energy use.
• Uses MMOG dynamics, social meta-currencies, and social networks to manage, measure, and reward activity that aligns with the goal. Far, far beyond simple local currency and loyalty schemes.

The benefits of a behavior bloc within a commercial context include:

• Regularization of demand (frequency, scale, duration, etc.). Stable targets that can be planned against.
• Can rapidly shift demand to specific goods/services that don't yet exist.
• Can disrupt existing patterns of commerce.

An economy as a service (EaaS) provides the tools that make designing, launching, and growing a behavior bloc easy.

RC JOURNAL: Accelerating the Development of Resilient Communities

One of the major attributes of resilient communities is that can locally produce most of what they need (food, energy, and products). Needless to say, the transition to local production won't happen overnight. Let's explore this.

Most of the efforts to increase local production, to date, have been either:

1. The result of community action. Efforts like the transition towns movement.
2. Development driven. Communities that have built from the ground up with resilience in mind, i.e. agricultural urbanism.

Unfortunately, these early efforts have been sporadic and the results haven't reached what's needed to become fully resilient. Why? The reason is that these efforts are being attempted early in the cycle, before the trends that make transition inevitable have fully matured. These trends include:

• Expensive energy. Energy costs are climbing (with occasionally spike), but they haven't reached a level that makes local production much more attractive than global production, yet. They will.
• Technology. The costs of producing goods locally is rapidly decreasing due to new technologies. For example, with desktop fabrication, we are right at the cusp of a rapid increase in efficiency/capability -- the equivalent of 1980 in the personal computer industry.
• Disruptions. Shortages, panics, and cascading failures. We had a taste of a big one in 2008 in the financial industry and lots of small ones. More to come since the global system is only becoming more interconnected and unstable as time progresses.
• Economic failure/D2 (the second global depression). There's a strong argument that we are already in the midst of a second global depression. As economic failure intensifies on the global stage (debt, default, income stratification, fraud, etc.), the need for local economic activity will intensify.
• Global guerrilla insurgencies. Low grade, crime fueled insurgencies that spread like the plague. Think Mexico. Shootings, kidnappings, hijackings, etc.
• There's many more (political chaos, the inevitable global pandemic, sovereign default, the disappearing middle class, etc.), but these are some of the top ones.

Fortunately, there may be another way to get resilient communities off the ground faster than waiting for the trends driving their development to become inexorable (and in the process lose many, many people to the encroaching failure). The fastest way I can think of is to use the Internet to build a system that fosters their development (what other method can go from scratch to 500 million participants in three years).

The system I propose is a fully functional economy built as an Internet service. I believe that almost all of the elements need to build this, launch it, and gain widespread adoption are already available today. Further, there are people ready to build it. The only limitation is the funding needed to exploit the opportunity.

JOURNAL: Be unreasonable and maladjusted.

Be unreasonable. Be maladjusted. Make the future you want it to be. Build something new. Some quotes worth remembering:

George Bernard Shaw: The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him... The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself... All progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Martin Luther King: God grant that we will be so maladjusted that we will be able to go out and change our world and our civilization. And then we will be able to move from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man to the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.

JOURNAL: Let's Build Some Metacurrencies

Ok. Lots of people have asked me what they can do to move the EaaS (economy as a service) and resilient communities, along. Here's a good way to start.

One aggressive strategy is to use metacurrencies to automate, operate, and accelerate online businesses that are owned by the participants.

Here's what I mean. A metacurrency, in this context, is a way to put a numerical value to what each of participants in an online system does. The more they advance the system (their performance), the more metacurrency they accumulate. The metacurrency earned equates to an ownership stake in the company = which can be converted into cash in the standard economy.

So, if I put some time in recruiting new members, sourcing deals, adding content, adding new features, fixing bugs, etc. I earn metacurrency that advances my ownership of the company.

Every online business, is essentially a set of processes that can be logically constructed in a way that allows success of every participant to be measured automatically (to allow low cost scalability).

If you have some ideas for a metacurrency that may work and are willing to share them with this project, let's discuss it in this group:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Metacurrency_Project/

Why start with the Internet business ecosystem? How does this relate to resilience?

Simple: Cause that's where the money is. Conquer that challenge and resilient communities will be easy.

NOTE: Welcome message for the metacurrency working group

Pretty straight forward. It is almost the definition of a BHAG.

THE OPEN SOURCE ECONOMY and METACURRENCIES

Here's an alternative to complaining about how broken the current system is (or arguing about non-sense). It's a way to create something new that can improve all of our lives.

The article below is the latest post to the Metacurrency Project. If you are interested, please join the mailing list (you can get digests either daily or weekly if you just want to keep tabs on it).

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Basically, what this metacurrency project is about (at least my intent) is to find a way to make it possible to rapidly build successful open source ventures (and eventually an open source economic ecosystem) that:

1. actually generates income for the participants ($$, yen, Gold, Euros, food, etc.),
2. allocates rewards based on contribution, and
3. doesn't require a corporate hierarchy/bureaucracy to operate it (which ultimately dooms every corporation to stagnation/death/inefficiency).

The short term objective is to build socially network enabled Internet ventures that proves the concept by generating real incomes for the participants.

Why focus on social network enabled Internet ventures? They grow very quickly, require little capital (fixed costs are low), and the tasks required to operate them are quantifiable. They are also VERY lucrative. However, at the end of the day, the only true obstacle to building a successful venture of this type is a network of people willing to advance the system. As a result, this project is aimed at finding ways to build these networks better and faster than any other way imaginable. How? By rewarding the participants actively contributing to the venture, with ownership of the venture.

To accomplish this feat, I propose the development of metacurrencies. Here's what I mean.

The metacurrency (a currency about currencies) project isn't about building a currency in a traditional sense. It's about finding automated ways to determine who makes a contribution, how much they should be rewarded, and when they get that reward.

If you look at any discrete venture, it's a bundle of tasks that run continuously that solve a problem (in this case, generates income) until these tasks don't solve that problem anymore (either the problem doesn't exist anymore or a better way to solve it has been found). It's a continuous process. These tasks can be decomposed into specific functions that can be accomplished by individuals or groups. Each of these specific functions is a metacurrency (the rules of which are transparent), which measures the performance of individuals/groups in accomplishing these them.

So, an Internet venture = a bundle of metacurrencies. Some metacurrencies, like deal sourcing in Groupon's case, are venture specific. Others, like reputation and skill at a particular task, are applicable economy wide (part of the platform).

Metacurrencies can be configured in a variety of ways.

• They can be binary = yes or no.
• They can be continuous = like a meter that measures % of max contribution at any given time.
• They can be complex, with feedback loops = ratings or completion metrics that modify the results of any single process (as in, the customer satisfaction level of this process is very high, so the value of the completed process is increased).

Where do we go with this if it works? Here are some ideas:

• It would be possible to leverage existing metacurrencies to quickly create new ventures.
• The addition of MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) mechanics to metacurrency construction (structured randomness to some portion of the rewards) would accelerate adoption.
• Connected metacurrencies (across ventures) would make for very interesting dynamics. i.e. local food production venture connects with the reward allocation of a coupon venture.
• Levels and status. Continual success with a metacurrency could yield advancement in skill level -- unlocking new metacurrencies with new reward structures.
• Rapid group formation that can accomplish a variety of tasks (i.e. resilient communities).
• Etc.....

I believe we can actually build this and it will work. This is still early days, but if we can get 50 k participants over the next year, 500 m in five years isn't out of the question.

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How can you help?

• Join in on the discussion. Form working groups to solve specific problems.
• Financial Support. A funded think tank to work through hard obstacles and prototype solutions would be great (!).
• IF you are a lawyer or a businessperson with global public company experience - you might be able to help us find a legal venue (a nation with laws that wouldn't restrict ventures built using this framework) for this effort.