This section monitors new metrics, evaluation and accounting methods that are appropriate for a collaborative, peer to peer economy.

The necessary Value Revolution strives to re-integrate both social and environmental externalities, currently neglected in the dominant system, into our production systems.

Key theme: how do we evolve towars "relations of open reciprocity, communal sharing, gift-giving and voluntary collaboration allowed value to circulate in its unalienated forms, including labor power, political expression and interspecies ecological exchanges". [1]

Key Concepts: Unalienated Value ; Generative Justice

Key document: Value in the Commons Economy, our report on the transition in value regime, by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Niaros.

Contextual Citation

The moment we stop optimizing the digital economy for the growth of capital, and optimize it for the circulation of value between people, everything will start to get better really fast.

- Douglas Rushkoff [2]

Introductory Resources

• see the work of the Assembly of the Commons in Lille, to define the: Six Characteristics to Define Commons-Oriented Entities. as well as their work on Contributive Commons as Tools for Reciprocity

• the most important ecosystem accounting system in the world: the Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism used by Senplades in Ecuador.

• For the most advanced p2p Value Accounting System, see Sensorica's Open Value Network. Watch these videos for an introduction: Tiberius Brastaviceanu on the Scalable Peer Economics of the Sensorica Open Value Accounting Network; or read: Tiberius Brastaviceanu on Why We Need a Open Value Accounting System. More about the software

• Video, for the historical, present and future context of the transition in value regime, listen to the podcast: Michel Bauwens on Shifting From an Extractive Value Regime To a Regenerative Value Regime

• Video: Christian Felber on the Common Welfare Economy; a metrics system to measure the common welfare contribution of every market entity.

• Sustainable Community Indicators: "Of the expanding “family” of alternative wealth measures, sustainable community indicators are probably the most comprehensive expression of qualitative wealth and community development generally. At their best, they synthesize a range of quantitative and qualitative data, including people’s subjective preferences." [3]

Citations

Chelsea Rustrum:

"There is a way to more equally distribute wealth and transfer value. We can easily build technology to account for, assign, and distribute value as it’s created. Value distribution is coming — it’s just a matter of time." (https://medium.com/@shareablelife/the-sharing-economy-a-social-movement-dying-to-become-an-economic-one-5bbebddad96b#.xdmdl62lt)

On the Value Revolution that is taking place

"Under the radar of mass media and mainstream academia, a value revolution is taking place that is promising to transform humanity’s very notions of wealth and economic development. Expressed in an explosion of both traditional academic indicators and innovative new quality-of-life and sustainability measures, this value revolution is not simply revealing previously invisible “full costs” of production, but also “redefining progress” more positively—from quantity to quality. Economically, our ways of growing and distributing food, providing & using energy, building buildings, making and exchanging clothing, etc. are being reexamined not only to reduce their negative impacts, but also to more fully express their social and ecological potentials. They are geared not simply to the sustainability of communities and ecosystems, but to their regeneration—to make economic development, as eco-architect Bill McDonough would say, “not just less bad, but good.”

- Brian Milani [4]

On Measurement and Power

"The history of measurement has been a history in which the privileged and empowered have been the creators and institutionalizers, while the oppressed and powerless have had no choice but to use their master’s tools and definitions of reality (Kula, 1986; Scott, 1998). This is a pattern that continues to this day, perhaps best exemplified by current trends in educational “reform,” where in the United States, billionaires who never set foot in a public school growing up, and who send their own children to private schools, swayed federal legislation toward the creation of a vast technologically intensive testing infrastructures that now dominates the entire public school system (Ravitch, 2014). New tests and measures are being forced upon teachers; if they do not use them they can be fired. Educators are being disempowered, deskilled, and rendered without voice when it comes to some of the most essential aspect of their professional practice, i.e., assessment drives curriculum and pedagogy. Meanwhile for-profit industries are poised to make billions off the privatization of one of the oldest and most inspiring public institutions in American history."

- Zachary Stein [5]

Tiberius Brastaviceanu on Open Value Accounting System‎s

"We need to make the distinction between co-creation of value and value exchange. These are two important processes but very distinct ones. Sensoricans are working hard to solve the value accounting problem, which is meant to support large scale co-creation of value. The value accounting is a way to capture individual contributions that blend into a unique product, to evaluate these contributions, and to compute equity in the end product, a % for every member.

NOTE the value accounting system is NOT a system that objectifies value and it is not a bean counting system! It is a contract, a method to which all contributors adhere to reassure every contributor about how the future revenue will be redistributed. That's it! It preserves the subjective nature of value, it can take, in theory, into consideration all types of value, tangible and intangible.

Once the product is made it is exchanged, and this is where you need currencies, or systems of value exchange.

Again, value accounting for co-creation of value and value exchange are two different things in my mind. These two systems must interact with each other, but we need to see them as separate. One is designed to manage the amalgamation of value from different agents into one product, the other one is designed to facilitate value exchange between different agents, with no value added in the process."

Tom Walker on the need for a new Social Accounting system for the Labor Commons

"What I proposed in "Time on the Ledger" is a social accounting framework for evaluating the net social productivity of different hours of work arrangements. The basic idea is that first, there are fixed social cost to labor that are not reflected in capitalist accounting and the way that employers can shed their labor costs by laying off workers and second, there is a technologically-determined optimal length of working time per worker exceeding which subtracts from net social product over the longer period. The information from this process can guide collective bargaining and public policy advocacy while at the same time inculcating a commons mentality in practitioners. It is not enough to translate back and forth between capitalist accounting perspective and a commons ideal. One must become fluent in a new social accounting language." (http://ecologicalheadstand.blogspot.ca/2013/02/the-new-charter-of-industrial-freedom.html)

Key Resources

Key Articles

• Michael Gurstein: On the Failure to Measure the Contributions of the Internet Economy

• A New Way of Measuring Openness: The Open Governance Index. Liz Laffan. TIM Review, January 2012 [6]. A way to measure the degree of real Peer Governance of any project (particularly for Open Source Software companies).

• Introduction to the Eight Forms of Capital‎

• Open Source Ratings Are Needed To Break the Ratings Agency Oligopoly

• Accounting and Control of the Labour Process

• Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks.By Nick Szabo

• 1) Post-modern Measurement and The Hyper-Measured Self. 2) Sacred Measures and Measures of Pure Abstraction: A Socio-Political History of Quantitative Objectivity. By ZACHARY STEIN

Values and Currencies in Peer Production

• Measuring Value in the Commons-Based Ecosystem: Bridging the Gap Between the Commons and the Market. By Primavera De Filippi and Samer Hassan. MoneyLab Reader, 2014 [7]

• Pearce, J.M. (2015) Quantifying the Value of Open Source Hardware Development. Modern Economy, 6, 1-11. doi: 10.4236/me.2015.61001. open access

• De Filippi, P. (2014). Translating Commons-based Peer Production Values into Metrics: towards Commons--based Crypto-Currencies, in Lee Kuo Chen D. (ed.), The Handbook of Cryptocurrency. Elsevier

Social Ledgers for Labor as a Common-Pool Resource

Tom Walker:

• Social Accounting for the Good Society, http://www.scribd.com/doc/44657733/Time-on-the-Ledger-Social-Accounting-for-the-Good-Society

• the implications and the background of the analysis of labor-power as a common-pool resource, http://commonsandeconomics.org/groups/stream-2-labor-and-care/forum/topic/labour-power-as-a-common-pool-resource/

Shared Value, Blended Value Conceptions

• Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer. Creating Shared Value. Harvard Business Review, 2011 [8]: “creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges

The potential of universal open ledgers (Blockchain / Holochain)

• Trust by Computation in the Bitcoin and Blockchain Model

Key Books

• The Ethical Economy. Rebuilding Value After the Crisis. By Adam Arvidsson and Nicolai Peitersen. Columbia University Press, 2013

Historical Context

• The Institutional Revolution: Measurement and the Economic Emergence of the Modern World. By DOUGLAS W. ALLEN. University of Chicago Press, 2011 [9]

• James Aho's The Religious, Moral and Rhetorical Roots of Modern Accounting [10]

• Rob Bryer's Accounting and Control of the Labour Process [11]

Key Reports

• Value in the Commons Economy: Developments in Open and Contributory Value Accounting. By Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Niaros. Heinrich Boll Foundation, 2016. [12]

• * Report: Re-imagining Value: Insights from the Care Economy, Commons, Cyberspace and Nature. By David Bollier. Commons Strategies Group in cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation and David Graeber. March 2017.

[13]

Key Statistics

• 90% of for-profit companies use unreliable accounting (from 72% in 2008); read more in: Dangerous Dynamics of Capitalism's Futuristic Accounting ((from static to IFRS’ futuristic accounting). [14]

Key Tools

• Co-Budget, a open source tool from Enspiral, to allow network members to re-invest in each other's projects

• Balance, an open-source tool to keep track of shared finances for groups