• see: the Mutual Coordination Economics Working Group initiative

Key hypothesis: What market pricing is to capitalism and planning is to state-based production, mutual coordination is to commons-based peer production!

Key tool in the context of Peer Production: The Open Value Network Model (see Network Resource Planning software, Wezer; and the Ryaki project

Current experiments and examples: Sensorica and the internal transparency in the Enspiral network

Introduction to the potential for Mutual Coordination through Peer Production

0. What market pricing is to capitalism and planning is to state-based production, mutual coordination is to commons-based peer production!

1. Today we have the emergence of a new proto-system of production, Commons-Based Peer Production in which contributors are free to contribute to a common pool of shareable knowledge, code and design, which may be associated through physical production in microfactories using distributed machinery such as 3D printing.

2. This emerging new system of value creation and distribution is not sustainable if contributors need to find work as labour for capital, so contributors need to be able to generate livelihoods for themselves, keeping the generation of surplus value within the sphere of the commons and its contributors.

3. To achieve this, we advocate the use of Commons-Based Reciprocity Licenses such as the Peer Production License. This allows for the creation of a non-capitalist 'counter' economy based on Open Cooperativism and other forms of an ethical economy. In this proposal, the commoners or peer producers, i.e. the contributors to the commons, are also cooperators of their own corporate entities, which create livelihoods and insure the surplus value remains within the commons. So, in between the sphere of the accumulation of the commons (open input, participatory process, commons-oriented output), and the sphere of capital accumulation, there is a intermediary sphere of cooperative production, which regulates physical production and the social reproduction of the commoners-cooperators.

4. The production of immaterial common pools is already regulated through mutual coordination and stigmergy, i.e. coordination based on open and transparent signals of what is needed by the system; but physical production cannot be coordinated without similar signals, i.e. the coordination of production through information. It is therefore a next logical step to advocate and practice, within the ethical entrepreneurial coalitions that coalesce around particular commons through their shared adherence to the commons-based licenses, to also practice open accounting and open supply-chains and logistics. This means that within these coalitions, physical production can also be coordinated through stigmergic signals; and negotiated coordination and even voluntary common planning can take place on the basis of the shared production information.

Key resources

• Whitepaper by Provenance: The Blockchain as Solution for Transparency in Supply Chains‎‎

Citations

Bob Haugen and William McCarthy:

"The Internet as a means of coordination is driving supply chain collaboration very quickly, but there is no accepted standardized semantic model that can actually encompass all supply chain activities. A standard, non-proprietary semantic model can make supply chain collaboration more like a public utility (the semantic Web) that businesses plug into than the current slow and expensive collaboration projects." (http://www.jeffsutherland.org/oopsla2000/mccarthy/mccarthy.htm)