TODO: record short video equivalent to reading this page

Hello 👋 I call myself elf Pavlik. I would like to present here what role I want to play in World Peace Game, originally formulated as a challenge:

Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone. — Buckminster Fuller

Source - Buckminster Fuller Institute

For many years I specialize in web technologies, including participation in various W3C groups. I focus on open standards and developing various prototypes as open source software.

Reciprocity map

Diagram below shows first static version of a view on reciprocity map centered around me. Currently it shows just a part of all the products and services I receive and who provides them. As well as services I provide and who receives them. While I don't provide any products directly myself, services I provide contribute to processes which in turn create open knowledge products which everyone can freely access (receive). As you can see we currently don't see clear cycles representing Circular Reciprocity.

TODO: add timeline with slider

TODO: add legend

Problem

Currently mainstream monetary currencies with ISO 4217 currency codes (commonly called just 'money'), which people supposed to rely on to manage reciprocity, don't have a way to ensure that we cultivate circular reciprocity. How do we know that chains of providing and receiving make full circle.

Distribution inequality

Source - World Inequality Report 2018

With great inequality in current distribution of nowadays mainstream currencies, we let small minority of population to have un-proportional influence on what majority of population dedicates their work towards. While many people believe in democracy and even envision liquid democracy, in many ways we keep moving in direction of plutocracy.

Misdirecting efforts

As society we face potential of many alternative futures which we can co-manifest from any present moment. We all have some vision of the future we would like to work towards. Given our communication capacity amplified by recent communication technologies, we can develop common visions and work together to bring them to life. As one of main consequence of drastically unequal distribution of mainstream finances, we have very common scenario where people choose to work on something they can pay for, even if their work in no way contributes to manifesting vision of the future they share with other people they work with. For example people doing construction work, might choose to dedicate their work to building a casino, even that many of them might see more need for building learning centers or health centers. We to often let vision of a minorities who control finances let suppress vision of majorities which have the actual power - defined in physic as rate of doing work.

Solution

Pluralism of reciprocity management technologies - currently mainstream currencies just one of available options.

New generation of reciprocity management technologies taking advantage of World Wide Web and rapid adoption of mobile devices

Cooperative planning which allows coordinating our efforts - work we do, in a way that results in beneficial outcomes which all participants envision.

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew. — Marshall McLuhan

Circular Reciprocity Suite

While I see cooperative planning and directing our efforts towards manifesting feature we envision as more important goal in a long run. I still want to address the challenge of cultivating reciprocity and ensuring that it stays circular first.

Keeping track on what we provide and receive

Which often happens through exchanges

• work (eg. doughnut charts on my plan below) I see work done by humans as one of two fundamental elements of our economy, with natural resources as the second one. If we trace back origin of all the products and services, we can see that everything comes from natural resources transformed in products through human work. Later using those products combined with additional work we create services. Similar to Clockify and Toggl
• services (eg. cards with purple glyphs on my plan below)
• products (eg. cards with pink glyphs on my plan)

Visualizing and analysing reciprocity

Static example of reciprocity map above shows how we can start visualizing reciprocity. Having accessible and interactive visual interface allows to have better overview of our socio-economic relationships and how we cultivate reciprocity. Just as with street maps, we should have possibility to zoom in and out, show and hide various aspects and discover alternative ways to create value flows based on reciprocity. Having such tool should help everyone raise awareness about one's own role in global socioeconomic network.

Redesigning reciprocity while planning

When we take advantage of digital tools for planning, we have choice to stay conservative - tend to repeat closely how we did something in the past, we can also choose to take progressive approach and systematically adjust our plans and adopt new emerging ways of creating value flows and cultivating reciprocity. I would like to develop Circular Reciprocity Suit in a way that one can stay conservative but those who choose more progressive attitude will find many helpful features. It will support any number of currencies: ISO4217, LETS, blockchains coins, timebank hours etc. It will also support barter and multilateral barter.

At some point I would like to introduce gamification elements, for example adding challenges to try out some different approach of managing reciprocity as they become more and more available.

Plan (Q2 & Q3 2019)

While developing Circular Reciprocity Suite I will heavily use and contribute to those three open technologies:

• Valueflows

  We develop web ontology for expressing economic interactions. It aims at generalized approach which doesn't assume that everyone wants to do commerce. It embraces pluralism of economic aproaches and enables unlimited ways to cultivate reciprocity. It also provides building blocks for cooperative planning, expressing intents and making commitments. Individuals and collectives can develop their autonomous plans as well as more broadly shared plans. Those plans have clear causal relations between efforts made and resulting benefits, even with long chain of indirections.

  In last four years I participated semi-regularly in development of Valueflows ontology, as one of three main contributors together with Lynn Foster and Bob Haugen.

• Solid

  Solid aims at creating decentralized read-write platform which fully embraces The Web. Project led by Tim Berners-Lee - creator of The Web and director of World Wide Web Consorcium.

  I follow Solid practicaly since its conception. I recall seeing early drafts and demos presented during W3C Social WG - F2F in Paris 2015

• RDFJS

  Javascript (Ecmascript) has been the language of web browsers since their early days. For long time javascript modules, which work with RDF existed but had limited interoperability due to lack of common interfaces.

  I act as co-author of Data Model spec and Streams Spec.

In Q4 2019 and Q1 2020 I plan to start shifting my efforts towards:

• Vientos

  Open source platform which aims at creating Mutual Aid Networks. Local organizations and individuals can publish proposals for how they would like to interoperate. I already has data model inspired by Valueflows and it can easily adopt its newer versions.

• Open Food Network

  Open source platform which aims at creating local food networks by connecting producers, processors, distributors and consumers. Currenty it has commerce based approach, but once Valueflows gets more stable I would like to take advantage of it to bring more diversity to food networks which already use Open Food Network software.

Sponsoring

To have possibility to focus full time on that work, I will need to help with securing very specific products and services. Our current dependence on monetary currencies results in need for broader community of supporters to help with sponsoring acquisition of those products and services.

TODO: explain how using Circular Reciprocity Suite I want to transition toward direct in-kind support

One can donate using those transfer options

• Payoneer (waiting for account verification)
• Paypal

I stay open for suggestions to enable other transfer solutions.

TODO: explain in detail transaction fees for each of the options

TODO: automatic currency converter based on day's exchange rates

TODO: interface to direct donation toward specific goods and services

I want to keep all donations and who made them transparent. If you don't want to get listed as sponsoring specific products and services, please do not make any donations.

As I work on web components of Circular Reciprocity Suit section below will become more and more interactive.