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Valueflows Reading.md
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Jillian Ada Burrows Sosa

My notes are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. All images here are also similarly licensed.

Valueflows Reading

The following is a set of reading that I've found helpful for thinking about Valueflows. For background context, Valueflows is a real world implementation of the mostly academic REA ontology.

Technology shapes what we make.

Economics

Inequality

Value

And descrepancies in value, such as the different in a currency's value: If we look at the difference in the cost of certain kinds of cellphones, they are out of reach for most people in many places. Looking at minimum wage in Colombia, it would take someone working full time 7 months of saving up their entire wages (meaning no expenses) to be able to buy a new iPhone. In Mexico, it would take 3-4 months. In the US it would only take one month. Considering campesinos might have less income based on the productivity of their crops and the going rate for produce, some of them may never be able to afford a new iPhone. Of course, one also has to look at why the global south is leveraged like this in global financial markets.

Money/Finance

Mutual Credits, Time Banking, and Complimentary Currencies

Accounting

There were many ways of tracking things in the past. Double entry accounting was just an incremental improvement that was good enough.

Capitalism itself is just a word referring to the head of cattle an ancient herder owned, aka "stock". It came into use as "Capitale" around the 12th or 13th century. It did not take the modern form of usage until around the mid-1600s where it was intertwined with the monopolies an imperialism of the time. Most of what gave corporations their power was the relationships with the crown, monopolies, and other aspects of law and society (aka, imperialism).

There's also a possible claim for double entry accounting originating in Roman times as the "Tabulae Rationum" and another possibility of originating in India, with the "Desi Namu" or "Jama Nama" system.

Online Payments/Settlement

Thermodynamic Constraints

Governance/Management

Memory and Cooperation

Murmurations

REA

Foundational REA Papers

The REA Ontology

REA Computational Proofs of Concept

REA Literature Reviews and Summaries

Semantic Modeling of Enterprise-Wide Economic Phenomena

REA Research Methodology and Design Science

AAA Design Science webinar

Valueflows

Here are some overview images I made to help explain Valueflows. They are not perfect, but they've helped explain a few things.

I've been playing with a kind of diagramming that tries to represent all of the aspects visually, but in a way that is indicative of an underlying grammar. I have been trying to think about how processes are actually mappings from source flows to output flows and are therefore bicategories (not unlike the discussion laid out here). Or a process can be seen as a set of containers of input and output flows or a directed hyperedge between input and output flows. Proposals and Agreements are containers of flows. Scenarios and Plans are containers of Processes. The EconomicResources are just resource stockpiles (with additional data).

I only mention ResourceSpecifications in passing, but in some cases, they can be used as more generic stand-ins to EconomicResources (but that's definitely not always the case). The ResourceSpecification is a category of resource and that it's possible that, in certain circumstances, any of the EconomicResources which conform to it might be substituted for another. There are obviously certain cases, such as a ResourceSpecification of 'Alcohol Infusion' and the EconomicResources of 'Tepezcohuite' and 'Mallow', or a ResourceSpecification of 'Git Repo' and EconomicResources of 'REA Plaspace' and 'We'.

I'm almost where I want to be in terms of something that feels ideal. Note, this is not a UX, it's just a bunch of ideas for understanding how the ideas and objects all fit together.

In the following images, the Plan is the same in the last three boxes. It could also be imagined as having the arrows pointing back down through the stack of Event to Commitment to Intent.

The two Agreement boxes are the same Agreement. Just as in the above set of Plans, the arrows could be pointing down the stack from Event to Commitment.

This shows a scenario where two Processes feed into each other.

This Scenario has two processes that feed into each other. It also has a transfer. One of the processes has many inputs.

This shows how a Plan with a Process overlaps with a Proposal.

I've made the process a container that holds the inputs and outputs. However, when I draw a process as a container without that dotted line dividing the inputs from the outputs, it feels weird that there's nothing holding the inputs and outputs together, but that's likely fine as it is just a slot in a grammar that's being ocupied. It almost feels like some more specific process definition language should be used inside of the processes to specify how they should be carried out and how each resource should be used and how that maps to the output. This could be as simple as just displaying the process description in a central box that has all of the connections from the flows going to it. Or it could be something like:

Granted, most processes are supposed to be operational processes — which means they should be fairly simple straightforward things. For instance, slicing, dicing, mixing, sauteeing, boiling, etc. This means most higher level processes will actually be scenarios or plans in Valueflows. However, there may be an opportunity to add in more feedback and cybernetic type aspects to plans. This is something that is considered in Spivak, D. I. (2020). Poly: An abundant categorical setting for mode-dependent dynamics and Libkind, S. (2020). An algebra of resource sharing machines [these papers are listed below].

Value Chains

Value Networks

Cosmolocalism

Resource Contention/Sharing

Quantum Resource Theories

Catallatics

"A catallaxy is thus the special kind of spontaneous order produced by the market through people acting within the rules of the law of property, tort and contract." (Hayek, F. A., 1982, Law, Legislation and Liberty (Routledge, London), Vol. 2, pp. 108-109).

Catallatics come from the Greek καταλλάσσω, which has various meanings in differing declensions that refer to:

  • changing money
  • exchanging items and prisoners
  • transgressing/contravening conventions
  • reconciling accounts and people
  • to be attoned of an offense

Related Works:

Personally, I must note that these works put to much emphasis on efficiency, as though that was the sole indicator of human satisfaction and improvement.

Contracts

Technology Adoption

Language

Time

Relational Frame Theory (RFT)

Category Theory

Not all of the papers in this list deal directly with category theory, but they are still mostly mathematical in nature and adjacent to the themes of the core category theory based papers.

Introduction

Not so Introduction

Introduction to n-Categories

Categories of Containers

Linear Logic

Categories of Networks

Valueflows (the subset of EconomicResource, Flow (Intent, Commitment, Event), Process, and Plan) is really a Properad. Even other structures around Proposal, Agreement, AgentRelationship have a Properad structure.

Petri Nets

Petri nets are very similar to how Vauleflows models the flow of resources between processes. However, Petri nets typically have a ability to make a decision formalized within their logic (like a threshold being crossed at which point an action occurs). Valueflows leaves this decision up to the people using it, so it can't formally predict as much as Petri nets. However, that means that any of the symmetric monoidal category aspects of Petri nets likely still apply to Plans and Processes in Valueflows (especially if we allow for nesting Plans and fully create a Properad structure around them).

Language & Meaning

Quantum Resource Theories

I'm just putting these here beacuse there may be some interesting but tenuous connection and I don't have time to sort through it. Maybe someone else will tell me exactly what the connection is. Or some research will benefit from this independent of Valuflows.

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