Network interoperability - Membership Agreements and Fees

We have discussed a little about how to design a suitable protocol to make the various software systems of the different MC networks work together: The most popular answers being an API or nested and networked systems in which a "special member" is empowered to trade (up or down or sideways) with another "special member" of another network, in order to facilitate trades between members in different networks.

That seems solvable - albeit with a lot more work... but it is not what I want to tackle here.

The harder challenge, and to some extent the "elephant in the room" is how we handle differences in the various networks Membership Agreements and Fee structures.

If we can start to explore ideas for this here it may help provide a useful starting point as we progress towards the possible “Summit Meeting on MC platform and network interoperability”

I am struggling to even propose a possible solution to the "Protocol for interoperable MC networks - Membership Agreements and Fee structure". So will try to break this down a bit more by tackling the two aspects separately.

Membership Agreements:
Presuming every MC Network, or at least some that may want to be part of a wider Credit Commons, will have differences in their Membership Agreements, the only way I can see this working is if each Network signs up to a wider "Umbrella Org?" / "Credit Commons Membership Agreement" in order for their members to trade with members of other networks. It would be useful to try and test this, to work out if it might be viable, by taking two Membership Agreements from existing networks (e.g. Bartercard / Sardex and OCN) and seeing where / if issues would arise... and hence what the overarching Agreement would need to balance...
The idea of requiring there to be a global "umbrella Org" is slightly at odds with the Global Credit Commons concept ... but, currently, I am struggling to work out how it could work without one...
If you have better ideas about "Protocol for interoperable MC networks - Membership Agreements" I would love to hear them...

Fee structures
The most obvious idea that comes to mind is that, in order to balance the different fee structures of different networks, the inter-network trading software would need to be able to "understand" the fees of each Network, and make these clear to the buyer that wants to initiate an inter-network trade... So if an OCN Member tries to buy something from a Bartercard member, the OCN buyer is told about, and covers, the Bartercard fees. Presumably this clarity would incentivise Members to join the network with the lowest fees to reduce their personal fees... good for OCN as we aim to have lower fees than most other networks.
There may also need to be an "inter-network" trade fee - to cover any costs of the umbrella Org / any inter-network software fees...
But, if any specific network charges the seller fees as well as the buyer, the above gets a lot more complex...

This is all very "top of my head" and only my initial thoughts - I am trying to figure this as I type... So again, if you have better ideas about "Protocol for interoperable MC networks - Fees" I would love to hear them...

"The idea of requiring there to be a global "umbrella Org" is slightly at odds with the Global Credit Commons concept ... but, currently, I am struggling to work out how it could work without one..."
Not every group of groups would probably have its own articles of association and membership rules, unless they were the hardest of anti-establishmentarians. This would provide a legitimate procedure for changing rules and managing membership.
The parent group would usually have expenses and would meet them ultimately from member groups and from members. It is up to member groups how to finance the parent group. This is bottom up politics. The software should be configurable to work with periodic fees or transaction fees.
I hope this short answer addresses your concerns and that, at least at the protocol level, nothing needs to be very complicated.

Sorry, I'm a bit 'absent' generally, finishing up at Birkbeck + stuff to do in France. Anyway, my view of both the governance and software for the project is start from concrete examples and then generalise rather than try and produce all-embracing specifications. I dealt with X400 (email specification) in the 1980s, top--down, all things to all people and, in the main, it was an expensive, time-consuming disaster. Or, otherwise, rough consensus and running credit (pace Unix).

I missed a plane yesterday and spent the evening in Budapest with Teodoro, the Sicilian PhD student who is doing the research part of our LEDGER proposal. He had a call with Guiseppe this morning and asked him about Credit Commons and Interlace. This is good because its the first feedback I've had from a B2B operator.
"I just finished the call with Sardex and I asked them about Credit Commons. In a very short way, they told me that they don't agree with the governance perspectives, they think that a too open governance structure can be too problematic to manage so they are not interested in it for the moment.
Even if from an ideal point of view it is very attractive, from a practical point of view they see too many limitations regarding the feasability of the project.
About the interlace project, they told me that the project is already completed and the code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/InterlaceProject
About collaboration in general, they said that their needs are too specific that any possible partnership will require a long long way of in-depth discussions."
So what we see is that Sardex,, understadably is concentrating on its own needs and codifying its own way of working. This seems to be very entrenched, making interoperabiity hard. We need to better understand those issues - which is what this thread is about I suppose. We might find that more specifications are needed before the Credit Commons protocol is useful in a B2B context.

Platform 6

Not sure this is the place to log this, but it's not something to start a thread about . . Is Platform 6 known to OCN? In conversation with? membership overlaps?
- https://platform6.coop/
- https://www.loomio.org/g/S2GO31ij/platform-6-community

To me, looks more like a 'values club' than an enterprise? Similar issues to social.coop maybe - hoping to operate a platformed piece of the web as a coop, and no closer to resolving this? But with more at stake (actual ££). Has been 'soft launched' - which may translate as 'doesn't know yet quite what it is'.

Views on this?

We are members of Platform 6.