Monthly Updates - October 2014

@lynnfoster , @ahdinosaur and I have been working on https://github.com/openvocab/ovn

We decided to focus on a possible application for Enspiral Services, and wrote up this very tentative treatment:
https://github.com/openvocab/ovn/wiki/OVN-Sample-Data

(Questions, criticisms and suggestions for improvement are welcome.)

It is expressed now in the NRP (valnet) vocab, but we plan to translate into a new OVN LOD vocab when that is ready.

We'd also like to start harmonizing with everybody else on this stuff: https://github.com/openvocab/ovn/tree/master/vocab (that is, agents and their relationships, persons, groups, etc etc).

Last 2 weeks was on vacation. Didn't do much but I came with a nice idea.

I am currently working on building a metaprogramming tool based on ideas around model oriented programming and that led me to an idea. Since each production process uses specific coordination, communication patterns (agile, lean, etc) depending also on the interdependencies of processes in the project, can we create a domain specific language that would describe them?

I think that we can. One would then write down that code and use github for versioning and for ipdating. Then we could build an interpreter that would take the code and produce signals to each agent when it is required of them to do a specific work etc.

This is my next project after I finish what I do now.

YAY! Nice timing @simontegg :0)

Here's the exec summary I've been promising...

We've deployed PLP (Personal Linked Profiles)-Browser to http://directory.open-steps.org. It integrates PLP-Editor.
PLP-Directory + PLP-Provider run both on profiles.allmende.io + profiles.open-steps.org /directory or /provider.

Very likely to be used as a directory of participants for TransforMap.

Possibly being adopted by Open Knowledge Foundation, too.

Still lacking Events, Places, Offers and Requests. Processes. And some other stuff hidden in the discussions.

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Thinking about how Cobudget would help TransforMap.

Reading again through the Enspiral Open App Ecosystem whitepapers + Mykorizal's NRP descriptions + trying to understand OVNs. Need to integrate with TransforMap's OpenStreetMap proposal via LOVing it is apparent.

Waiting for Loomio Docker in a month.

One thing to add - Mikorizal is focusing now on coding the value equation for NRP, using requirements from Sensorica, Guerrilla Translators, and a local herb network. This distributes money back out to members of a network, based on their contributions and an agreed upon formula. When we have some minimally proven code, we'll add that piece to the open vocab work we are doing with @ahdinosaur .

Also had a thought that it might be useful at a later point to add on a CoBudget (or layer of CoBudget?) process for distributing income, as another method.

Sounds excellent, @lynnfoster. As you probably know, Michel knows Tiberius / Sensorica. It sounds like this tool will be a useful asset - and a good fit/compliment for Cobudget too.

@lynnfoster do you know what agreements Sensorica use for contributors to participate? Useful applications for the world of PPL... http://thecitizensmedia.com/pub/section/the-commons?id=1174

@carolinesmalley asked: do you know what agreements Sensorica use for contributors to participate?

They are still working out a lot of the details as they go along. Also, each project can set its own value equation. Here is their wiki page on VEs: http://valuenetwork.referata.com/wiki/The_Value_Equation - although it does not have a lot of implementation detail. Here is one concrete example: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MHiMZT8KzS8tX6FQqN0XTe41NsYPcWKbgw443HWAmyU/edit?usp=sharing.

Apologies for the late update.
#openappjs - databrowser update
We’ve deployed a toy version of the databrowser on github-pages. At the moment it displays data from (some) people in Craftworks. You can ‘view people in a list’, and ‘view a profile’ and navigate between the two. You can engage with the databrowser project by voting on user stories on the trello board or check out the github roadmap and make an issue.

This is the start of a project to build recomposable multifunction UI’s that integrate directly with open-app’s vocab. I’ll discuss the next steps, technical and design sides of this in separate updates.

#openappjs - next steps:

I’ve been noticing quite a lot of pull from within and outside of Enspiral for ways of visualising who/what/where of the network. Responding to this pull @nanz1 made this cool infographic for a Shareable article. The brief was to keep details out of it because these go out of date so quickly.

I believe there’s still a case for Enspiral and other similar to ‘see themselves’. With this in mind I’m going to focus on visualising a group as network, and apply some of things I’ve learnt a Twingl to this challenge.

The alternative is to focus on more typical app things ‘add an account’, ‘update info’ etc. These will give us a ‘fatter’ MVP and while the technical details behind it will be innovative the UX will still be fairly ‘meh’. By trying for something innovative where there’s pull, we’ll still have a read-only app in the short-term, but it’ll be easier to ‘sell’ this Linked Data stuff back to a non-technical audience.

@simontegg - we like radial graphs as one way to visualize a group.
http://tip.webfactional.com/accounting/radial-graph/5/
http://nrp.sensorica.co/accounting/radial-graph/33/

Our implementation leaves a lot to be desired, especially for the dense ones like Sensorica. But we'll get back to it and sparse it out better when we get time. Otherwise, here's the code.

Uses jit.js, which has a pretty easy to integrate radial graph.

P.S. one reason we like radial graphs is that they don't really privilege any one viewpoint. You can put any node into the center and see the network from their viewpoint.