tyaga.org

I have revised tyaga.org’s mission to be more concise and clear - please visit the About page for a quick look. I realize that not everyone agrees 100% with the scope of work or strategies that are outlined in this site. For those who agree with the practical aspects of Tyaga’s IS Plan, feel free to use any idea or code that you find useful. I am also very open to collaborating with those who appreciate tyaga.org’s envisioned goal, path and tools. 

Even for those who take exception to tyaga’s approach, there might be room for common lines of actions if only we stay open-minded, as discussed in a related post. I am more than willing to change tyaga’s direction based on evidence gleaned from practical experience. At this point, there is little in the way of actionable results from other projects that would justify a revision of the Tyaga IS Plan.  

The following documents are now available to help explain the Tyaga IS Plan:

• An Open Infrastructure for Adaptive Currency Information Systems: This browser-enabled slide presentation explains Tyaga’s approach to separation of concerns, with links to related demonstrations.
• Published and Cross-Verified Transaction (PaCT) Sequences: These transaction sequence examples illustrate the type of system interoperability that would be essential to the widespread use of ledger-based currencies.  

In addition, there is now a packaged version of software code, tentatively named Kit, available for download. Kit is a revised version of an earlier Prowl reporter implementation for the Apache/MySQL/PHP platform. The packaged files are also browser-viewable - please browse the filenames for methods and code snippets that might interest you (such as parser.php and the svg-graphing functions.)  The Kit 0.2 package is not refined by any means, but it offers basic reporter functionalities.

I will begin writing use cases to illustrate independent currency brand support through the OCAUP accounting model. I’m also hoping to package an acounting system that I developed from last year in order to demonstrate not only OCAUP, but also built-in support for a protocol such as Prowl. 

After debating whether to move forward by coding a market implementation package or documenting the IS Plan more throughly, I have decided to allocate more time on the latter. I intend to finish drafting additional pending documents for Q2 2009, and to move to market implementation packaging for the second half of this year.

While I feel that practical demonstrations are always more convincing and more easily grasped than written plans, there is a clear need to explain the ‘tyaga’ approach to currency design that lists information system functional requirements and shows the strategy for the separation of concerns. This need became more apparent after I drafted the prowl_layers diagram. Even though there are now more systems that use the publication-oriented approach, tyaga’s IS Plan seems to be unique in positioning the accounting system as a layer that feeds the publisher platform, rather than the other way around as illustrated in the prowl_vs_twollars diagram. I hope to explain the rationale behind this design consideration in the planned document drafts for this quarter.

For now, I will simply note that responsible market entities typically maintain independent accounting systems and ledgers. It would be easier to ask each entity to build on top of what it already uses, to independently declare its own budgets and to self-regulate against those budgets — the only additional effort will be to publish market objectives, periodic tallies and flow records in conventional formats in order to promote accountability and auditability.  In contrast, I am skeptical of the perceived benefits/costs in putting the accounting system and transaction control as a layer above the publisher platform.   

In an effort to facilitate the discussion of open money standards, I have created two diagrams that others might find useful, proposed architecture and prowl vs. twollar layers.

If you have questions or strong opinions about the proposed architecture and comparison diagrams, please join the discussion at http://groups.google.com/group/prowl-users?hl=en. Just recently in that forum, I have tried to discuss some details of the Prowl design that concerns potential collaboration areas with other currency projects.