tyaga.org

The three main goals for this year are:

1) By spring: Finish coding and doc’ing the updated demonstration of a budget-centric accounting system to serve entities that issue independent currency brands. The transactional back-end is pretty much done, with inclusion of xtype accounts for double-entry of inter-entity transactions and IPP support to facilitate payments across independently administered ledgers and accounting systems. The administrative and user interface should be updated soon.

2) By summer: Conduct smaller studies prior to an actual exploratory study. I’m still working out the details of these intermediate studies, but I’m confident that these low-risk steps will yield useful information for conducting effective studies in the future. 

3) By year’s end: As some of the implementation concepts and strategy take concrete shapes, a more user-friendly website is being planned to offer accessible materials to general audience types. I’m sure most readers are not interested in following the always-changing technical implementation details, and perhaps there are even less who are interested in the philosophies and principles discussed at satconomy.org. At the same time, I am not really looking forward to creating yet another website, so this is lower on my priority list.

I have recently come across Postel’s Law, which is typically quoted as: “Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.”

This is also known as the Robustness Principle. It reflects tyaga’s vision of how independent currency brands should operate and interact: “Be strict in setting your own limits and performance, be tolerant in accepting other currency brand’s limits and performance.”

In other words, in order to promote the adoption and spread of independent currency brands, it is important to expect that most entities will likely have poor performance relative to its initial budgets. The important thing is to observe work with dedication and perserverance, and not to expect immediate success. A dynamic index is therefore a means for evaluating the progress of an entity through its currency brand, and not a means for avoiding transactions that could help another entity reach its goals. Something to think about when studying and promoting the use of dynamic indices.

I have taken a short break from coding accounting system and reporter features in order to present a rough vision for implementing the concepts and components that have been described in this site.  In this vision, the information system under development will be packaged for exploratory studies of dynamic currency brand indices.

All of tyaga’s work relates to the development of reliable and compelling currency brand indices. The impact of dynamic indices on the spread of ledger-based currencies will be comparable to the impact of search engines on the usability and growth of the Web. This is an optimistic statement that begs to be tested on empirical grounds. 

Of course, there are different ways to establish currency brand indices. Stephen DeMeulenaere / Strohalm publishes something similar once-a-year for complementary or alternative currencies, but the information is not sufficiently dynamic, and is neither easily auditable nor traceable to economic activities of market entities. When the “tower” analogy was posted in 2007, there were no apparent published efforts that appreciated the importance of this challenge. As a result, tyaga.org was established to actively research and develop strategic approaches for establishing dynamic brand indices. So far, the strategy involves the following concepts and components:

• Prowl’s publisher-reporter emphasis encourages the simultaneous development of multiple index applications.
• PaCT results in instantenously cross-verified and updated transaction information that indices could pull and evaluate
• OCAUP facilitates audits and reconciliation of information in internal ledgers, published reports and indexed evaluation metrics. 
• The concept of independent currency brands (ICB) promotes traceability to and indexing by specialized market entities, instead of communities-members or lenders-borrowers. 
• The IS infrastracture plan and diagram present the conceptual separation of concerns
• The Prism classification convention encourages new perspectives and critiques on currency design

The proposed study plan is one way to test the validity and effectiveness of various design elements, including tyaga’s assumptions made with regards to the design of information system.