tyaga.org

The last quarter of 2011 has been productive as I have been able to devote more of my time conducting simple studies. I have generated a lot of preliminary data from prototype tests, but unfortunately, I am not prepared to share those results yet. I am still sifting through the data and familiarizing myself with relevant analysis techniques along the way.

I am enthusiastic about my progress and of having the opportunity to learn many things along the way. Although a lot of analysis work remains, it feels good to accomplish my main goal of performing at least one study this year. It was not easy switching gears midyear to code a prototype system for conducting studies, and then again to refactor the prototype in November to improve the efficiency and reliability of getting results. The wait throughout the first half of 2011, while settling in at a new workplace, was really worth it. Amazingly, I was able to use — and is still using — many of the lessons I’ve learned from my new work responsibilities.

For example, I ended up using a JSON-based datastore since MySQL seemed too heavy for coding a quick prototype at work. This shortcut proved really handy when I began to work on my personal project again. It really helped me see why different tools are often necessary for different prototyping tasks. MySQL is not a good choice for a research-oriented database system, at least in my case, so I dropped it and everything went more smoothly with simple JSON-formatted output files.

More importantly for my continued productivity, being in a research environment helps cultivate my skills and motivation. Even the daily routine of commuting to work requires a certain level of discipline to make my spare time count, a challenge that I find rewarding. I should also mention that I tried Erlang along the way and also Git, but the learning curve made me go back to the familiar PHP and the simpler(?) Mercurial. The research/coding workflow that I have developed around performing studies really ties in well with a decentralized code versioning system. I’ve also accomplished the goal of creating a new site, actually a new blog, as mentioned in a previous post.

So, after a productive 2011, I have the following goals for 2012:

• Finish analyzing and share the results by end of Q1
• Demonstrate the study prototype in Q1
• Improve the study prototype to handle more sophisticated test scenarios by Q2
• Seek out potential collaborators throughout 2012

Looking forward to a great year!

There really is not a lot to update for the first quarter of 2011, at least not in the form of code and documentation. However, I could easily account for 15 hours a week in March spent on related research activities, which include reading, conceptualizing, and setting strategies. I have read, for example, a few of the latest IJCCR articles. Another web site that I have been reading lately is matslat’s blog. A consistently excellent resource is the Communications of the ACM, which even has an article on virtual goods and currencies in the April issue.

Why bother with ‘conceptualizing’? Mainly to avoid making contradictory or confusing statements. An example would be in this cc typology article, which is an otherwise well-written paper. Blanc’s description of first generation of CC schemes contains the oft-repeated “money is created (at) the very time of exchange.” I have written a while back that this description is misleading when there are debit limits involved in mutual-credit system. As soon as some kind of issuance or trading limit is imposed by a system administrator, the money (as limits) is only exchanged, and NOT created, at the time of transactions. Misleading notions should be carefully filtered out to clarify one what is doing and see where the pitfalls lay.

What about strategies? To use an analogy, strategies are not as crucial in a 100m dash as they are in long distance races. Working on nontraditional currency designs is like a marathon, a long term endeavor where the goals are not clearly in sight and various paths, some untried, are open for exploration. I have long ago shed any misconception that I could code an idea quickly and hope for spontaneous transmission (’viral’ is another oft-repeated but misleading description thrown around by enthusiasts.) The work requires commitment and endurance, luck and inspiration. It certainly helps to be in a community of similarly-minded advocates, but shared interest is actually less important to me than having a shared notion of what constitutes quality effort.

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.