tyaga.org

For Q2, I finished working on several documents as planned. The OCAUP document has been revised, and there are now more detailed presentations of the IS Plan and PaCT. The recent study plan outline rounds out the suite of documents that outline tyaga’s approach from core principles to initial packaging strategy.

For Q3, I will continue updating an accounting system to support the updated OCAUP model and PaCT payments. The Prowl protocol document will be overhauled to more fully explain the domain-as-currency-brand approach, the need for a simple payment witnessing protocol such as PaCT and reporting requirements regardless of the representation or content-type used (html, xml, json, etc.).

Hopefully, there will be packaged information systems ready for use in exploratory studies starting next year. To find out more, please read the study plan and a related post about currency indexes.

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.

The accounting system demo is still being coded and tested, but is near completion. OCAUP support will ensure reconcilablity between periodic currency activity tallies and unused budget balances. PaCT support will include triggering the publication of transaction record and notification of reporters to cross-verify published transactions. The accounting sytem will also support voiding a published record that has not been cross-verified yet, but there are still some transaction sequence details to be worked out.

Based on the results of recent efforts, PaCT is evolving to look more like the ‘HTTP ‘ of Prowl. It used to be that ‘witnessing’ or ‘notarizing’ was just another reporter feature, but PaCT’s importance is really based on its potential to facilitate the everyday use of independent currency brands. Essentially, PaCT is a generic payment protocol for witnessing published transactions, in contrast to the more common approach that uses intermediaries or settlement agents through which payments are routed.

I have been holding off on working on Prowl’s report structures and details, but as mentioned in the previous post, different representations will be supported. One idea is for the accounting system to generate a report, copies of which will be audited and kept by independent audit service providers, and the URI locations of various audited copies will be tracked by a reporter in a document format similar to Git’s parent tree listing. This plan will farther simplify the role of a basic reporter (the one declared in a currency brand/domain’s home page) to letting indexers and evaluators choose the location from which to pull reports. But this is still only a tentative plan.

Many of the development work, planned changes and protocol revision will likely continue to Q3.

In the current effort to prototype an accounting system with OCAUP and Prowl support, I have had to re-evaluate the  expected capabilites of reporter service providers. It seems appropriate to drop the expectation for reporters to parse published feeds or email for unmarked transaction records. Instead, an accounting system should be responsible for parsing record submissions through feeds, emails or http. The accounting system should then submit properly marked-up records to a reporter application.

This change implies that the earlier Blogger demo, which triggers a reporter ‘observer’ service through notification email, would not be supported by future Prowl versions. On the plus-side, Prowl reporters would become simpler and more flexible, especially in being able to accomodate different conventions, such as XML or JSON, when posting verified records into a report structure. Standard parsers for those report representations would make it easier to code auditor and evaluator features into reporter applications.

It is important to note that changes to query and report structures does not impact Prowl’s record publication syntax. A publishing platform such as Blogger would still be expected to publish records in a ‘canonical format’, which would simplify the cross-verification of matching copies from transactor domains.

I have been updating an earlier version of an accounting system from last year. The upcoming version will have built-in support for Prowl and the ocaup model. The user interface will be SMS, email and HTTP-based. 

Also planned for this quarter, the Prowl report structure will be revised to an HTML rather than plain-text representation, in order to use head-metadata tags for information such as encoding, language and record delimiters. The move to HTML representation is just one of the many changes planned for Prowl version 0.2. 

An aspect of Prowl record publication that was not explained in an earlier post concerns the authentication of transactors. When transactors do not belong to the same currency community, such as in ocaup inter-entity trade, the ability of a transactor to ‘publish’ a record in a certain domain implies membership in that domain, with the domain name being equivalent to the currency brand in Prowl. Thus, the authentication of brand membership is simplified, without requiring a centralized brand-membership registry or intensive authentication schemes. This publish-to-authenticate scheme is incorporated in the various PaCT sequences, which also includes reporter notarization to help deter fraudulent repudiation of published records.  

I have revised the hastily drafted game-design representation of tyaga’s goals. In reviewing the simplified “game rules”, I was reminded of the standards that underlie the success of the World Wide Web. The web standards, listed in order of importance by Tim Berners-Lee, include the URI, HTTP and HTML. In other words, the Web is primarily defined by the use of URIs, a standard that is easily taken for granted while HTTP and HTML receive more attention.

It was also no accident that URIs use the Domain Naming System, which was designed to be globally scalable and was already widely supported. For the same reasons, Prowl also specifies the use of domain names to simplify the implementation of the similarly crucial concept of Independent Currency Brands (ICBs). The use of separate registries would have added unnecessary complexity and led to collisions as more market entities establish independent currency brands.  

After the concept of ICB, the second-most important design aspect in Prowl relates to accounting models. Just as web and gopher clients offered interoperability in each other’s early protocol versions, Prowl is also designed to understand different market transaction requirements and effects on account balances. For example, would transactors have to be members of the same community to transact (mutual-credit, cc model)? Would the ‘buyer’ accrue debt which would have to be settled later (lender-borrower model)? By default, Prowl reporters are expected to support the cross-verification of OCAUP-based transactions, where the buyer entity’s unused expense and seller entity’s unused revenue budgets decrease by the same amount. The default notary support for OCAUP is similar to the default support for HTTP in web browsers.

The third-most important design aspect in Prowl relates to the representation of transaction information. Prowl specifies default published record syntax, report structure and query-response conventions. However, Prowl should support other representations as they emerge. As inter-regional trade in ledger-based currency grows, Prowl would need to support currency activity representations in different dialects. 

The game-design representation also shows tyaga’s infrastructure building blocks as a list of ‘game equipment’. Through Prowl standards and PaCT payment sequence, establishing and using independent currency brands should become simpler and more fun. 

I have just uploaded a heavily revised OCAUP document. The latest revision includes simple tables and attached illustrations. The main difficulty has been, and continues to be, finding appropriate terminology that adheres to common accounting language while purposely avoiding terms that might cause confusion with conventional interpretations.

At the moment, the most suitable terminology relates to ”budgets”. Ledger-based currency may be viewed as unused entity budgets that are periodically planned and dynamically reported as inter-entity transactions occur. OCAUP may be used to model and track how well an entity regulates against its self-determined limits. Entities that demonstrate effective self-regulation develop reputable currency brands, which should translate to better market access.  

The illustrated OCAUP currency activity and journal entry examples should help explain the “scoring rules/system” that tyaga is trying to establish. Speaking of scoring rules, I also drafted a game-design representation of tyaga’s information systems goals. The OCAUP document also has an attached table that compares mutual-credit accounting systems with OCAUP-based designs.

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.