We came up with the best portamento for this at a Guerrilla Translation meeting: “Simplexity”. We need the underlying complexity for adaptability and modularity… but we can also have streamlines interfaces that don’t overwhelmed.

I know how you feel. But some stuff is just complex. Counter-intuitive. You have to live with and study it for years, a lifetime, generations.

It’s the illicit yearning for simplicity that gives us Donald Trump as US Presdient, and Brexit?

> What are supply or demand signals for?
> Do I have the right general idea? To enable coordination of supply and demand; so that what is needed is supplied at an appropriate time, rather than people not being able to get what they need when they need it; and what is produced is consumed while it is useful, rather than being wasted or spoiled, or tying up resources by sitting unused as excess stock.

Those are the purposes of the coordination signals between supplying and consuming processes. The signals of need are newer. The first ones were point-of-sale events (I’m excluding explicit customer orders as signals). More recently, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc., started to harvest everything you look at, and in the cases of FB and Google, also information on your contacts and what you post on social media. (I think Google claims not to use the contents of your email, but I don’t know that.)

Regardless, those are among the signals that are being called “demand sensing”.

I’m suggesting for a better economic system we could add a lot of ecosystem signals (for example) that don’t matter to e.g. Amazon.

> Where is the balance between transparency and privacy in these kinds of transactions, particularly when individuals are involved in them?

That’s a great question. (Which I think is what you say when you don’t really know.) I think minimally anonymizing, depending on the situation. But I’m also writing this assuming a different economic system and something like the P2P Foundation’s “partner state”, rather than the current surveillance capitalist intelligence apparatus. My goal in writing was to suggest that a better economic system is not only feasible but could actually work better economically and especially ecosystematically, as well as being more humane.

I am obviously handwaving at a lot of the details. Your equally good questions about some of the details will need to be answered if and when we start to develop such an economic system.

Do I have the right general idea? To enable coordination of supply and demand; so that what is needed is supplied at an appropriate time, rather than people not being able to get what they need when they need it; and what is produced is consumed while it is useful, rather than being wasted or spoiled, or tying up resources by sitting unused as excess stock.

I like the sound of this: “a Mutual Coordination Economy can work from a much richer set of need signals and need-sensing than a capitalist economy can handle, because capitalist demand signals must have money attached. And Mutual Coordination Economy signals should not need them.”

Looks like you are trying to work towards a truly open system, where as much information as possible is available to all, including “intent-casting”. Just what I would hope for! Here’s a few follow-on questions that occurred to me…

Where is the balance between transparency and privacy in these kinds of transactions, particularly when individuals are involved in them?
How can all that information be effectively filtered in a way that commoners can use easily?
What parts of the signalling system do online P2P marketplaces (like eBay) provide — i.e. which requirements already have workable solutions, and which do not yet?
Is there any difference between the concepts of “mutual coordaination economy” and “commons economy” and “collaborative economy”?
Can this functionality be generalised to be even more useful to commoners and the commons economy?

I have a real curiosity about whether the kind of supply and demand matching needed in industry generally, and the kind of matching in e.g. recruitment, could be seen as variants of one another. If they can, it might open the way to a great simplification from the user’s point of view. That’s one of the things that commoners need — simplicity.

Groups that I know well are reaching out now through the existing social media and bringing new people into their network, and finding sponsors for projects through (for example) academic connections. That’s all good, and helps them grow, but does not yet give evidence that we are all building the same system.

But some of them are also connecting with other projects in their own domain, which could lead to the larger set of connections outlined in the article. Those connections can also be made through existing channels, not requiring new infrastructure.

For example, groups of software projects are connecting together in this and other attempts at alliance: https://www.hylo.com/c/collaborative-technology-alliance

Groups of young farmers are connecting in (for example) http://farmhack.org/

Making the connections between different groups in the same or similar domains right now is more important than new infrastructure. After that, across domains. New infrastructure, whenever it becomes a forced move.