Agent

Anything that can perform an action. Has agency, i.e. can also plan to take actions.

Agents can be individuals, groups, projects, networks. Agents can also be bots, machines (IoT)

Related to REA / NRP-CAS / NDO

Agent / Affiliate vs User

In a p2p context it is not advised to reduce agents or affiliates to users.The term user is appropriate for centralised platforms (Facebook, Uber) where participants have no control over the platform, interact on terms set by the owner, and provide data in exchange for access. An agent, by contrast, is an entity with agency, i.e. capacity to plan and take actions, to own its own data, and to participate in defining the rules of the system it operates within.

This is not merely semantic. The data model follows the ontology: a "user" has an account on a server that another party controls. On p2p infrastruture (ex. Holochain), an agent has a cryptographic key pair that they control, a source chain of their own actions that only they can append to, and relationships with other agents that are maintained on a shared DHT, not a shared database controlled by an operator. Holochain is the first infrastructure natively designed for agent-centric data models.

In the old REA / NRP-CAS language we have users and economic agents.

A user is linked to an account, it is credentials to access the NRP-CAS.

An economic agent can represent an individual, a project / venture, another network or even a traditional organization. Economic agents (or simply agents) ca be of various types: agent type.

Agent that contribute to processes are affiliates. Furthermore, affiliates have profiles, can form a digital identity, and that in the case of a NRP-CAS as a platform (server-client architecture) user is the credentials to access the platform.

We can say that resources are used in events by agents (hence REA).

User vs agent

The term user is used in the context of online centralized platforms such as Facebook or Twitter. The users in these contexts have no control over the platform, they are provided the platform as a service, in exchange of user data produced through interactions within the platform, which can be monetized elsewhere by the platform owners.

User also has a local connotation, as an agent within a specific application. Agent is used in a more generic sense that can transcend the local contexts.

In a p2p context it is not advised to reduce agents or affiliates to users.

The Agent Type Spectrum

In Valueflows language, an agent is anything that can perform an action. Therefore an agent has agency, i.e. can also plan to take actions.

In a P2P complexity economics framework, the system must model:

• Individual agents: human participants, each with a source chain
• Collective agents: groups, working groups, communities — entities with collective agency
• Project/venture agents: temporary organised efforts with their own goals and resources
• Network agents: larger-scale communities (an OVN as a whole is also an agent in its ecosystem)
• Artificial agents: bots, AI models, IoT devices — increasingly significant actors in the commons

Individual vs Person

The Two Layers of Agent Identity

This distinction is of deep philosophical and technical importance:

An individual is the physical you. You exist and therefore you have access to certain things. A person is a representation of the physical you, it is an agent in a socio/economic context.

In practical terms:

• Individual-type identity: exists by virtue of holding a cryptographic key pair. Permissionless access. No disclosure required. Like Bitcoin: you only need keys to transact. This is the foundation of the NDO's permissionless entry model.
• Person-type identity: requires reputation, credentials, or demonstrated capabilities earned through participation. Required for sensitive processes: governance participation, custodianship, specialised service provision.

This two-layer model is not bureaucratic gatekeeping, it is a precise answer to the information-theoretic question: "what does this process require to function well?" Taking the bus requires a ticket, not identification. Performing surgery requires credentials. The NDO must distinguish which processes are ticket-level (individual-type) and which require person-type identity, and build the appropriate mechanisms for each.

In complexity economics terms: forcing all interactions through person-type identity is a high information-overhead solution applied to low-information-need situations. It reduces participation, increases friction, and creates centralisation risks (who issues the credentials?). The OVN model, and therefore the NDO, reserves person-type identity for the specific processes that genuinely need it.

Identity ≠ Credentials

When you take the bus you don't need to tell the driver all about yourself before boarding, you just show your ticket, which is the credential required to access the transportation service.

Credentials are context-specific access tokens derived from past actions or present conditions. They are not identity. You can prove you can safely use a 3D printer (credential) without revealing who you are (identity). This distinction, made precise through zero-knowledge proof technology, is the foundation for privacy-preserving participation in P2P systems.

The implications for NDO agent design: the system should be designed so that agents prove what they can do through minimally-revealing credentials, not by revealing who they are through full identity disclosure. This is currently only partially implemented: the PPR system generates verifiable contribution records (a form of capability credential), but there is no ZKP layer to share them without revealing the underlying data.

See also

• Identity
• Profile