OVNi stands for Open Value Network infrastructure.

Working definition of infrastructure - a coherent set of tools that support productive and beneficial activity. The infrastructure integrates various modules from communication (ex. messaging, including social media), coordination (ex. agenda, calendar, planning, kanbans), repositories (documentation and other type of media, such as photos, videos, designs or CAD files, etc.), decision making (ex. voting, such as Loomio), resource planning and contribution accounting (ex. NRP-CAS, which contains modules for inventory of shared resources, process stewarding and planning, demands, supply, benefit redistribution and other type of transactional modules, etc.), credentials and reputation, roles, etc.

All the modules of the infrastructure are integrated into a digital environment that must be designed for leveraging social intelligence and stigmergy. It must allow maximum transparency and openness. In other words, the digital environment must support p2p economy activities or collaborative entrepreneurship activities.

The infrastructure specifies a set of tools and their associated procedures (see also methodology) to be used by agents to achieve their goals in the context of projects and ventures.

Infrastructure is a structural elements in an organization, see more on organizational structure. As such, it must be considered in parallel with other structural elements such as culture and ethos, methodology, governance, and organizational interface. In other words, it cannot be considered in abstraction of these other structural elements.

NOTE: we are exploring new p2p technology, blockchain and holochain, and we are constantly looking for individuals with skills in this field. Sensorica documents efforts for transition in THIS folder.

See other efforts: Provenance, Backfeed, Colony

Development

History and development Spaces

Integration of collaborative tools for open networks has been performed within Sensorica since its inception, in February 2011, when the Sensorica website was first published. Sensoricans used Google Sites to integrate a series of other Google collaborative tools such as Google Drive, Youtube and Photos (as shared and public repositories), Calendar (coordination), Mailing list (communication), Blogger (public communication). Other non-Google services were also used, such as Facebook (social media communication), Diigo (information mining), Trello and the NRP-CAS (planning), Github and 3D Wearehouse (other repositories), Loomio (decision), etc. More on Sensorica's digital environment.

Other infrastructure components such as identity (see below), were implicit to the tools that Sensorica adapted. Fiat transactions were carried out using the banking system through the Custodian services. Governance was managed (and still is in 2022) on paper, with some elements of governance (norms / rights) embedded as features of the other modules (ex. public view and comment access to Google docs, edit rights to all affiliates).

Development of the NRP-CAS, a central piece of the infrastructure, is documented on Value Network on Github. This has been forked to Sensorica/valuenetwork on Github. See Sensorica's NRP-CAS as an example.

In 2014, a collaborative effort for generalizing the NRP-CAS was created as the project OpenVocab, which later became valueflows, see on Githuband (the website). The valueflows project was moved during the summer of 2020 from GitHub to GitLab.

After the spring of 2014, a new group was formed mostly based in Europe to work on a OVN infrastructure based on semantic web and linked data. See OuiShare labs/Value Networks

After the summer of 2014 a new initiative between OVN developers and Enspiral started to work on a the third generation of the NRP-CAS. See OVN Sample Data on Github

In February 2019 Holo-REA was created as an effort to port the server-based NRP onto the Holochain p2p infrastructure. See on Github and Discord.

Other branches of the NRP There are now five versions of NRP:

the original, which Sensorica is using now.
the Freedom Coop fork, integrates Faircoin:
the GoPacifia fork of the Freedom Coop fork
django rea
Chris Troutner's fork of the Sensorica version:
Bob and Lynn fork of the Freedom Coop fork - development

The P2PValue project made a comprehensive study about commons-based peer production networks in order to extract basic, high level design requirements for IT infrastructure to support their activities. Their results came out in 2016. This project was followed by the p2pModels project.

Discussion groups

For old discussions, watch Sensorica meetings on Infrastructure see Sensorica's Youtube channel and search for "infrastructure meeting".

Theory

An OVN is modeled as a living system. Its infrastructure design emerges for optimal performance in terms of creativity, productivity, synchronicity, quality assurance, responsiveness, adaptability... and any other explicit objectives. The OVN must also respond to ethical requirements (see the Ethos page, and take into account solidarity mechanisms (see empathic access).

The infrastructure of an OVN is mainly a flow infrastructure, i.e. it allows resources to be used in different contexts by network affiliates (agents), while taking into consideration different property rights of these resources, their respective use access rules, and the rules that govern the rewards after use. Network affiliates use resources in different contexts, called projects or ventures.