![](\"https://media-cdn.entangledfutures.fm/podcast-entangledfutures-fm/production/media/rich-editor/channels/vPv5VdjRnPt/image-87263a0560932a6dbbd05b4e3d4f1246.jpg\")
A podcast exploring MutualityA podcast exploring MutualityConversations towards a world that work for everyone
Entangled Futures is a podcast exploring the world of mutuality, produced by Lucas Tauil.
Engaging in conversation with the people shaping collective spaces, we aim to identify adjacent possibilities— new opportunities for collaboration and innovation—that nourish a planet where everyone can thrive.
This work is the result of the excellence and dedication of an amazing team: Ira Nezhynska led the design, Kika created the music, Clara Chemin was the narrator, Paul d'Aoust developed the website, Mamading Ceesay handled the infrastructure, Matthew Nichols took care of integration and Jonathan Patecki edited the animations.
Come together! Help us bring the next season to life. You can support the show with a credit card on our Patreon page, (https://patreon.com/EntangledFutures) or with crypto using the Ethereum wallet, ENS: entangledfutures.eth.
0x24055dB18b971f24C3BFAB623A24Ee6c2b04F921
The show is brought to you by the Holochain Foundation. Holochain is creating technology that helps people team up, share information, and solve their own problems together—without needing a middle-man. Creating carriers that cannot be captured, Holochain enables privacy and holds space for innovation and mutuality.
Lucas Tauil is a trained, and seasoned communicator focused on participative culture and collaboration. Connected to the world of sustainability and decentralised technology he has worked as a Journalist for two decades in mainstream media.
Working with the power of difference and collective intelligence on multiple stakeholders organisations since 2001, Lucas is part of Enspiral, a collective of people working on stuff that matters.
Together with his partner Sandra Chemin and eight other families, Lucas co-founded Quintal Magico, a communitarian Steiner school in Paraty, Brazil. The couple sailed for six years with their two daughters from England to New Zealand.
","icon":"https://media-cdn.entangledfutures.fm/podcast-entangledfutures-fm/production/images/channel-4c7d31cfbcc5192ef6804cfa98b4b8de.png","favicon":"https://media-cdn.entangledfutures.fm/podcast-entangledfutures-fm/production/images/favicon-18f0d6d4ac04a283dbd6c93b2e0d33ea.png","authors":[{"name":"Lucas Tauil"}],"language":"en-nz","items":[{"id":"XcKPeIi8PeT","title":"Economies That Flow: An Open Source Blueprint","attachments":[{"url":"https://media-cdn.entangledfutures.fm/podcast-entangledfutures-fm/production/media/audio-c9efa6100c2b2635af768583040d3162.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_byte":24774548,"duration_in_seconds":3096}],"url":"https://entangledfutures.fm/episodes/economies-that-flow-an-open-source-blueprint-XcKPeIi8PeT/","content_html":"In this episode, Lynn Foster—champion of open-source software and co-author of the Value Flows vocabulary—shares her journey from corporate software development to creating commons-based economic infrastructures. She explains how Value Flows provides a shared language for representing economic activity, enabling projects and organizations to coordinate without relying on siloed systems. At the heart of this work is REA accounting (Resources, Events, Agents), an elegant model that traces real-world flows of resources and interactions across networks.
Foster explains how Value Flows and REA accounting enable interoperability across distributed systems and why ontologies, that is shared vocabularies are critical for both people and software to communicate effectively. She also reflects on the real-world impact of projects such as cooperative supply chains and regenerative networks.
Lynn Foster explores:
Listen to this episode:
Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Pocket Casts • RSS Feed
Themes:
Timestamps:
Origins & Foundations
Value Flows & Ontologies
Patterns & Flows
REA & Network Resource Planning
Ontologies in Practice
Distributed Systems & Carbon Farm Network
Broader Applications & Future Directions
References:
REA Accounting Model – Bill McCarthy
Value Flows Vocabulary – Co-created by Lynn Foster, Bob Haugen, and collaborators
Digital Product Passports (EU Initiative) – Ongoing regulatory framework
Sensorica – Open value network experiments in contribution accounting
Transcript
Lynn Foster (00:00.076)
I think open source is one of these seeds that's kind of growing within the beast, so to speak, where it organically appears and it wants to be born. It takes us beyond the competitiveness of our current system.
Narrator - Clara Chemin
Welcome to Entangled Futures with Lucas Tauil, where we explore mutuality and conversations towards a world that works for everyone.
Lucas Tauil (00:35.97)
This episode is brought to you by the Holochain Foundation. Holochain is creating technology that allows people to team up, share information and solve their own problems without needing a middleman. Creating carriers that cannot be captured, Holochain enables privacy and holds space for innovation and mutuality. I first came across the project in 2018, during my journey into participative culture with Unsparil. My good friend, Hailey Cooperider, pointed me to the green paper and I was blown away by the vision of a local first decentralized internet. I worked for five years on the project and feel very grateful for the support with the show. Enjoy it.
Lucas Tauil (01:52.888)
Today we welcome Lynn Foster, a champion of open source software and co-author of the Value Flows vocabulary. The Value Flows vocabulary is designed to represent economic activities, particularly within distributed fractal networks involving diverse agents, such as individuals, organizations, and ecological entities. The purpose of Value Flows is to enable
interoperability across various software projects serving as a shared vocabulary. Lynn Foster is also a driving force at HREA, an implementation of the Value Flows specification. HREA enables a transparent and trusted account of resources and information flows between decentralized and independent agents across and within ecosystems. Welcome Lynn, such a pleasure to have you here.
Lynn Foster
My pleasure, Lucas.
Lucas Tauil
Lynn, for us to break the ice, could you share the origins of your journey in Open Source software?
Lynn Foster (03:07.182)
So I worked in corporate America in software development for most of my kind of day job career. A little teeny bit of which was open source, but even that was usually kind of open source washing, you know. But when I retired and joined my partner Bob Haugen to work on economic open source software, we knew we wanted to help build a commons of shared code, to get beyond the corporate scene that's doing so much harm to the earth, to the people, and especially to support people doing economic experiments on the ground. But actually in those days when we were coding, not a lot of people came around to help. And we weren't really focused on building open source communities at that point. But I want to mention a kind of a little tidbit of a small incident that was kind of my first aha moment about open source, which is maybe three weeks into the Value Flows project. Somebody, I don't know, put out some kind of a call and all of a sudden this graphics designer showed up, made us a logo, you know. Nobody knew this person, Julio. And that was just cool, that was really cool, was people just want to contribute to what they believe in and contribute what they can. I think open source is one of these seeds that's kind of growing within the beast, so to speak, where it organically appears and it wants to be born. It takes us beyond the competitiveness of our current system.
Lucas Tauil
Lynn, I noticed you differentiating between open source software building and building open source community. Could you expand on that?
Lynn Foster (05:08.312)
Well, open source software is software that lives in the commons and people can use it. They can fork it, they can change it, whatever. An open source community needs to develop around open source software. And we had that in Value Flows. There were a lot of people working on it, people coming in and out, people that cared deeply about it. There was a lot of give and take between people. And that was a completely different experience than me and Bob sitting there coding together, you know, which was also pretty great, but the community is important.
Lucas Tauil
And Lyn, how did the Value Flows initiative start? What was the initial drive?
Lynn Foster
Yeah, so Value Flows got going around 2015 and for a year before that, there was a bunch of software developers kind of all over the world who were starting to be interested in making software that wasn't just your kind of big walled silo centralized kinds of things. And there was a lot of ferment going on and people were talking to each other about how to move forward on making better open source software. One thing that evolved was called the Open App Ecosystem, and I think that was named by somebody in Inspiral out in your part of the world, which is basically building apps or components that could be built into suites that people working on the ground can use and that could communicate with each other and be building blocks like Legos or something. And one thing that became
Lynn Foster (06:51.598)
is that if we had these smaller pieces of software, we were going to need vocabularies and protocols, or vocabularies could be called ontologies to enable that communication. So that way, like developers could program in whatever language they liked, you know, they could create very specific things for user groups, et cetera, and it would be much easier to get the software to interoperate.
Otherwise, things are geometric. everybody has a different API and you have 600 APIs, it's impractical to connect that way. But if you can say, OK, everybody's using this protocol or this ontology or whatever, then it's really easy. You create that, and then you can suddenly plug into lots of places.
Lucas Tauil
I see, I see. And how did the open app ecosystem evolve?
Lynn Foster
So it was all this discussion and ferment that was going on then. And then what happened is that as people talked about vocabularies and ontologies, Value Flows came out of that. We were interested in economic vocabularies. A lot of other people were too. so Value Flows was born. And a whole bunch of people just went off to work on it.
Lucas Tauil
2015. So this is 10 years on the ground.
Lynn Foster (08:17.742)
Yes, it is. I hate to say, but yes, it is.
Lucas Tauil
It's beautiful. Lynn, you have been in the world of distributed software and gossip protocols for over a decade, What patterns have you noticed, and where do you most see potential opportunities?
Lynn Foster
Let's see, have you heard of Conway's Law, Lucas? You probably have, and it has sort of a lot of permutations. But the one I'm thinking about is roughly that organizational communication structures tend to mirror the technology that's being created by that organization or for that organization without kind of taking a position on what causes what, you know? So these days with… You can kind of see it evolving, the gig economy, so-called sharing economy, growth of complex supply chains, that kind of thing. We seem to be moving towards more networked, more distributed organizations. And that finds reflection in software architectures. So there are more distributed software architectures and decentralized architectures appearing. And I think that those kinds of architectures will
Lynn Foster (09:37.282)
best support the kind of networked economic organizations we expect to see more of in the future.
Lucas Tauil
Beautiful, beautiful. Yeah, my career as a journalist in technology started in the late 90s where ERP software were picking up in, there was all the year 2000 bug fear. The foundation of ERP software is proprietary, right? And centralized. How is this an obstacle? For supply chain integration, for example.
Lynn Foster
So yes, I remember that period pretty well, actually. Supply chains are by definition more, they're not enterprise, right? There are many enterprises involved in a supply chain or whatever form of organization you'd like to plug in there. It's all the same. So being able to use open software and in some cases even open data, all of which can be seen by people all along the supply chain, makes it easier. People who work in supply chains tend to work across companies directly with their counterpart. And they're just thinking about making things work. They're not thinking about proprietary this, centralized that, right? So having software that can...
Lynn Foster (11:16.576)
interoperator is the same software, whichever, which is still a lofty goal, but sort of automatically supports more informed coordination. And it also means that there has to be a level of trust involved, you know? And I've heard people say that at some point around that time, it became apparent to a lot of people that the best company didn't win anymore. It was the best supply chain that wins. I'm not interested in winning, but anyway, within that context that made sense. So even within the capitalist world that consciousness was developing.
Lucas Tauil
Yeah, it's this shift of take mine into grow ours, right?
Lynn Foster
Mm-hmm. Yes. And it works better. Shockingly.
Lucas Tauil
It does, it does. I love this concept of increasing surface area rather than fighting for the resources on this single surface. So when we start looking at like, well, yeah, this surface is taken, but can we have other surfaces where we don't have to compete and we expand what's possible?
Lucas Tauil (12:43.608)
This is a huge orientation on the thinking around Holochain and what inspired Art and Eric. And it really speaks to me.
Lynn Foster
I totally agree with you and also think that what you're talking about there with the surface area is so much more productive than competition. It's huge.
Lucas Tauil
It is, yeah. And it speaks of fractality, doesn't it? There's this shape that emerges that is organic and somehow mimics what we see ecosystems creating in the natural world. It resonates with what I feel we should be focusing on. And I think it is, right? It's the space we are playing in. Yes. And Lynn, In that regard, what is REA accounting, this space that hREA comes from?
Lynn Foster
So REA is an ontology which developed initially in academia and was started by a guy named Bill McCarthy at Michigan State University in the US probably in 1980-ish. And there's now kind of a global academic community that revolves around that that's active. REA stands for Resources, Events, Agents. And it was...
Lynn Foster (14:17.034)
Actually, during that period, was coming to the forefront of computers and especially database design that enabled this to happen. Accounting for a few centuries had been double entry accounting, and McCarthy was able to take that and distill it into a very simple, elegant model based on real economic events that happened in the real world.
And you can take that kind of data and use it to generate your standard accounting reports, for example, if that's the way you want to look at your economic activity and that's not a problem. And that's again because of computers, you know, that you can slice and dice and aggregate data how you want. My partner Bob Haugen found REA in the 90s actually when he was looking for a model for a new kind of ERP system. And he needed ERP to go across enterprises. So he contacted McCarthy and kind of said, do you see what I see? This model can work across enterprises. It doesn't have to care. And McCarthy said, I see it. So they worked together for some years actually and expanded REA into this more like independent view, or sometimes it's called the helicopter view, which can easily work across enterprises.
And that made it really useful for accounting in networks. And there's now lots of experimentation going on in that area, kind of thinking beyond the capitalist enterprise. And Value Flows, which we mentioned earlier, uses REA. That's the base of its model. Adds a few things.
Lynn Foster (16:25.966)
to make the resource flows a little easier. There's a few things around the edges that kind of go a little bit beyond standard accounting. So it expands the scope a little bit, but its core base and heart is REA. So network resource planning, or kind of called NRP, was what Sensorica ended up calling some software that Bob and I developed in collaboration with them, maybe to 2015-ish, so was pre-Value Flows, but it was definitely REA. Bob and I had, mostly Bob at that point, I was still doing too much day job work, had been experimenting continuously with REA, and when he retired, he had created several systems around us. There were about four food networks and a timber network. then along came Sensorica, and they were interested in a lot more functionality. I mean, it was basically more or less an ERP system. I'm going to back up just a little bit for you. ERP was created out of initially MRP, material requirements planning, which was a production planning and inventory system way back when. I ran into it in the early 80s. It had already been around a decade, but that was a flow-oriented system. ERP took MRP and tacked on the rest of the software needed for enterprise financial and economic work. That's like accounts payable and receivable, those kinds of things.
And those things, I don't know, I could say that they were designed more to impede flows than enhance flows. So we had conflict between flow-oriented software and non-flow-oriented software. And also the whole thing got kind of bigger and more tacked together and more expensive and harder to work with, et cetera. But it ended up being software that was
Lynn Foster (18:49.792)
meant to cover an enterprise's needs, basically. Now, enter NRP, right? NRP takes everything back to flows because REA does that. That's how it works. It flows all the way down. So we started working with Sensorica in maybe 2012. Maybe I said that. Sensorica was in Montreal. They have a lab there. But they also worked globally through the magic of the internet with organizing what they call an open value network. And that's a flat organization that kind of organized itself into what they called peer production projects. And they were doing research and development, R &D, and eventually some manufacture of open source hardware, particularly sensors, thus then Sensorica.
And the open source piece was very important to them. And I think that that's the open source hardware world in general is really super important to where we need to go in this world. Because we still need a certain amount of stuff. anyway, that project was interesting because we were developing software while they were developing their organization and their systems. And so it was very fluid and sometimes a little crazy, but it really showed me the value of working agilely and interactively with user groups on the ground. I think you don't need to do that if there's a very mature, stable system that's already been programmed three times before or something. But for anything that's this kind of experimental, it really has to be, it's a give and take, a collaboration between the developers and the people trying to make things work on the ground. that was kind of interesting and fun. And we called the software working prototype and that's what it all was. We threw away a lot of software in the process and that was fine.
Lucas Tauil (21:09.102)
Lynn, how would you explain the importance of ontologies to a beginner?
Lynn Foster
Well, ontologies give people a defined language to use when they're talking about things and concepts in a domain so people can understand each other better. And ontologies also define the relationships between these things and concepts. Sometimes we kind of tend to use vocabulary and ontology interchangeably, and there's a lot of overlap and kind of looseness in how people use the words, but one thing ontologies definitely have is these relationships. So besides communications between people, there's communication between software, and that's where it becomes really important that software, people and the software know what is the same thing as something else, right?
So software can count on knowing the meaning of what's coming in and what they're sending out. Another implication of all of that is that when software needs to talk to other software, then ontologies, along with technical protocols, make it so that new software can just plug into software ecosystems. You know, they don't have to look and see, oh my gosh, there's 20 different ways I have to talk to these 20 different pieces of software, you know. If everybody's using Value Flows or whatever, because they're working in the same domain, it's easy. It's so much easier.
Lucas Tauil (22:53.364)
Lynn, what are the key innovations in the REA vocabulary?
Lynn Foster
Well, mostly I would say that it reflects what really happens in the economic world. And that makes it really a lot simpler than thinking about things like debits and credits, which are a little bit of a more analytical view of things and limited. And especially that's true across networks, because actually my debit is probably your credit or whatever. If you're just looking at reality, none of that matters. So it's also a very clean, configurable model. So different kinds of organizations can define the specifics of their economic activity as data. The ontology won't limit that. And that's where things called taxonomies come in. It's like people do have to agree that, I'm calling this particular kind of whatever x and you should call it X2 so that we can communicate, but that's all configurable in REA. So it can support any domains. And also speaking of simplicity, it has this resource event agents, right? And we have processes in there too and agreements, but that small, simple pattern happens across.
Lynn Foster (24:28.43)
So the one we've been talking about mostly, and it has the R, the E, and the A, is the what really happened layer. We call it observation. I think McCarthy calls it accountability. And before that, there are two layers. One is called scheduling or planning. It has the same basic pattern. So it calls the flow there as a commitment instead of an economic event. But it works the same way, and the layer above that is, we call it the knowledge layer. I think McCarthy might call it the policy layer, and it is where all that configuration happens, as well as recipes, which give you a pretty well-defined pattern of what used to be the bill of materials, plus routing information, plus whatever, all into one place so you can create your plans easily without redoing the same thing over and over when you have repeatable processes. Anyway, those three layers are basically the same model, right, which also makes it simple. Another innovation is the flows, right? This is a data model that makes it so your recorded economic data can be assembled into flows based on resources flowing like an output from a process creates a resource that some or all of that resource might be consumed in another process, et cetera. And you can, if you have open data, you can see that as far back as it goes, right, as far back as it's recorded. So it creates these flows in sort of a form that technical people sometimes call a directed graph. It supports all this network of flows. And that makes things like tracking back what happened to a resource or where all it came from or what were the implications of how it was produced much easier. And this also includes in REA both production and exchange types of flows. And those things can connect. If you produce something and the next thing you do is sell it to somebody, then that all works.
Lynn Foster (26:54.318)
It's a really nice model, actually. It's perfect for actually something the EU is trying to do now, which is called digital product passports, where I can't remember what year it's supposed to be implemented. It keeps getting moved out, but basically products coming into the EU will be required at some point to have that digital product passport associated with them, and you should be able to scan your QR code on a product and know exactly how it was created, what's happened to it since, for anything coming into that area.
Lucas Tauil
Yeah, that's fascinating in terms of allowing people to make informed choices on what they consume and what they are economically supporting, right?
Lynn Foster
Yes.
Lucas Tauil
Fingers crossed it will come soon. Lynn, what about the hollow chain architecture? What is different about it?
Lynn Foster (27:58.549)
Yes. Okay, I'm going to give you a simple version because I'm not a deep expert in Holochain. But the key thing, and we might have said this before, is that it is actually distributed. That is, a network's data is held on everybody's individual computers, right? There's no central server, which takes a little bit of getting used to. This kind of fits back into our Conway's law discussion.
Lynn Foster (28:39.006)
So it supports networks because it is a network. And it handles all that distribution so that if somebody's offline, you aren't missing any data. It manages sharding that out into the Holochain world using Holochain magic and a distributed hash table. It also has, because of that architecture, has an emphasis on privacy and security and all of those kinds of things. I don't think it will ever be a tool for surveillance capitalism, which is a nice thing.
Lucas Tauil
Lynn, what possibilities emerge from integrating Holochain and Value Flows in REA architectures?
Lynn Foster (29:35.746)
Yeah, we're trying to do that now in several projects, which is pretty fun, but the coolest possibility to me is that Value Flows and REA provide a way to connect Holochain networks to each other. So now we're adding networks of networks. And it can be networks that were formed and coordinated by people from the grassroots for their own benefit, you know. And then before you know it, you have a whole economic ecosystem going, say for a community, say for a bio region. So that's the kind of promise I feel with this kind of integration, which I think is very cool and we need it. think, so I mean, and we could expand that. If Holochain had kind of a set of ontologies that were used in that way, you could...internet work in whatever way you needed to.
We're doing the economic work, but there's other stuff. There's social networking, there's governance, all kinds of things. So a lot of work to be done there, but that's what I think is an amazing possibility. Another thing maybe to mention here is that we can start thinking more about how to simplify software development, making it more modular, working towards that concept of the open app ecosystem that we talked about a little bit. For example, HREA is created in that vein where it's REA-based backend. It's very generic and can be used by any developer who wants to
Lynn Foster (31:30.702)
Create user interface software on top of that, which is by its nature kind of much more specific and will support all kinds of different user experiences and use cases. There is a lot of work we got to do to get to this goal, but I see the possibilities.
Lucas Tauil (31:55.316)
Lynn, could you share the story of the carbon farm network?
Lynn Foster
The Carbon Farm Network is actually one of the projects that we're working on right now using Holochain and Value Flows. And it's built as a user interface on top of HREA, making use of that generic open source software that's sitting there for everybody. But the real story about the Carbon Farm Network, of course, is on the ground as usual.
They are a textile network in the Hudson Valley region of New York that focuses on sustainable creation of knitted clothing, basically. They are organized as a cooperative of the designers, and the designers together manage that whole supply chain. The network also includes the farmers and the mills in between where the fiber coming off the farms. This is Alpaca and Sheep Farms gets processed and made into yarn and knitted. They're a supply chain network, they like to call themselves, as opposed to just a supply chain.
Lucas Tauil
Lynn, what problems are being solved by the Carbon Farm Network software?
Lynn Foster (33:21.01)
Well, one thing is definitely sustainability. They think they see that as very important to them. That's the term carbon farming, right? So carbon farm network. So they support implementation of agricultural practices that tend to reduce carbon, sequester carbon, et cetera. And that also relates to them focusing on trying to be as local or regional as possible, which is sometimes difficult in this world and educating people about that. So another thing just to say about them is that they're in between what you think about as artisanal kind of, know, people making things by hand and mass industrial production, you know, they're like, they're in between that kind of a batch manufacturing thing, but there's, so for example, there's nobody with knitting needles, there's knitting machines, right?
But it's all local, smaller, and community-based, but also real.
Lucas Tauil
Nice, Lynn, what are the main challenges ahead of the carbon farm network software development?
Lynn Foster
They are many.
Lynn Foster (34:46.328)
So, I mean, the first one that comes to mind is funding, which is often the case with these grassroots efforts that aren't starting with capital in hand. And they have been doing a lot of work with the small farmers, right, on this carbon farming practice. A lot of that's funded by the USDA, but that just got yanked in our current political climate. So they're really scrambling there.
The software effort has received funding both from carbon farm networks contacts in the textile world and from several key people in the Holochain ecosystem, which is super helpful. And then the carbon farm network itself, the designers pitch into some of their income to the regenerative work with the farmers that they are doing and some of the infrastructure work.
But I think unfortunately in this world we're not at a place where new local sustainable economic activity itself can fully fund these kind of extra efforts that are needed, especially at the startup for for things that are trying to support a better climate and natural ecosystems and need new kinds of infrastructure that'll support these kinds of networks into the future. More generally, they have the ongoing kinds of challenges that are often felt by groups trying to implement this kind of local sustainable production of lasting quality in the world that we live in, right? Monopoly capitalism, that's moved production to areas of cheap labor, exploits the environment and privatizes the profits while socializing the costs and this all this makes artificially cheap prices possible and that's a problem in in this time of ever-rising inequality so there's this giant systemic problem that happens for all all of these like next economy
Lynn Foster (37:12.436)
experiments and they are definitely feeling that themselves. Just in the last few weeks they learned, this is just an example, right? They learned that their spinning mill is shutting down and now they're really scrambling to find something not too far away that can spin yarn. know, it's just part of this level of deindustrialization that's happened and somehow this spinning mill survived the worst of it and then I think COVID did them in. But anyway, they're closing, which made all of us sort of immediately think, is there some way that somebody or co-op or anything, people can get together and take advantage of that equipment and plants sitting there to start something new, you know, a new spinning mill there with all that existing equipment. But it's hard to scramble into that easily and quickly, you know, but maybe, fingers crossed, it will happen and hopefully we'll be catching up soon and hear about the development there. Lynn, I'm looking forward to more. Lynn, are there other Value Flows use cases you would like to share?
Lucas Tauil
That would be good.
Lynn Foster (38:45.526)
Yeah, sure, because it's such a flexible and lovely model. And I can say that because it stands on the shoulders of many, but there are lots of possibilities. A couple other apps that are in process now using HREA, one is an offers needs application being created for internal use in the Holochain ecosystem. So developers and projects and people who can offer other kinds of support can all find each other, and there are a bunch of other offers, needs, efforts in progress elsewhere. All kinds of exchange can be supported, know, conventional sales and e-commerce and purchases with money, whatever, mutual credit, gift economy, barter, whatever people can imagine.
If Value Flows doesn't support it, we'll make it support it, right? If it's something that people are using to try to make this a better situation. Another in progress application is a rewrite of the old sensorica software. So that's like the next generation NRP, right?
And it's probably about the same scope, but I'm sure they've learned a lot over the years and we can make lots of improvements. And another thing I could mention there is that Sensorica has innovated with something we could call a contribution economy. And I see that actually a fair amount now. A lot of groups are very interested in this concept where they distribute the income that comes in according to the contributions that were made to create the resources that brought that income in, right, when it was sold or delivered to somebody. AstonSorica has what they call a benefit distribution algorithm or redistribution. I've seen it both ways, which is democratically decided. And they use that to, the software actually uses that to calculate how much all the contributors get from that income.
Lynn Foster (40:57.566)
And it can be pretty involved or not that involved. But that's a lot of people are interested in that. A couple other applications that I think Deserva mentioned are apps that were completed in the EU. One is called Reflow. It's circular economies and they had like six pilot municipalities. So it was circular economy software within a city. And a more recent one is called Fab City. And that supports fab labs with individual or collaborative design and then the distributed manufacturing of fabricated items that were designed by whoever, because the designs are available and are open. There's also a Netherlands-based organization while we're in Europe here, called the Weathermakers that is working on software to help them design and manage rather large projects, earth moving projects often, that are to restore water cycles. And it's worth kind of emphasizing that Value Flows and REA, and we've actually had fairly recent discussions on this have expanded the concepts, both of resources and agents, to make climate modeling and climate accounting a real thing, also to account for externalities, to account for carbon and nitrogen and whatever you need, right? And we think that's kind of important for a whole set of future projects. Like when you have an agent, an agent can be a person or an organization, but we want to say that an agent can also be a river or a forest, you know, and that resources are taken out of that forest and resources are put into that forest. Maybe they're helpful and maybe they aren't. But anyway, if you can track all those flows, you can get a lot closer to helping
Lynn Foster (43:23.598)
the climate out a little bit, we definitely need. We've also worked locally with the high school FabLab network and there's a mutual aid network with us we've been working with for several years. I want to say it's not all about manufacturing, like services are equally well supported. When we were actually creating Value Flows, we talked quite a bit with translators who make, to translate, right? And the finished document is the resource that's created. So yeah, it's worth thinking about broadly. And also things like saving pools or other financial kinds of applications, you know. It can be about anything of value to people that they want to track in some way. Yeah.
Let me give you one more, too, because this one's sort of important. And we did a couple projects around this, but it is important, I think, to understand that Value Flows in REA can represent any kind of aggregated data. It can be more than operational software.
We did a couple projects around this. One was in Nova Scotia, mostly around planning around food, and then one specifically around fish, and then one with our nearby mutual aid network, where they're trying to connect up people and organizations within the community. And this kind of software gets you to where you can plan, for one thing, but also you can discover where there are gaps and where a new organization might fill in a gap. Or you can discover where one organization produces something that another organization uses, but they don't know about each other yet. So it's all about using the same model and similar tools for regions or communities. So that I can get pretty excited about.
Lynn Foster (45:46.08)
Actually, we were just talking with some people from Asheville and there's a whole effort there where they are thinking this is an area that was devastated by a hurricane a few months ago and they're still rebuilding from that. But there's a whole group that's really interested in using that as an opportunity even to think about, how would they restructure their economy in that region and just reconfigure things?
So that's, I think, important.
Lucas Tauil
I love the talk you're taking of looking into challenges as opportunities. We're going through an extremely challenging political moment in the world. And I'm really interested in what are the opportunities, because like there's no point in us only loathing it, right? It's like, can be done? What are the possibilities that open up? How can we encounter it?
in strength rather than as victims. And I'm really interested in why is work like value flow so relevant to this?
Lynn Foster
Yeah, you talked about the challenges and indeed they are many, right? I think anything where we can get prepared now and start to create relationships among ourselves, in this case we're talking about economic activity and economic relationships, but in any area really of human interaction, right? You know, if we can start working towards something
Lynn Foster (47:28.59)
that we know will work better than what we've got, maybe we'll have it when we need it. mean, I don't know, you know, it's, I mean, Value Flows and this kind of work we're doing with these projects is, it's, you know, we always say it's a small piece of a very large puzzle and that's really true. There's so much that's needed. But, you know, the open source piece is important, and we're gonna need that open knowledge to easily bring ourselves together, you know, up to where we need to be. And hopefully we'll still have internet. If we don't, we'll work with it, but you know. But we kind of ended up with our little piece of the puzzle just because we happen to have those skills and experience, you know. There are so many pieces that need to be plugged into that that it's sort of mind-boggling. I think if we can get our collaboration hats on and not be too competitive about any of this, we can maybe make something happen in time. We'll see.
Lucas Tauil
Yeah, I'm in love with small bits, you know. I think that in the beginning of my adult life, I had this expectation of scale, that things had to be big, they had to be impactful. And recently I heard from Paul Krafel that really at scale things are usually downward spirals because you're seeing them erode really quick. When you're building, you're building a small bit of the puzzle, you're laying bricks. You can imagine the cathedral or the beautiful bridge you're building, but it's not quick. Scale comes with the encounter of many small bits coming together. It's not immediate and as visible as downward spirals. And this was a beautiful...
Lucas Tauil (49:40.984)
framing for me, you know, just like, yeah, it's a right to be doing this small bit of work here that's very meaningful and local, because it will connect to other ones and together they will create an upward spiral. And yeah, this has been inspiring me a lot. And when I hear of your experience in the years you've dedicated to this, it goes like, yeah, there it is again, you know, that's the pattern that works and that makes sense.
Lynn Foster
Yeah, well said. You have your puzzle piece too, right Lucas?
Lucas Tauil
Lynn, it's been a huge pleasure to have you here today and hear of your story and all the beautiful work you and Bob have been doing together. I really appreciate your time and really looking forward to meeting you again shortly and hearing of the development of both Value Flows and HREA and where carbon farm networks are going with the software you're creating. Loads of gratitude.
Lynn Foster
And likewise, Lucas, this is important work you're doing here. And believe me, I wouldn't get up and talk about it without you initiating and doing what needs to be done to get to what people are doing out there. So that's a good thing. Thank you.
Lucas Tauil (51:12.75)
Thank you so much, Lynn. Have a beautiful day.
Lynn Foster (51:19.79)
And you too.
Narrator - Clara Chemin
Thanks for joining us at Entangled Futures. Subscribe to our channel for more conversations on mutuality. Towards a world that works for all.
","content_text":"In this episode, Lynn Foster—champion of open-source software and co-author of\nthe Value Flows vocabulary—shares her journey from corporate software\ndevelopment to creating commons-based economic infrastructures. She explains how\nValue Flows provides a shared language for representing economic activity,\nenabling projects and organizations to coordinate without relying on siloed\nsystems. At the heart of this work is REA accounting (Resources, Events,\nAgents), an elegant model that traces real-world flows of resources and\ninteractions across networks.\n\nFoster explains how Value Flows and REA accounting enable interoperability\nacross distributed systems and why ontologies, that is shared vocabularies are\ncritical for both people and software to communicate effectively. She also\nreflects on the real-world impact of projects such as cooperative supply chains\nand regenerative networks.\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster explores:\n\n * Code vs. Community – How open-source software becomes powerful when a\n community organizes around it.\n * From ERP to REA – Why flow-based accounting creates clarity across networks\n and ecosystems.\n * Networks of Networks – The potential of Value Flows and Holochain integration\n to connect grassroots initiatives.\n\n\n\n\nWatch this episode on YouTube\n\n\n\n\nListen to this episode:\n\nApple Podcasts • Spotify • Pocket Casts • RSS Feed\n\n\n\n\nThemes:\n\n * Open Source as Commons – How shared vocabularies and cooperative communities\n make technology durable.\n * Ontologies & Interoperability – Why common data meanings allow software\n ecosystems to plug and play.\n * Flow-Based Accounting (REA/Value Flows) – Moving beyond double-entry into\n transparent, cross-network flows.\n * Distributed Architectures – What makes Holochain different and better suited\n for decentralized collaboration.\n * Regenerative Supply Chains – Lessons from the Carbon Farm Network and other\n next-economy experiments.\n * Contribution Economies – Models that reward contributions fairly and support\n resilience.\n\n\n\n\nTimestamps:\n\nOrigins & Foundations\n\n * 00:00 — Opening reflections on open source as a growing seed\n * 01:53 — Lynn’s background and introduction to Value Flows & hREA\n * 03:07 — Leaving corporate software to build economic commons\n * 04:35 — First “aha moment” in open source: a stranger contributes a logo\n * 05:08 — The difference between open source code and open source community\n\nValue Flows & Ontologies\n\n * 06:20 — The Open App Ecosystem: modular tools like Lego blocks\n * 06:52 — Why vocabularies are needed for interoperability\n * 07:40 — APIs vs. shared vocabularies: simplifying collaboration\n * 08:17 — Ten years of Value Flows: what has evolved\n\nPatterns & Flows\n\n * 08:40 — Conway’s Law: communication shapes technology\n * 10:30 — Supply chains and the shift from “best company” to “best supply\n chain”\n * 11:16 — Trust and transparency across enterprises\n * 12:20 — Expanding the surface of cooperation rather than competing\n\nREA & Network Resource Planning\n\n * 13:50 — REA explained: Resources, Events, Agents\n * 15:35 — Three layers: policy, planning, and observation\n * 16:55 — Directed graphs: tracing resource provenance and flows\n * 18:10 — From ERP’s silos to NRP’s networks\n * 19:30 — Working with Sensorica on open hardware and contribution accounting\n\nOntologies in Practice\n\n * 21:09 — What ontologies are and why they matter\n * 22:53 — Shared meaning for humans and software alike\n * 24:28 — Configurability and taxonomies: flexibility without lock-in\n * 26:54 — Digital Product Passports in the EU as a use case\n\nDistributed Systems & Carbon Farm Network\n\n * 27:58 — What makes Holochain unique: no central servers\n * 29:35 — Using Value Flows to connect Holochain networks\n * 31:30 — hREA as a generic backend for many user experiences\n * 31:55 — Case study: the Carbon Farm Network in New York\n * 33:21 — Supporting sustainability and local supply chains\n * 34:46 — Challenges: funding cuts, infrastructure closures, systemic\n inequality\n * 36:30 — Possibilities for cooperative ownership of spinning mills\n\nBroader Applications & Future Directions\n\n * 38:45 — Offers/Needs apps, mutual credit, barter, and gift economies\n * 40:58 — Contribution economies and benefit distribution algorithms\n * 42:10 — EU projects: Reflow, Fab City, and The Weathermakers\n * 43:50 — Expanding agents/resources to rivers, forests, carbon, nitrogen\n * 45:46 — Regional planning and resilience after crises\n * 47:28 — Building relationships now for resilience in uncertain futures\n * 49:41 — Small pieces of the puzzle: upward spirals of collaboration\n * 51:00 — Closing reflections on the importance of collective effort\n\n\n\n\nReferences:\n\nREA Accounting Model – Bill McCarthy\n\nValue Flows Vocabulary – Co-created by Lynn Foster, Bob Haugen, and\ncollaborators\n\nDigital Product Passports (EU Initiative) – Ongoing regulatory framework\n\nSensorica – Open value network experiments in contribution accounting\n\n\n\n\nTranscript\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (00:00.076)\n\nI think open source is one of these seeds that's kind of growing within the\nbeast, so to speak, where it organically appears and it wants to be born. It\ntakes us beyond the competitiveness of our current system.\n\n\n\n\nNarrator - Clara Chemin\n\nWelcome to Entangled Futures with Lucas Tauil, where we explore mutuality and\nconversations towards a world that works for everyone.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil (00:35.97)\n\nThis episode is brought to you by the Holochain Foundation. Holochain is\ncreating technology that allows people to team up, share information and solve\ntheir own problems without needing a middleman. Creating carriers that cannot be\ncaptured, Holochain enables privacy and holds space for innovation and\nmutuality. I first came across the project in 2018, during my journey into\nparticipative culture with Unsparil. My good friend, Hailey Cooperider, pointed\nme to the green paper and I was blown away by the vision of a local first\ndecentralized internet. I worked for five years on the project and feel very\ngrateful for the support with the show. Enjoy it.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil (01:52.888)\n\nToday we welcome Lynn Foster, a champion of open source software and co-author\nof the Value Flows vocabulary. The Value Flows vocabulary is designed to\nrepresent economic activities, particularly within distributed fractal networks\ninvolving diverse agents, such as individuals, organizations, and ecological\nentities. The purpose of Value Flows is to enable\n\ninteroperability across various software projects serving as a shared\nvocabulary. Lynn Foster is also a driving force at HREA, an implementation of\nthe Value Flows specification. HREA enables a transparent and trusted account of\nresources and information flows between decentralized and independent agents\nacross and within ecosystems. Welcome Lynn, such a pleasure to have you here.\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster\n\nMy pleasure, Lucas.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nLynn, for us to break the ice, could you share the origins of your journey in\nOpen Source software?\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (03:07.182)\n\nSo I worked in corporate America in software development for most of my kind of\nday job career. A little teeny bit of which was open source, but even that was\nusually kind of open source washing, you know. But when I retired and joined my\npartner Bob Haugen to work on economic open source software, we knew we wanted\nto help build a commons of shared code, to get beyond the corporate scene that's\ndoing so much harm to the earth, to the people, and especially to support people\ndoing economic experiments on the ground. But actually in those days when we\nwere coding, not a lot of people came around to help. And we weren't really\nfocused on building open source communities at that point. But I want to mention\na kind of a little tidbit of a small incident that was kind of my first aha\nmoment about open source, which is maybe three weeks into the Value Flows\nproject. Somebody, I don't know, put out some kind of a call and all of a sudden\nthis graphics designer showed up, made us a logo, you know. Nobody knew this\nperson, Julio. And that was just cool, that was really cool, was people just\nwant to contribute to what they believe in and contribute what they can. I think\nopen source is one of these seeds that's kind of growing within the beast, so to\nspeak, where it organically appears and it wants to be born. It takes us beyond\nthe competitiveness of our current system.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nLynn, I noticed you differentiating between open source software building and\nbuilding open source community. Could you expand on that?\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (05:08.312)\n\nWell, open source software is software that lives in the commons and people can\nuse it. They can fork it, they can change it, whatever. An open source community\nneeds to develop around open source software. And we had that in Value Flows.\nThere were a lot of people working on it, people coming in and out, people that\ncared deeply about it. There was a lot of give and take between people. And that\nwas a completely different experience than me and Bob sitting there coding\ntogether, you know, which was also pretty great, but the community is important.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nAnd Lyn, how did the Value Flows initiative start? What was the initial drive?\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster\n\nYeah, so Value Flows got going around 2015 and for a year before that, there was\na bunch of software developers kind of all over the world who were starting to\nbe interested in making software that wasn't just your kind of big walled silo\ncentralized kinds of things. And there was a lot of ferment going on and people\nwere talking to each other about how to move forward on making better open\nsource software. One thing that evolved was called the Open App Ecosystem, and I\nthink that was named by somebody in Inspiral out in your part of the world,\nwhich is basically building apps or components that could be built into suites\nthat people working on the ground can use and that could communicate with each\nother and be building blocks like Legos or something. And one thing that became\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (06:51.598)\n\nis that if we had these smaller pieces of software, we were going to need\nvocabularies and protocols, or vocabularies could be called ontologies to enable\nthat communication. So that way, like developers could program in whatever\nlanguage they liked, you know, they could create very specific things for user\ngroups, et cetera, and it would be much easier to get the software to\ninteroperate.\n\n\n\n\nOtherwise, things are geometric. everybody has a different API and you have 600\nAPIs, it's impractical to connect that way. But if you can say, OK, everybody's\nusing this protocol or this ontology or whatever, then it's really easy. You\ncreate that, and then you can suddenly plug into lots of places.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nI see, I see. And how did the open app ecosystem evolve?\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster\n\nSo it was all this discussion and ferment that was going on then. And then what\nhappened is that as people talked about vocabularies and ontologies, Value Flows\ncame out of that. We were interested in economic vocabularies. A lot of other\npeople were too. so Value Flows was born. And a whole bunch of people just went\noff to work on it.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\n2015. So this is 10 years on the ground.\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (08:17.742)\n\nYes, it is. I hate to say, but yes, it is.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nIt's beautiful. Lynn, you have been in the world of distributed software and\ngossip protocols for over a decade, What patterns have you noticed, and where do\nyou most see potential opportunities?\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster\n\nLet's see, have you heard of Conway's Law, Lucas? You probably have, and it has\nsort of a lot of permutations. But the one I'm thinking about is roughly that\norganizational communication structures tend to mirror the technology that's\nbeing created by that organization or for that organization without kind of\ntaking a position on what causes what, you know? So these days with… You can\nkind of see it evolving, the gig economy, so-called sharing economy, growth of\ncomplex supply chains, that kind of thing. We seem to be moving towards more\nnetworked, more distributed organizations. And that finds reflection in software\narchitectures. So there are more distributed software architectures and\ndecentralized architectures appearing. And I think that those kinds of\narchitectures will\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (09:37.282)\n\nbest support the kind of networked economic organizations we expect to see more\nof in the future.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nBeautiful, beautiful. Yeah, my career as a journalist in technology started in\nthe late 90s where ERP software were picking up in, there was all the year 2000\nbug fear. The foundation of ERP software is proprietary, right? And centralized.\nHow is this an obstacle? For supply chain integration, for example.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster\n\nSo yes, I remember that period pretty well, actually. Supply chains are by\ndefinition more, they're not enterprise, right? There are many enterprises\ninvolved in a supply chain or whatever form of organization you'd like to plug\nin there. It's all the same. So being able to use open software and in some\ncases even open data, all of which can be seen by people all along the supply\nchain, makes it easier. People who work in supply chains tend to work across\ncompanies directly with their counterpart. And they're just thinking about\nmaking things work. They're not thinking about proprietary this, centralized\nthat, right? So having software that can...\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (11:16.576)\n\ninteroperator is the same software, whichever, which is still a lofty goal, but\nsort of automatically supports more informed coordination. And it also means\nthat there has to be a level of trust involved, you know? And I've heard people\nsay that at some point around that time, it became apparent to a lot of people\nthat the best company didn't win anymore. It was the best supply chain that\nwins. I'm not interested in winning, but anyway, within that context that made\nsense. So even within the capitalist world that consciousness was developing.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nYeah, it's this shift of take mine into grow ours, right?\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster\n\nMm-hmm. Yes. And it works better. Shockingly.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nIt does, it does. I love this concept of increasing surface area rather than\nfighting for the resources on this single surface. So when we start looking at\nlike, well, yeah, this surface is taken, but can we have other surfaces where we\ndon't have to compete and we expand what's possible?\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil (12:43.608)\n\nThis is a huge orientation on the thinking around Holochain and what inspired\nArt and Eric. And it really speaks to me.\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster\n\nI totally agree with you and also think that what you're talking about there\nwith the surface area is so much more productive than competition. It's huge.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nIt is, yeah. And it speaks of fractality, doesn't it? There's this shape that\nemerges that is organic and somehow mimics what we see ecosystems creating in\nthe natural world. It resonates with what I feel we should be focusing on. And I\nthink it is, right? It's the space we are playing in. Yes. And Lynn, In that\nregard, what is REA accounting, this space that hREA comes from?\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster\n\nSo REA is an ontology which developed initially in academia and was started by a\nguy named Bill McCarthy at Michigan State University in the US probably in\n1980-ish. And there's now kind of a global academic community that revolves\naround that that's active. REA stands for Resources, Events, Agents. And it\nwas...\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (14:17.034)\n\nActually, during that period, was coming to the forefront of computers and\nespecially database design that enabled this to happen. Accounting for a few\ncenturies had been double entry accounting, and McCarthy was able to take that\nand distill it into a very simple, elegant model based on real economic events\nthat happened in the real world.\n\n\n\n\nAnd you can take that kind of data and use it to generate your standard\naccounting reports, for example, if that's the way you want to look at your\neconomic activity and that's not a problem. And that's again because of\ncomputers, you know, that you can slice and dice and aggregate data how you\nwant. My partner Bob Haugen found REA in the 90s actually when he was looking\nfor a model for a new kind of ERP system. And he needed ERP to go across\nenterprises. So he contacted McCarthy and kind of said, do you see what I see?\nThis model can work across enterprises. It doesn't have to care. And McCarthy\nsaid, I see it. So they worked together for some years actually and expanded REA\ninto this more like independent view, or sometimes it's called the helicopter\nview, which can easily work across enterprises.\n\n\n\n\nAnd that made it really useful for accounting in networks. And there's now lots\nof experimentation going on in that area, kind of thinking beyond the capitalist\nenterprise. And Value Flows, which we mentioned earlier, uses REA. That's the\nbase of its model. Adds a few things.\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (16:25.966)\n\nto make the resource flows a little easier. There's a few things around the\nedges that kind of go a little bit beyond standard accounting. So it expands the\nscope a little bit, but its core base and heart is REA. So network resource\nplanning, or kind of called NRP, was what Sensorica ended up calling some\nsoftware that Bob and I developed in collaboration with them, maybe to 2015-ish,\nso was pre-Value Flows, but it was definitely REA. Bob and I had, mostly Bob at\nthat point, I was still doing too much day job work, had been experimenting\ncontinuously with REA, and when he retired, he had created several systems\naround us. There were about four food networks and a timber network. then along\ncame Sensorica, and they were interested in a lot more functionality. I mean, it\nwas basically more or less an ERP system. I'm going to back up just a little bit\nfor you. ERP was created out of initially MRP, material requirements planning,\nwhich was a production planning and inventory system way back when. I ran into\nit in the early 80s. It had already been around a decade, but that was a\nflow-oriented system. ERP took MRP and tacked on the rest of the software needed\nfor enterprise financial and economic work. That's like accounts payable and\nreceivable, those kinds of things.\n\n\n\n\nAnd those things, I don't know, I could say that they were designed more to\nimpede flows than enhance flows. So we had conflict between flow-oriented\nsoftware and non-flow-oriented software. And also the whole thing got kind of\nbigger and more tacked together and more expensive and harder to work with, et\ncetera. But it ended up being software that was\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (18:49.792)\n\nmeant to cover an enterprise's needs, basically. Now, enter NRP, right? NRP\ntakes everything back to flows because REA does that. That's how it works. It\nflows all the way down. So we started working with Sensorica in maybe 2012.\nMaybe I said that. Sensorica was in Montreal. They have a lab there. But they\nalso worked globally through the magic of the internet with organizing what they\ncall an open value network. And that's a flat organization that kind of\norganized itself into what they called peer production projects. And they were\ndoing research and development, R &D, and eventually some manufacture of open\nsource hardware, particularly sensors, thus then Sensorica.\n\n\n\n\nAnd the open source piece was very important to them. And I think that that's\nthe open source hardware world in general is really super important to where we\nneed to go in this world. Because we still need a certain amount of stuff.\nanyway, that project was interesting because we were developing software while\nthey were developing their organization and their systems. And so it was very\nfluid and sometimes a little crazy, but it really showed me the value of working\nagilely and interactively with user groups on the ground. I think you don't need\nto do that if there's a very mature, stable system that's already been\nprogrammed three times before or something. But for anything that's this kind of\nexperimental, it really has to be, it's a give and take, a collaboration between\nthe developers and the people trying to make things work on the ground. that was\nkind of interesting and fun. And we called the software working prototype and\nthat's what it all was. We threw away a lot of software in the process and that\nwas fine.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil (21:09.102)\n\nLynn, how would you explain the importance of ontologies to a beginner?\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster\n\nWell, ontologies give people a defined language to use when they're talking\nabout things and concepts in a domain so people can understand each other\nbetter. And ontologies also define the relationships between these things and\nconcepts. Sometimes we kind of tend to use vocabulary and ontology\ninterchangeably, and there's a lot of overlap and kind of looseness in how\npeople use the words, but one thing ontologies definitely have is these\nrelationships. So besides communications between people, there's communication\nbetween software, and that's where it becomes really important that software,\npeople and the software know what is the same thing as something else, right?\n\n\n\n\nSo software can count on knowing the meaning of what's coming in and what\nthey're sending out. Another implication of all of that is that when software\nneeds to talk to other software, then ontologies, along with technical\nprotocols, make it so that new software can just plug into software ecosystems.\nYou know, they don't have to look and see, oh my gosh, there's 20 different ways\nI have to talk to these 20 different pieces of software, you know. If\neverybody's using Value Flows or whatever, because they're working in the same\ndomain, it's easy. It's so much easier.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil (22:53.364)\n\nLynn, what are the key innovations in the REA vocabulary?\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster\n\nWell, mostly I would say that it reflects what really happens in the economic\nworld. And that makes it really a lot simpler than thinking about things like\ndebits and credits, which are a little bit of a more analytical view of things\nand limited. And especially that's true across networks, because actually my\ndebit is probably your credit or whatever. If you're just looking at reality,\nnone of that matters. So it's also a very clean, configurable model. So\ndifferent kinds of organizations can define the specifics of their economic\nactivity as data. The ontology won't limit that. And that's where things called\ntaxonomies come in. It's like people do have to agree that, I'm calling this\nparticular kind of whatever x and you should call it X2 so that we can\ncommunicate, but that's all configurable in REA. So it can support any domains.\nAnd also speaking of simplicity, it has this resource event agents, right? And\nwe have processes in there too and agreements, but that small, simple pattern\nhappens across.\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (24:28.43)\n\nSo the one we've been talking about mostly, and it has the R, the E, and the A,\nis the what really happened layer. We call it observation. I think McCarthy\ncalls it accountability. And before that, there are two layers. One is called\nscheduling or planning. It has the same basic pattern. So it calls the flow\nthere as a commitment instead of an economic event. But it works the same way,\nand the layer above that is, we call it the knowledge layer. I think McCarthy\nmight call it the policy layer, and it is where all that configuration happens,\nas well as recipes, which give you a pretty well-defined pattern of what used to\nbe the bill of materials, plus routing information, plus whatever, all into one\nplace so you can create your plans easily without redoing the same thing over\nand over when you have repeatable processes. Anyway, those three layers are\nbasically the same model, right, which also makes it simple. Another innovation\nis the flows, right? This is a data model that makes it so your recorded\neconomic data can be assembled into flows based on resources flowing like an\noutput from a process creates a resource that some or all of that resource might\nbe consumed in another process, et cetera. And you can, if you have open data,\nyou can see that as far back as it goes, right, as far back as it's recorded. So\nit creates these flows in sort of a form that technical people sometimes call a\ndirected graph. It supports all this network of flows. And that makes things\nlike tracking back what happened to a resource or where all it came from or what\nwere the implications of how it was produced much easier. And this also includes\nin REA both production and exchange types of flows. And those things can\nconnect. If you produce something and the next thing you do is sell it to\nsomebody, then that all works.\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (26:54.318)\n\nIt's a really nice model, actually. It's perfect for actually something the EU\nis trying to do now, which is called digital product passports, where I can't\nremember what year it's supposed to be implemented. It keeps getting moved out,\nbut basically products coming into the EU will be required at some point to have\nthat digital product passport associated with them, and you should be able to\nscan your QR code on a product and know exactly how it was created, what's\nhappened to it since, for anything coming into that area.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nYeah, that's fascinating in terms of allowing people to make informed choices on\nwhat they consume and what they are economically supporting, right?\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster\n\nYes.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nFingers crossed it will come soon. Lynn, what about the hollow chain\narchitecture? What is different about it?\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (27:58.549)\n\nYes. Okay, I'm going to give you a simple version because I'm not a deep expert\nin Holochain. But the key thing, and we might have said this before, is that it\nis actually distributed. That is, a network's data is held on everybody's\nindividual computers, right? There's no central server, which takes a little bit\nof getting used to. This kind of fits back into our Conway's law discussion.\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (28:39.006)\n\nSo it supports networks because it is a network. And it handles all that\ndistribution so that if somebody's offline, you aren't missing any data. It\nmanages sharding that out into the Holochain world using Holochain magic and a\ndistributed hash table. It also has, because of that architecture, has an\nemphasis on privacy and security and all of those kinds of things. I don't think\nit will ever be a tool for surveillance capitalism, which is a nice thing.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nLynn, what possibilities emerge from integrating Holochain and Value Flows in\nREA architectures?\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (29:35.746)\n\nYeah, we're trying to do that now in several projects, which is pretty fun, but\nthe coolest possibility to me is that Value Flows and REA provide a way to\nconnect Holochain networks to each other. So now we're adding networks of\nnetworks. And it can be networks that were formed and coordinated by people from\nthe grassroots for their own benefit, you know. And then before you know it, you\nhave a whole economic ecosystem going, say for a community, say for a bio\nregion. So that's the kind of promise I feel with this kind of integration,\nwhich I think is very cool and we need it. think, so I mean, and we could expand\nthat. If Holochain had kind of a set of ontologies that were used in that way,\nyou could...internet work in whatever way you needed to. \n\nWe're doing the economic work, but there's other stuff. There's social\nnetworking, there's governance, all kinds of things. So a lot of work to be done\nthere, but that's what I think is an amazing possibility. Another thing maybe to\nmention here is that we can start thinking more about how to simplify software\ndevelopment, making it more modular, working towards that concept of the open\napp ecosystem that we talked about a little bit. For example, HREA is created in\nthat vein where it's REA-based backend. It's very generic and can be used by any\ndeveloper who wants to\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (31:30.702)\n\nCreate user interface software on top of that, which is by its nature kind of\nmuch more specific and will support all kinds of different user experiences and\nuse cases. There is a lot of work we got to do to get to this goal, but I see\nthe possibilities.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil (31:55.316)\n\nLynn, could you share the story of the carbon farm network?\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster\n\nThe Carbon Farm Network is actually one of the projects that we're working on\nright now using Holochain and Value Flows. And it's built as a user interface on\ntop of HREA, making use of that generic open source software that's sitting\nthere for everybody. But the real story about the Carbon Farm Network, of\ncourse, is on the ground as usual.\n\n\n\n\nThey are a textile network in the Hudson Valley region of New York that focuses\non sustainable creation of knitted clothing, basically. They are organized as a\ncooperative of the designers, and the designers together manage that whole\nsupply chain. The network also includes the farmers and the mills in between\nwhere the fiber coming off the farms. This is Alpaca and Sheep Farms gets\nprocessed and made into yarn and knitted. They're a supply chain network, they\nlike to call themselves, as opposed to just a supply chain.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nLynn, what problems are being solved by the Carbon Farm Network software?\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (33:21.01)\n\nWell, one thing is definitely sustainability. They think they see that as very\nimportant to them. That's the term carbon farming, right? So carbon farm\nnetwork. So they support implementation of agricultural practices that tend to\nreduce carbon, sequester carbon, et cetera. And that also relates to them\nfocusing on trying to be as local or regional as possible, which is sometimes\ndifficult in this world and educating people about that. So another thing just\nto say about them is that they're in between what you think about as artisanal\nkind of, know, people making things by hand and mass industrial production, you\nknow, they're like, they're in between that kind of a batch manufacturing thing,\nbut there's, so for example, there's nobody with knitting needles, there's\nknitting machines, right?\n\n\n\n\nBut it's all local, smaller, and community-based, but also real.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nNice, Lynn, what are the main challenges ahead of the carbon farm network\nsoftware development?\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster\n\nThey are many.\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (34:46.328)\n\nSo, I mean, the first one that comes to mind is funding, which is often the case\nwith these grassroots efforts that aren't starting with capital in hand. And\nthey have been doing a lot of work with the small farmers, right, on this carbon\nfarming practice. A lot of that's funded by the USDA, but that just got yanked\nin our current political climate. So they're really scrambling there.\n\n\n\n\nThe software effort has received funding both from carbon farm networks contacts\nin the textile world and from several key people in the Holochain ecosystem,\nwhich is super helpful. And then the carbon farm network itself, the designers\npitch into some of their income to the regenerative work with the farmers that\nthey are doing and some of the infrastructure work.\n\n\n\n\nBut I think unfortunately in this world we're not at a place where new local\nsustainable economic activity itself can fully fund these kind of extra efforts\nthat are needed, especially at the startup for for things that are trying to\nsupport a better climate and natural ecosystems and need new kinds of\ninfrastructure that'll support these kinds of networks into the future. More\ngenerally, they have the ongoing kinds of challenges that are often felt by\ngroups trying to implement this kind of local sustainable production of lasting\nquality in the world that we live in, right? Monopoly capitalism, that's moved\nproduction to areas of cheap labor, exploits the environment and privatizes the\nprofits while socializing the costs and this all this makes artificially cheap\nprices possible and that's a problem in in this time of ever-rising inequality\nso there's this giant systemic problem that happens for all all of these like\nnext economy\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (37:12.436)\n\nexperiments and they are definitely feeling that themselves. Just in the last\nfew weeks they learned, this is just an example, right? They learned that their\nspinning mill is shutting down and now they're really scrambling to find\nsomething not too far away that can spin yarn. know, it's just part of this\nlevel of deindustrialization that's happened and somehow this spinning mill\nsurvived the worst of it and then I think COVID did them in. But anyway, they're\nclosing, which made all of us sort of immediately think, is there some way that\nsomebody or co-op or anything, people can get together and take advantage of\nthat equipment and plants sitting there to start something new, you know, a new\nspinning mill there with all that existing equipment. But it's hard to scramble\ninto that easily and quickly, you know, but maybe, fingers crossed, it will\nhappen and hopefully we'll be catching up soon and hear about the development\nthere. Lynn, I'm looking forward to more. Lynn, are there other Value Flows use\ncases you would like to share?\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nThat would be good.\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (38:45.526)\n\nYeah, sure, because it's such a flexible and lovely model. And I can say that\nbecause it stands on the shoulders of many, but there are lots of possibilities.\nA couple other apps that are in process now using HREA, one is an offers needs\napplication being created for internal use in the Holochain ecosystem. So\ndevelopers and projects and people who can offer other kinds of support can all\nfind each other, and there are a bunch of other offers, needs, efforts in\nprogress elsewhere. All kinds of exchange can be supported, know, conventional\nsales and e-commerce and purchases with money, whatever, mutual credit, gift\neconomy, barter, whatever people can imagine.\n\n\n\n\nIf Value Flows doesn't support it, we'll make it support it, right? If it's\nsomething that people are using to try to make this a better situation. Another\nin progress application is a rewrite of the old sensorica software. So that's\nlike the next generation NRP, right?\n\n\n\n\nAnd it's probably about the same scope, but I'm sure they've learned a lot over\nthe years and we can make lots of improvements. And another thing I could\nmention there is that Sensorica has innovated with something we could call a\ncontribution economy. And I see that actually a fair amount now. A lot of groups\nare very interested in this concept where they distribute the income that comes\nin according to the contributions that were made to create the resources that\nbrought that income in, right, when it was sold or delivered to somebody.\nAstonSorica has what they call a benefit distribution algorithm or\nredistribution. I've seen it both ways, which is democratically decided. And\nthey use that to, the software actually uses that to calculate how much all the\ncontributors get from that income.\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (40:57.566)\n\nAnd it can be pretty involved or not that involved. But that's a lot of people\nare interested in that. A couple other applications that I think Deserva\nmentioned are apps that were completed in the EU. One is called Reflow. It's\ncircular economies and they had like six pilot municipalities. So it was\ncircular economy software within a city. And a more recent one is called Fab\nCity. And that supports fab labs with individual or collaborative design and\nthen the distributed manufacturing of fabricated items that were designed by\nwhoever, because the designs are available and are open. There's also a\nNetherlands-based organization while we're in Europe here, called the\nWeathermakers that is working on software to help them design and manage rather\nlarge projects, earth moving projects often, that are to restore water cycles.\nAnd it's worth kind of emphasizing that Value Flows and REA, and we've actually\nhad fairly recent discussions on this have expanded the concepts, both of\nresources and agents, to make climate modeling and climate accounting a real\nthing, also to account for externalities, to account for carbon and nitrogen and\nwhatever you need, right? And we think that's kind of important for a whole set\nof future projects. Like when you have an agent, an agent can be a person or an\norganization, but we want to say that an agent can also be a river or a forest,\nyou know, and that resources are taken out of that forest and resources are put\ninto that forest. Maybe they're helpful and maybe they aren't. But anyway, if\nyou can track all those flows, you can get a lot closer to helping\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (43:23.598)\n\nthe climate out a little bit, we definitely need. We've also worked locally with\nthe high school FabLab network and there's a mutual aid network with us we've\nbeen working with for several years. I want to say it's not all about\nmanufacturing, like services are equally well supported. When we were actually\ncreating Value Flows, we talked quite a bit with translators who make, to\ntranslate, right? And the finished document is the resource that's created. So\nyeah, it's worth thinking about broadly. And also things like saving pools or\nother financial kinds of applications, you know. It can be about anything of\nvalue to people that they want to track in some way. Yeah.\n\n\n\n\nLet me give you one more, too, because this one's sort of important. And we did\na couple projects around this, but it is important, I think, to understand that\nValue Flows in REA can represent any kind of aggregated data. It can be more\nthan operational software.\n\n\n\n\nWe did a couple projects around this. One was in Nova Scotia, mostly around\nplanning around food, and then one specifically around fish, and then one with\nour nearby mutual aid network, where they're trying to connect up people and\norganizations within the community. And this kind of software gets you to where\nyou can plan, for one thing, but also you can discover where there are gaps and\nwhere a new organization might fill in a gap. Or you can discover where one\norganization produces something that another organization uses, but they don't\nknow about each other yet. So it's all about using the same model and similar\ntools for regions or communities. So that I can get pretty excited about.\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (45:46.08)\n\nActually, we were just talking with some people from Asheville and there's a\nwhole effort there where they are thinking this is an area that was devastated\nby a hurricane a few months ago and they're still rebuilding from that. But\nthere's a whole group that's really interested in using that as an opportunity\neven to think about, how would they restructure their economy in that region and\njust reconfigure things?\n\n\n\n\nSo that's, I think, important.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nI love the talk you're taking of looking into challenges as opportunities. We're\ngoing through an extremely challenging political moment in the world. And I'm\nreally interested in what are the opportunities, because like there's no point\nin us only loathing it, right? It's like, can be done? What are the\npossibilities that open up? How can we encounter it?\n\n\n\n\nin strength rather than as victims. And I'm really interested in why is work\nlike value flow so relevant to this?\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster\n\nYeah, you talked about the challenges and indeed they are many, right? I think\nanything where we can get prepared now and start to create relationships among\nourselves, in this case we're talking about economic activity and economic\nrelationships, but in any area really of human interaction, right? You know, if\nwe can start working towards something\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (47:28.59)\n\nthat we know will work better than what we've got, maybe we'll have it when we\nneed it. mean, I don't know, you know, it's, I mean, Value Flows and this kind\nof work we're doing with these projects is, it's, you know, we always say it's a\nsmall piece of a very large puzzle and that's really true. There's so much\nthat's needed. But, you know, the open source piece is important, and we're\ngonna need that open knowledge to easily bring ourselves together, you know, up\nto where we need to be. And hopefully we'll still have internet. If we don't,\nwe'll work with it, but you know. But we kind of ended up with our little piece\nof the puzzle just because we happen to have those skills and experience, you\nknow. There are so many pieces that need to be plugged into that that it's sort\nof mind-boggling. I think if we can get our collaboration hats on and not be too\ncompetitive about any of this, we can maybe make something happen in time. We'll\nsee.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nYeah, I'm in love with small bits, you know. I think that in the beginning of my\nadult life, I had this expectation of scale, that things had to be big, they had\nto be impactful. And recently I heard from Paul Krafel that really at scale\nthings are usually downward spirals because you're seeing them erode really\nquick. When you're building, you're building a small bit of the puzzle, you're\nlaying bricks. You can imagine the cathedral or the beautiful bridge you're\nbuilding, but it's not quick. Scale comes with the encounter of many small bits\ncoming together. It's not immediate and as visible as downward spirals. And this\nwas a beautiful...\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil (49:40.984)\n\nframing for me, you know, just like, yeah, it's a right to be doing this small\nbit of work here that's very meaningful and local, because it will connect to\nother ones and together they will create an upward spiral. And yeah, this has\nbeen inspiring me a lot. And when I hear of your experience in the years you've\ndedicated to this, it goes like, yeah, there it is again, you know, that's the\npattern that works and that makes sense.\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster\n\nYeah, well said. You have your puzzle piece too, right Lucas?\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nLynn, it's been a huge pleasure to have you here today and hear of your story\nand all the beautiful work you and Bob have been doing together. I really\nappreciate your time and really looking forward to meeting you again shortly and\nhearing of the development of both Value Flows and HREA and where carbon farm\nnetworks are going with the software you're creating. Loads of gratitude.\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster\n\nAnd likewise, Lucas, this is important work you're doing here. And believe me, I\nwouldn't get up and talk about it without you initiating and doing what needs to\nbe done to get to what people are doing out there. So that's a good thing. Thank\nyou.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil (51:12.75)\n\nThank you so much, Lynn. Have a beautiful day.\n\n\n\n\nLynn Foster (51:19.79)\n\nAnd you too.\n\n\n\n\nNarrator - Clara Chemin\n\nThanks for joining us at Entangled Futures. Subscribe to our channel for more\nconversations on mutuality. Towards a world that works for all.","image":"https://media-cdn.entangledfutures.fm/podcast-entangledfutures-fm/production/images/item-9074a173d55f7e3c48254f62a76d3667.png","date_published":"2025-09-04T15:26:52.850Z","_microfeed":{"is_audio":true,"is_document":false,"is_external_url":false,"is_video":false,"is_image":false,"web_url":"https://podcast-entangledfutures-fm.pages.dev/i/economies-that-flow-an-open-source-blueprint-XcKPeIi8PeT/","json_url":"https://podcast-entangledfutures-fm.pages.dev/i/XcKPeIi8PeT/json/","rss_url":"https://podcast-entangledfutures-fm.pages.dev/i/XcKPeIi8PeT/rss/","guid":"XcKPeIi8PeT","status":"published","duration_hhmmss":"00:51:36","itunes:episodeType":"full","itunes:season":1,"itunes:episode":4,"date_published_short":"Thu Sep 04 2025","date_published_ms":1756999612850}}],"_microfeed":{"microfeed_version":"0.1.5","base_url":"https://podcast-entangledfutures-fm.pages.dev","categories":[{"name":"Technology"},{"name":"Society & Culture"},{"name":"News","categories":[{"name":"Tech News"}]}],"subscribe_methods":[{"name":"RSS","type":"rss","url":"https://podcast-entangledfutures-fm.pages.dev/rss/","image":"https://podcast-entangledfutures-fm.pages.dev/assets/brands/subscribe/rss.png","enabled":true,"editable":false,"id":"nUhl7Fa-Cl0"},{"name":"JSON","type":"json","url":"https://podcast-entangledfutures-fm.pages.dev/json/","image":"https://podcast-entangledfutures-fm.pages.dev/assets/brands/subscribe/json.png","enabled":true,"editable":false,"id":"VyIkGrRjybr"}],"description_text":"[HTTPS://MEDIA-CDN.ENTANGLEDFUTURES.FM/PODCAST-ENTANGLEDFUTURES-FM/PRODUCTION/MEDIA/RICH-EDITOR/CHANNELS/VPV5VDJRNPT/IMAGE-87263A0560932A6DBBD05B4E3D4F1246.JPG]A\nPODCAST EXPLORING MUTUALITY\n\n\n\n\nConversations towards a world that work for everyone\n\n\n\n\n\n\nABOUT US\n\n\n\n\nEntangled Futures is a podcast exploring the world of mutuality, produced by\nLucas Tauil.\n\nEngaging in conversation with the people shaping collective spaces, we aim to\nidentify adjacent possibilities— new opportunities for collaboration and\ninnovation—that nourish a planet where everyone can thrive.\n\nThis work is the result of the excellence and dedication of an amazing team: Ira\nNezhynska led the design, Kika created the music, Clara Chemin was the narrator,\nPaul d'Aoust developed the website, Mamading Ceesay handled the infrastructure,\nMatthew Nichols took care of integration and Jonathan Patecki edited the\nanimations.\n\n\n\n\n\nSUPPORT US\n\n\n\n\nCome together! Help us bring the next season to life. You can support the show\nwith a credit card on our Patreon page, (https://patreon.com/EntangledFutures)\nor with crypto using the Ethereum wallet, ENS: entangledfutures.eth.\n\n\n\n\n0x24055dB18b971f24C3BFAB623A24Ee6c2b04F921\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSPONSORED BY\n\n\n\n\nThe show is brought to you by the Holochain Foundation. Holochain is creating\ntechnology that helps people team up, share information, and solve their own\nproblems together—without needing a middle-man. Creating carriers that cannot be\ncaptured, Holochain enables privacy and holds space for innovation and\nmutuality.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHOST\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil is a trained, and seasoned communicator focused on participative\nculture and collaboration. Connected to the world of sustainability and\ndecentralised technology he has worked as a Journalist for two decades in\nmainstream media. \n\nWorking with the power of difference and collective intelligence on multiple\nstakeholders organisations since 2001, Lucas is part of Enspiral, a collective\nof people working on stuff that matters. \n\nTogether with his partner Sandra Chemin and eight other families, Lucas\nco-founded Quintal Magico, a communitarian Steiner school in Paraty, Brazil. The\ncouple sailed for six years with their two daughters from England to New\nZealand.","itunes:title":"Entangled Futures","copyright":"©2025 Lucas Tauil","itunes:type":"episodic","itunes:email":"lucas@entangledfutures.fm","items_sort_order":"newest_first"}}