PLANET
PLANET is an evolving project to design an operating system for a collaborative, regenerative economy.
The project aims to demonstrate how collectively governed online systems could facilitate collaboration at scale by providing a decentralised coordination system to manage our collective endeavours.
how does planet work?
You can think of PLANET as a club, which is owned and managed by it’s members.
Everyone who joins gets access to a collection of tools to help them participate in the regenerative economy and collaborate with everyone else.
PLANET is built on a series of protocols, which define the procedures and rules at each layer of the system.
Conceptual layer
Defines the ontology on which PLANET is built.
An ontology is a set of principles, or assumptions, about how the world works and the fundamental nature of reality.
The dominant social paradigm is based on an outdated ontology – a new worldview is fundamental to our survival.
James Robertson explains it succinctly in his article entitled Neoliberalism is shit: “Not only has neoliberalism achieved our compliance by convincing us it’s the only game in town, it has persuaded us to adopt the values and worldviews that justify its legitimacy and our oppression.”
Read more about A new ontology for the progressive movement.
The PLANET commons needs to be founded on a new set of assumptions about how things work. Once PLANET is running, these would be continually crowd-sourced from all Members… But to kick things off, we ran an initial experiment to create a starting list, which we broke down into two sections. These are some of the ideas:
Assumptions about human behaviour:
- Complex decisions are best made by diverse minds
- Success depends on how well we relate to everything around us
- Joy comes from the bliss of connectedness
Assumptions about reality and existence
- Humanity relies on planet Earth for its survival
- All societies are complex, adaptive, systems that require flows of value
- Well-being is an emergent property of a system that provides its members with safety, security, feelings of competence, connection to others and the ability to act autonomously and be authentically engaged in their work and play
Read more about A new ontology for the progressive movement.
Core Policy layer
Puts the Planetary ontology into operation.
The shared purpose and principles on which PLANET operates.
To gather the momentum we need to deliver the synergistic, systems-level change we need to unite under a shared purpose. We don’t all need to agree on everything, as long as we all agree on some things and – importantly – act accordingly.
Dee Hock, and others, have demonstrated that incredible results emerge from even loose organisations when they are bound by a simple purpose and some basic principles.
In order to build a regenerative economy we need to acknowledge that we rely on planet Earth for our survival (as per the planetary ontology) and set an objective that operationalises our world view. So the draft purpose of the PLANET commons might be:
“To restore and steward the Earth’s natural systems to create lasting abundance for all”, or maybe just “To create a world which puts people and planet before profit”
The draft principles of PLANET might be to maximise:
- Equity
- Equality
- Diversity
- Respect for others
- Resilience
- and subsidiarity
These are only suggestions. The final purpose and principles would need to be a defined by all members as a collaborative effort.
Read more on Defining a shared purpose and discuss these ideas on Loomio.
operational layer
Converts the Planetary purpose and principles into code.
The Membership Agreement and systems which define how PLANET works.
The Membership Agreement codifies the purpose and principles and defines the responsibilities, obligations and rights of the Members of the PLANET commons. It acts as a semi-permeable membrane and protects the PLANET commons from exploitation.
According to Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, the authors of Free, Fair and Alive:
“Semi-Permeable Membranes are what the boundaries of a Commons should be. Like other living social organisms, Commons need to protect themselves from external forces that might harm them while remaining open to flows of nourishment and signals from the environment. Therefore, a commons functions best if it develops a semi-permeable membrane for itself rather than a tight, rigid boundary. This flexible skin, figuratively speaking, both assures its integrity by preventing Enclosure and other harms while allowing it to develop nourishing, symbiotic relationships with other living organisms.”
Semi-permeable membranes can therefor be used to help protect commons from becoming ‘free-for-alls’ (commons which are exploited due to lack of protection).
Everyone who joins the club signs the Membership Agreement and becomes a co-owner of the PLANET commons. Members gets access to the systems and tools detailed below to help them participate in the regenerative economy and collaborate with other members.
collaborative layer
Provides the tools members use to participate in the new economy.
Everyone who joins the PLANET commons get access to the following tools:
Self Sovereign Identity
Self-sovereign identity (SSI) is an approach to digital identity that gives individuals control over their data. SSI addresses the difficulty of establishing trust in an interaction.
For an identity system to be self-sovereign, users control the verifiable credentials that they hold and their consent is required to use those credentials. This reduces the unintended sharing of users’ personal data. This is contrasted with the centralized identity paradigm where identity is provided by some outside entity. Read more on Self-sovereign identity.
We’re collaborating with Co-op Credentials, who are developing a Verifiable Credential for the co-operative community.
They’re working on a SSI system which will provide verifiable credentials stored in a digital wallet. Like a physical credential, such as a drivers licence, or a university degree, you can use it to prove something. You could use a verifiable credential to prove you’re allowed to drive a car, or that you’re a qualified accountant.
Read more about Co-op Credentials.
Your multi-currency wallet can hold both ‘conventional’ (e.g. GBP or USD) and other currencies, including Crypto and Mutual Credit.
Read more about Mutual Credit.
Conventional currencies, such as GBP and USD are created by central and investment banks as interest bearing debt.
When money is created as interest bearing debt it fuels the extractive nature of our economy, by requiring we extract even more value from nature in the future in order to ‘balance the books’.
Find out more about how the global economy is the core driver of environmental destruction.
Currencies should provide a measure, or store of value, or a means of exchange which is appropriate to the context in which it is being used. A collaborative regenerative economy will need multiple currencies for different purposes for example, you might ‘pre-buy’ deli-dollars in return for a discount on your lunch from the local deli, which in turn provides the deli with upfront capital for expansion.
Groups within PLANET would have the ability to create their own currencies, according to their own specifications, from within their multi-currency wallet.
The profile system within PLANET enables Members to set which of their details to share publicly, which to keep private and which data to license to third parties.
Public profiles make it easy for people to find others with shared interests, but nobody likes being spammed. With an appropriate permissions system which allows Members to reveal only what they want, to who they want data exploitation can be minimised – plus, by enabling Members to license their data to third parties on their own terms we can flip the ‘standard’ advertising model on its head and enable people, rather than big corporates, to benefit from the use of their data.
When you sign up to a new service or app you license your data to the service provider on your terms. To create a Data License you set permissions for the data you are willing to share from your private profile.
These licenses form the terms on which you participate with a service or platform and you can revoke a data license at any time. So, for example, you might allow your local pizza restaurant to send you promotions once a week, but you might charge your local supermarket 50p to send you a promotion.
Your reputation is an important metric in PLANET, which works throughout the economy – so when you sign up to a new service or app you don’t have to build a new reputation from scratch.
Reputation is a key means of tracking, rewarding and recognizing contributions which support the development of the collaborative, regenerative economy, which can help establish trust.
Reputation metrics can be complex to get right. So the reputation algorithm used by PLANET would be an open, and evolving, formula which Members define together.
Initial designs for PLANET’s reputation score have been developed to incorporate several ‘dimensions’ including:
- Identity – based on which aspects of your identity you have verified
- Claims – your own ratings of your various skills
- Reviews – based on ratings and feedback from others, per claim
- Honesty – based on your Claims and your Reviews
- Wisdom – how valuable your contributions are to others
- Ecological footprint
Read more about the initial designs for the PLANET reputation system.
collaborative tools
To support decentralised collaboration at scale.
A space for you to share updates about what you have been contributing to the economy (not posts about your cat!) – every post requires:
- A title
- Some main text
- Tags
- And local relevance
If posts have ‘local relevance’ as well as @mentions and #tags we create richer data which can be highly filtered to help reduce ‘noise’.
For example, by selecting one of the following options for every post we can direct our messages better.
Local relevance options:
- Street
- Neighborhood
- Town
- District
- Country
- World
So, if you’ve shared your location publicly, only your followers on your street see your question about bin day, and your followers in other countries get a richer feed.
This is just one example of how improving the quality of the data we publish we can create higher value data within the PLANET commons.
Achieving our full collaborative potential requires networks that can help small groups to connect more effectively with each other at larger and larger scale.
PLANET provides a specific set of group tools to encourage co-creation, collaboration and ethical trade.
A space for you to file your private work and share folders and files with other members.
The Docs system is closely connected to Groups, to enable simple sharing with other collaborators
My groups
In PLANET groups have 3 possible modes – All groups must be in one of these modes.
Chat groups are just for chatting, like a forum or WhatsApp group.
The PLANET chat tool enables Members to send private messages (DMs) and to form ‘open’, ‘restricted’ or ‘private’ groups, much like we already offer using the open source tool Mattermost via Open Web Systems.
Working groups are for members who have agreed to work together on some specific purpose e.g. an open source software project, or other creative endeavour.
Working groups come with the same chat features of chat groups, plus shared document storage – to enable collaboration with other group members,
shared calendars and
project management tools – much like we already offer using the open source tool Nextcloud via Open Web Systems.
Trading groups are for teams that have developed a business or other idea, to present a commercial proposition. A trading group is like a ready-made business and comes with all the tools that are needed to trade, but without the hassle of setting up a conventional business.
Trading Groups come with the same features as Working Groups, plus a CRM – to manage customer relationships, accounting and budgeting tools to keep track of the groups finances, and an online payment system to enable the group to make sales or receive donations.
The design of Groups is a central component of PLANET’s collaboration framework, which is designed to help small teams evolve by supporting them with the essential online tools they need to flourish. By providing the features above ‘out-of-the-box’, as soon as a new group is set up, or as its mode is updated, groups can bypass the tedium – and cost of tool selection, installation, and integration, and focus on their core objectives.
group features
Group Profiles
Every open group comes with a public profile, which explains the purpose of the group. These profiles make it easy for other Members of PLANET to find and connect with groups and include a link to their RSS feed, which provides a chronological list of their progress updates.
Group profiles provide the details that other members of PLANET need to find out about the latest developments within a specific subject or topic area, how to support the work and opportunities for cooperation and collaboration.
Group profiles, which we are already building on the Murmurations protocol, include a range of interoperable fields which allow others to aggregate the data in a range of ways.
Profiles are created to match specific ‘schemas’ (pre-defined sets of fields) which include specific data. For example, the community currency schema includes details of alternative currency projects and the ways they transact, and the systems change schema includes other fields pertinent to systems change projects – but, importantly, where the data from different fields ‘overlaps’, for example, the ‘name’ or ‘description’ of a community currency or systems change project, it is stored in a dedicated ‘name’ or ‘description’ field which is identical in both schemas, making it possible for aggregators to build maps, directories or matching systems (for example, for offers and wants) which merge the data from a wide range of projects, making it easy for PLANET members to search, and find existing groups and to avoid replicating work.
Group blogs
Groups blogs are just like personal blogs – but for groups. They provide a chronological feed of updates from the group, to which any Member of the group can contribute.
Chat groups don’t necessarily need to update the outside world about their progress, unless they have something specific to share, or ask. But, every working group or trading group needs a way to inform the rest of the PLANET network about progress. Group blogs fill this need. They replace the need for projects to post their progress to numerous social networks because every blog comes with RSS feeds as standard, which push out notifications every time a new post is published, so that aggregators can gather, curate and publish topic, or sector specific, news with links to deeper content.
Blog posts provide progress updates and the latest news so that other members of PLANET can find out what’s happening in any specific area by searching aggregators.
Group blog posts follow the same format as personal posts, with title, an image, a range of topic #tags and even @mentions, as well as ‘local relevance’ as standard, making it easier to filter posts and cut out the noise.
Group Wallets
Group wallets provide a way for Trading groups to transact with other Members and Groups within PLANET. Instead of needing to incorporate and register a new bank account group wallets provide Trading groups with a simple way to send and receive funds, in multiple currencies, as soon as the group is established.
The existing route to establishing a trading entity is mired with bureaucracy which stifles innovation and collaboration and distracts team members from their core roles.
Group wallets, for Trading Groups, are designed to bypass the administration which is required to start trading. By enabling small teams and projects to get set up and start accepting and distributing funds quickly Group Wallets provide a critical means of exchange within the regenerative economy and, with access to alternative currencies – such as mutual credit – built in, projects are ale to trade and access credit without creating the interest bearing debt, which plagues the ‘traditional’ economy.
Group Wallets provide a means of sending and receiving funds, in multiple currencies, as part of Trading Groups financial tools.
Wallets integrate with the group’s Accounting system and web site, so that Groups avoid the need to set up an online shopping cart, a payment gateway, a CRM and an accounting system, as well as a bank account and credit cards etc… Group Wallets can be configured in a number of ways, so that only specific Members within the group can administer funds, as required. Members’ existing reputations are used to calculate initial credit lines, so that even new businesses can access credit if they’re established by Members with strong trading history, or trust networks.
The collaborative tools within PLANET are supported by a range of services, including:
Feeds
RSS feeds provide an automatically updated list of posts which Members make on their personal or Group blogs. See The Open Co-op’s RSS feed as an example.
Feeds provide a chronological list of updates from people and groups – they are the source of news within the network, which enable data processors to aggregate, filter and match data to other Members needs.
You could think of a personal feed like the timeline of a person’s posts on Facebook or Twitter, but PLANET feeds can also be more sophisticated by providing specific data for other types of content, for example, Offers and Wants for a trading network.
Ultimately, feeds are just RSS. But they’re used in PLANET in a way which makes it easy for specific types of news to be shared across the network. For example, we’re working on a Murmurations schema for Offers and Wants to facilitate trade, like on Amazon or eBay but without the ‘middle man’ taking a cut. When someone creates an ‘offer’ or a ‘want’ post for an item they would like to sell, or buy, this would also be posted to their feed, so that ‘trade aggregators’ can publish and notify other Members with matching interests.
Processors
Processors ingest, process and output the data within PLANET to provide specific information and services to PLANET’s Members. Aggregators, matching, transaction and notification services are all examples of processors.
Processors interpret the data within PLANET to make it useful to Members. They provide the core functionality which powers the tools outlined above. For example, an aggregator gathers data from various indexes, collates it, filters it and presents it back in a specific format such as a map or a directory.
A ‘matching processor’ gathers data and looks for matches based on specific inputs – for example, by match people on age and interests on a dating site, by matching offers with wants on a trading site, or people and projects on The Open Projects Hub.
A ‘transaction processor’ collects funds from one wallet and transfers it to another – and another processor requests, collects and records feedback on Members transactions, which feed in to a Members reputation.
Notifications rely on another processor, to update Members when specific actions happen, or criteria are met.
The processors within PLANET are designed as microservices, in order to increase re-usability of code, and to encourage the decentralised, democratic and subsidiarity principles of PLANET.
A microservice architecture arranges applications as collections of loosely-coupled services based on simple protocols. The goal being that teams can bring their services to life independent of others, thereby allowing PLANET to grow faster as developers can focus on delivering for specific needs and use cases – and reuse existing functionality wherever possible via open protocols and APIs.
HELP us make PLANET a reality
The Open Co-op is a collaborative endeavour to develop the various layers protocols, components and microservices to bring PLANET to life.
But, as you might appreciate, this is no small challenge!
So we need your help.
PLANET history
The original PLANET concept was designed in 2004. We designed a series of screenshots and cartoon story to demonstrate how the concept would be used in practice.
The cartoon story was developed in 2004, but was set in 2010. The designs might look old now but bear in mind that Facebook did not exist until February 2004 and Google Earth was not launched until June 2005, so the screenshots were quite forward thinking at the time.
We updated the PLANET concept in January 2017, as an open source operating system for a collaborative, sustainable economy with a new series of phone-based screenshots to illustrate how the various concepts and ideas would work.
Like before, the purpose was to illustrate some of the key concepts of a collaborative economy and what it might be like to interact with this new economic system via PLANET.
PLANET was, and still is, envisioned as an open source project which is owned and controlled by its members, giving them complete control over how it works.
