Merging Flowspace and Action Workflows? IPAG: is Intentions, Planning or Promise, Action and Grace/Gratitude).

Models and Relationships

Each of these models will be further evolved and developed as the architectural map of the complete system evolves. Starting from the ARE triple in subject object verb order. Agency is what drives everything because we are always doing human and humane design that connects to whole persons and the same with the others they interact with whether other people, other living beings or artificial systems based on cultural conventions and technical knowledge. The wealing cycle emerges from collective production, and the coordination of individual and collective agency is present throughout the cycle and no more so than in the initial intention formation stages.

Collective Agency and Intentions

Intention formation is at the start of action cycles, and it starts in openness to individual and collective needs. First people within communities need to imagine future actions and select paths of future actions. Community survival may depend on success, and not aligning on a collective intent is clearly a formula for failure. In the models we are designing for open communities, we take into account those  who are not always existentially bound in a collective context as all humans once were. Not that the strength of community ties should be weakened and all group boundaries easily crossed, but that binding strength and entry and exit rules are design parameters.

We will need to involve good social science research and development to comprehend these systems in action as fully deployed and operational social media systems in the wilds of the Internet. Intentions in this system are to be like circles of interest, signposts and symbolic causes to rally around. We need to find others to align with at increasing scale, and also to provide the systems facilities to connect to local action and social circles. The systems design will use Intention models and subsystems to virtually create many of these structures directly from the social relationships represented by systems actions. In other words, you find the collections from the relating actions of all the individual agents, and just reflect it back to people as they are relating and coordinating. Lots of social media applications try to exploit this and own this relating data. In this design the agency goes to the agents not the systems.

Intention Models -- These are scaled/nested spaces created by alignment of intents. These objects lead into the generation of collective wealth by cycling in actions. The scaling/nesting of IPAG is a general pattern where high granularity cycling at high frequencies are accumulating progress at the more comprehensive (large) scales of the systems. That is the individual actions of planting trees in a particular place, for example, is connected to regional biodiversity projects through people and funding flows as well as to global climate action networks. The agency will always devolve to the individual making free choices, but the choices ocur in communities of joint action who are coordinating by choice and policy.

Agents/Agency -- In systems layers, these are User logins often with shared authentication or better private key signed authentic messages to source systems events. Collective agency will be designed as the result of rule based aggregations of individual agents. Rules are free to implement democracy how it sees fit with majority or other voting based decisions or others such as rotating service roles, or capacities enabled by reputation or actions of agents and other rule based agencies. No change can be registered without some agency. Even when content changes are part of a release and performed by a Bot, individual agency is there, it just might be hidden by out of band actions. In other words, the system user's id is known to the system, but not shown to the users of the system nor represented in its data.

Planning and Commitments

To move to the next phase of IPAG, we are heading for commitment, or not. In this phase we identify resources and commit them to actions, conventionally agents make promisses to actions they intend to complete. Of course, people don't always keep promisses, but we know how much effort and pain can go into promisses not kept of forgotten by one party, leaving another with a problem. One of the most valuable functions of systems to coordinate actions and workflows is to help people keep their commitments and to adjust the goals or conditions when the promise will not be kept as committed. The first step to keeping our important commitments is to know what they are, and have simple tools to review them and know when time commitments are coming up.

Any complex of planning tools and subsystems can be invoked in this phase of the process. It will be natural to have feedback from previous cycles available to plan next actions. We might have to initially guess about some process parameters, but can also use history to improve performance. Some actors may initially be somewhat unreliable and improve, and although your performance and mistakes are visible in history, so is your growth. Our context is free and open collaborations and not hierachy command driven organizations. You can't just jump into the inner circles of a large project, but their will be opportunities to contribute first in your own ways from the outer spaces and that can be what is needed to be invited into other circles.

Common Requests and Offerings

An accelerator pattern for actions is to have standard products and services. When there is a lot of traffic on the same simple actions or action patterns, we can make these very streamlined. If lots of people come and ask the same questions or need the same service, you can send them to a featured service to find and make a request according to a common pattern and have these requests serviced. For example, a person with a disability needs a little shopping, and they have several care-givers who regularly help with this. The request pops up on one or more agent screens and one of them accepts the request thus making a promise that then gets completed and acknowledge in due course. In another case, the requester may be new to a network or community and needs to publish the request to a local care services group or groups. In this case, someone new can respond and we find out how that goes in practice as it unfolds. Either party can cancel the commitment before it is complete and take another action path.

The flip side of a request is someone who offers to do something specific or general either to a specific person or other cause. The active agent can accept an offer resulting in a promise and a completed (or not) action cycle.

Currencies and Payments -- The typical commercial offers and requests are generally of good and services for cash moneys, but we are just as interested if not moreso in alternative currencies. This topic needs a lot more depth to account for different types of gift currencies with different rules of exchange and transfer. There will be some currencies in our systems that are not at all for exchange, but for enabling transactions according to community base rules of conventions. This allows us a lot more flexibility in design than cash moneys and their difficult properties.

Our systems will necessarily interact with the money systems people are using of necessity already, but in general will seek to move more value as gifts and recognition vs. rewards to the winners. When the system does interface with fiat moneys, great care will be taken both to comply with all regulations and reporting requirements and to remain viable with sufficient capital reserves to maintain stable financial institutions to support the commons such that it remains productive and solvent.

In the planning/promise phase, rates and payments should be part of the resource specifications to the later phases. In gift flows, this will often be delayed to the final phase to be able to fully acknowledge the quality that is delivered and express gratitude. The intention of this design is to make gratitude more abundant,  and not limited by resource considerations because it doesn't represent a claim on any future assets. Recognition vs. rewards.

Action