Introducing Realities

TLDR: It's a webapp that's a bit like P2Panda if you've seen that talk, but it's not p2p, and it has less focus on resources and more focus on responsibilities. You can look at an existing organization using it here or look at the AGPL code on github.

Since september I've been working on (and other people from time to time for a few years before that) on Realities. It's an app that grew out of The Borderland (a danish burn festival with a few thousand members on a normal year) needing to find a way to organize its mostly decentralized organization. The basic concept is that people create Responsibilities (sort of roles (not brief tasks!)) that are categorized into Needs. Realizers (people responsible for a responsibility) are assigned to Responsibilities, there are also Guides (people who don't actually do the Responsibility but know how to do it, or at least how to find someone who knows how to do it) that are assigned to Needs and responsibilities.

It can be a bit confusing to understand at first (we're working a lot on the UX right now though!) but you can maybe take a look at some organizations already using it, Blivande (a hippie coworking space in stockholm) or at The Borderland's own (it's running a slightly older version but should work mostly the same). One cool feature is to click the Graph button in the top right, there you can see e.g. if any individuals are carrying much more of the load compared to other people.

Introducing it now because up until new years it was only possible to have one organization using it per installation, but now anyone can create their own organization in the app, just log in :)

I'm currently getting paid to work on it until probably june as the main developer. But the whole Plato Project has a few more people including (but not limited to) @hugi and @gustav. We're currently funded through a Vinnova grant (swedish gov grant body) and will be moving into a business model similar to e.g. Loomio: You can host it yourself (it's all open source, AGPL3), or we can host it for you (but you'll have to pay at some point if you have money), and in the future we might provide e.g. payment/event ticket handling for some fee.

(we also have an app Dreams but I'll let someone else introduce that)

#realities #platoproject #borderland #p2panda

This is really great. We've got a bunch of mutual aid groups which are active in Portland around both covid response and black lives matter movement.

It'd be helpful to have an example .env file with the default values laid out. Or maybe even a docker setup to make it easier to get going.

@Rabble Using it for mutual aid stuff would be super cool :)

The installation instructions in the readme are recently updated, I haven't had anyone try them but they should be relatively easy to follow to set up your .env and stuff. Please open an issue if they aren't. And yeah we've thought about making a docker-compose file to get it easy to setup but we haven't gotten there yet.

To clarify since I got a question: If you want to try this out in your own org, the easiest way is to go to our instance at https://realities.platoproject.org/ , create an account and then create an org. Note though that everything is public and editable by anyone so far (we haven't had any malicious users so far though, and worst case we do periodic backups).

There needs to be a link to the github repo from the main site: https://www.platoproject.org/eng

Responsibilities, Roles, Needs, Reailizers, Guides ...

Back in the stone-age, before bugzilla and it's ilk were born, people realized they needed issue-trackers. The problem was that different industries needed different processes - they way you deal with broken equipment in a factory is different from how you deal with broken software. Medical issues ("broken people") are obviously different from broken software. And then there's the problem of putting in a purchase requisition order to buy the x-ray scanner that would fix many problems, but requires approval via a distinct process flow. How can you automate this, without hard-coding your web-page?

The clever folks at NASA realized this was all scriptable. They were not the first, but maybe the first to open-source it. The script file was used to autogenerate web pages (this was way before css and javascript) it autogenerated source code to update a database, every time a new issue was created a new role defined, etc. It autogenerated the SQL table layouts. It was all done in lex and yacc. Very very cool, very very flexible. However, the web was expanding at light-speed, back then, and, for whatever reason, this fell into obscurity. Maybe it was overkill for what most people needed.

I super-duper strongly suggest looking into how to make the generic concept of Responsibilities, Roles, Needs, Reailizers, Guides scriptable, so that the next organization might decide, "oh hey, we don't need guides, but we do need leaky-roof building-materials purchase-requisition assistants", or something. The way I see it, you should be able to use the same software to run dentists offices and run communes. Of course, you don't want to loose focus, so the initial version should do one or two things really really well, and look beautiful. But it should be configurable .. ideally, configurabe by "power users" instead of programmers. That is, do NOT hard-code assumptions about process-flow.

Tag @bob haugen and #ssb-valueflows because this borders on generic process-flow design and implementation. The word "value" suggests that the thing that is flowing is "money". More generically, what is really flowing is responsibility, expertise, needs, time, effort, roles, training ...

Well, I wrote that before I clicked through to look at the plato website. So maybe you already got the basic outline of what I just said ...

Dreams bug report(?) So I went to https://dreams.blivande.com/frihamnstorget-development and it looks nice, and I said to myself "gee wonder if the wayback machine has this", it doesn't, so I save it, and wayback saves another blivande page, instead. So that's obviously a bug. And then clicking through on things, I get the sense that dreams is maybe using weird javascript to make it look like there are static urls when there aren't any. or something. This is apparently confusing the wayback machine, and also seems to have unexpected side-effects when navigating the site. Or something. I can't tell what's going on, but obviously, I am not working with "normal urls", here.

For example: https://web.archive.org/web/20210207193248if_/https://dreams.blivande.com/ulvsvik-microburn is clearly not a capture of https://dreams.blivande.com/ulvsvik-microburn. It is instead a capture of the top banner for that page, followed by the content from this page: https://dreams.blivande.com/frihamnstorget-2020 (minus the top banner). So I guess the banners are associated with the URL, but the page content comes from some cookie, and the cookie is garbled.