Changes between Initial Version and Version 1 of Ostrom


Ignore:
Timestamp:
2011-05-31T17:49:54Z (13 years ago)
Author:
zooko
Comment:

all about accounting, Ostrom, social networking, visualization

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  • Ostrom

    v1 v1  
     1The grid of storage servers which contribute space for clients to use is a common good—all clients benefit from capacious, reliable, well-performing servers. One way to manage this common good would be integrate a payment system, such as !MojoNation did. Many Tahoe-LAFS hackers are very interested in !BitCoin as an option for that. But another—perhaps complementary—approach is community socialization. Elinor Ostrom is an economist who won the Nobel Prize for investigating how groups of people in the real world manage shared resources. Her results are inspiring! Maybe not all resources are optimally mediated by economic transactions between passing strangers.
     2
     3Here is a podcast of a couple of economists discussion Ostrom's work: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/11/boettke_on_elin.html
     4
     5In the context of Tahoe-LAFS, Brian has summarized Ostrom's idea and sketched out some ideas about how to integrate some combination of money-oriented accounting and social-oriented accounting into Tahoe-LAFS:
     6
     7http://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2010-December/005748.html
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     9That "Accounting" project is an ambitious project, but with very high value. I (Zooko) really hope that Brian and the other core Tahoe-LAFS hackers prioritize that project soon!
     10
     11But without implementing a full "Accounting" system, there are many very simple and easy "low hanging fruits" which would increase the ability of the user to visualize how the Tahoe-LAFS grid behaves. For example, we currently don't even display how much storage space each server is offering! (648)
     12
     13Following from that, users would probably benefit from visualizations of server performance and its historical uptime. See the [http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?status=!closed&keywords=~ostrom&order=priority tickets tagged with "ostrom"] for other examples.
     14
     15In general, Tahoe-LAFS is ready for an experiment combining economics, social networking, and visualization/transparency.