Rethinking regions and companies
A region is a collection of shared assets in a geographic location. However, after some discussion this might morph a bit.
It's interesting because this concept of shared assets makes sense in some places and not in others, and a discussion on reddit (first comment below (ah, hell, I'll just link it again here)) really changed some of my viewpoints.
There are two things that immediately come to mind when thinking about shared assets:
- Things specific to some producers
- Large equipment (construction, farming, etc)
- Various "real" property (farmland, forests)
- Things general to everybody (mostly)
- Housing
- Commercial space
- Transportation
If I live in regional housing and use a regional office space, does that give me the ability to vote on how many tractors the region owns? The answer, really, comes down to whether the capital pool is shared between me and the farmers in the region. If yes, then I should obviously get a say. If not, and this is where it gets interesting, then no. And we're starting to get into networks-within-networks territory here. What if the farmers in my geographical area had their own network and capital pool and it managed their farmland and various machinery, and they solely managed it themselves? This would be closer to the picture of workers managing the MoP based on use.
Then thinking about things like housing, maybe that would be its own local network that everyone who wants socialized housing is a part of, and they all make decisions along those lines.
This breaks the geographical regional model and turns it more into an emergent network, and these networks are free to form, grow, shrink, and dissolve as they see fit. Each one would have its own shared set of assets and capital pool. If I'm a member of a company that is participating in the system, I can request to join any number of regions in the system, and hether or not I am accepted would be dependent on criteria (what companies am I a member of? where do I live? etc). In other words, the idea of one member, one region is more and more seeming brittle and straitjacketed.
This brings up a lot of questions, some of which were previously unsolved to some extent, but some of which are new and complicated:
- Geographic grouping makes sense in the case of pooling money together to buy things like housing for everyone. If regions are just sub-networks, the farmer "region" and construction "region" all will have siloed capital pools. How do these capital pools help other regions, like the local housing region?
- If regions are no longer geographical, what stops us from having a region-per-company (effectively capitalism)?
- Should there be defined limits in the network? Members of a region only get at-cost pricing if there are >3 companies in that region?
- Note that this was somewhat unsolved already in the current notion of regions.
- Having some grouping of people by area does make sense in the context of housing, commercial property, transportation, etc. Would this form via emergent behavior, or would it need some kind of systemic guideline?
- What does membership in various regions look like? Obviously joining requirements are similar (must be a member of a member company), but if regions are less rigid then would they have other requirements, like "must be a member of a farming company" or "must be a member of a healthcare company"? Seems each region would have its own membership requirements.
- How does UBI function (#79) if regions are more nebulous groupings/networks?
- Leans toward it being systemic (global), but maybe there's some strategy for pooling resources among regions here.
- Naming for regions? Region implies area/geography. "Group" is too general. Nothing immediate comes to mind.
- How does this affect things like banking (#73)? If I cash out my credits, who pays me? Maybe the region my company is a member of? In which case, credits need to track where they came from.