Sensorica is an open value network (OVN), established in 2011 in Montreal, Canada, for open source hardware development.[1][2] It is a pilot project for commons-based peer production applied to hardware, designed to operate at large scale.
Sensorica uses the Resources, Events, Agents accounting model as a basis of its network resource planning and contribution accounting system (NRP-CAS). The NRP is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) type of software based on the REA model to support the complexity of operations in an OVN.[3] It collects, stores, and interprets data from all the different types of activities in the network and connects them to specific resources, events, and agents. Economic agents are associated with other agents and participate in events of various types, such as processes, exchanges, or transfers. Events change the state of resources by using, citing, consuming, creating, or transferring them. A certain resource may be an output from one process and then an input to another one. Those processes and events are then connected with a resource flow.
Important contributions to p2p
The main contributions of Sensorica to material peer production is to provide a space for experimenting with tools (IT infrastructure), methods, peer governance and p2p culture. Sensorica is a real community of scientists, engineers and hackers that use a digital environment to collaborate on designing open source hardware solutions. The network has access to a makerspace in Montreal, where hardware prototyping is done and some limited capacity production, making use of digital fabrication. The digital and physical environments in which network activity is deployed have been set up as nondominium forms of property, meaning that they don't belong to anyone but anyone who engages can gain access. This is similar to the physical dimension of the Bitcoin network, the aggregate of all the mining computers, which is permissionless (unrestricted access based on a set of strict rules) and not owned by anyone.
Sensoricans define their network as "A stigmergic environment for synergistic open innovation, leveraging collective intelligence."
In the recent past Sensoricans have been experimenting a lot of stigmergy, which is a way of organizing innovation and production relying less on planning.
Sensorica's processes are also designed to stimulate collective intelligence, which makes collaboration integrated, i.e. it looks and feels like one social brain is thinking and making decisions, producing harmonious and coherent results (as opposed to a mosaic of outcomes).
When Sensoricans speak about synergistic open innovation they mean that all ventures are interlocked at the agents and resources level and one venture can be complementary to another. This is achieved through the NRP platform, which considers any resource as an independent entity that can be used in any process, belonging to any venture. That makes Sensorica is an ecosystem of ventures in synergy. The history and data of Sensorica shows that this reduces redundancy and generates huge savings, which is an advantage over competitive capitalistic economic practices.
Sensorica has pioneered Collaborative Entrepreneurship, which is defined as a set of skills that enables an individual to coordinate highly collaborative economic activity and generate powerful incentives and benefits for all stakeholders. The equivalent of a traditional startup in this flavor of p2p economy is the open venture, which is not to be confused with a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization). Thus, one can say that Sensorica is a tight ecosystem of open ventures, supported by NRP-CAS technology. An open venture is an economic unit that focuses on providing a solution to a world problem or a specific need or category of needs.
Sensoricans have also proposed the 4th Sector, which is the sector of commons-based peer production, seen as distinct from the Private, Public and Solidarity (nonprofit, coop) sectors. What distinguishes the 4th Sector from the rest are: its new mode of production, its open (permissionless and transparent) network type of organization, the transnational nature of its endeavors with its p2p governance models.
Contributions to specific projects
Breathing Games was hosted in the Sensorica lab in Montreal for more than 2 years. Sensoricans contributed to the design of the so-called organic pressure sensor.
