This article is work in progress. We are currently reviewing it and improving it iteratively.
Introduction
In February 2011, just two years after Bitcoin’s revolutionary emergence, a group of visionaries in Montreal launched an experiment that would challenge fundamental assumptions about how economic activity could be organized. Sensorica, initially focused on open-source sensor development, has evolved over fifteen years into something far more profound: a living laboratory for regenerative economic systems that mirror the cyclical patterns of natural ecosystems rather than the extractive logic of industrial capitalism.
What began as an effort to demonstrate that peer production could be applied to material goods is evolving into an experimental vision for economic organization that spans from local community production to global knowledge networks. Through ongoing development of Open Value Network (OVN) models, exploration of distributed technologies like Holochain, and active work on projects like PEP Master, Sensorica is developing frameworks that could help transform extractive economic structures into regenerative systems. Our work is documented on our OVN Wiki and demonstrated through prototypes like True Commons and Nondominium.
This evolution represents more than just organizational innovation; it embodies a fundamental shift in how we conceptualize economic relationships. While traditional capitalism creates what Sensorica describes as “brittle” economic structures that waste resources and organizational knowledge when firms collapse, our model functions more like an ecosystem’s forest floor - continuously decomposing and recomposing value in ways that strengthen the entire network. This approach offers a compelling alternative to both the centralized control of state socialism and the extractive accumulation of corporate capitalism.
Sensorica’s mission continues to evolve around exploring economic networks that could enhance both individual sovereignty and collective empowerment through multi-scale integration. Our ongoing experiments investigate how local production, bioregional governance, and cosmo-local knowledge sharing might be integrated through distributed infrastructure and collaborative economic modeling. As we face mounting ecological and social challenges, Sensorica’s fifteen-year journey offers crucial insights into how economic systems can be designed for regeneration rather than extraction, resilience rather than brittleness, and abundance rather than scarcity.
Part I: The Foundation - Open Value Networks and the Composting of Capitalism
Sensorica’s transformation from a sensor development startup to a regenerative economic laboratory reflects a broader recognition that emerged in the mid-2010s: the traditional firm-based model of innovation and production was fundamentally wasteful and brittle. As Tibi Tundrea, one of Sensorica’s founding members, articulated in his recent analysis of “Composting Capitalism,” the core problem with conventional economic organizations is that they function like landfills rather than forest floors.
When traditional firms collapse - and in capitalism’s boom-bust cycles, they inevitably do - their accumulated knowledge, social networks, infrastructure, and organizational capabilities are typically lost or wasted. The intellectual property gets locked away, the teams disperse, and the lessons learned disappear into bankruptcy proceedings. This represents an enormous inefficiency at the system level, even if individual firms appear profitable. It’s what Tundrea calls the “capitalist landfill” problem: wealth and knowledge accumulation followed by waste when organizations fail.
The Forest Floor Alternative
Sensorica’s Open Value Network model proposes an alternative approach inspired by ecological systems, which we continue to refine through practical experimentation. In a forest, when a tree falls, its accumulated nutrients don’t disappear - they decompose into the soil, feeding new growth throughout the ecosystem. The knowledge contained in its growth rings, the networks formed by its root system, and the habitat it provided all contribute to the forest’s resilience and continued development.
Open Value Networks function similarly. Rather than enclosing knowledge and resources within corporate boundaries, OVNs create permeable, transparent systems where contributions, innovations, and resources continuously circulate and recombine. When a project concludes or a contributor moves on, their work remains accessible to seed new initiatives. Knowledge builds upon knowledge, social connections strengthen the network, and infrastructure investments benefit the entire ecosystem.
This is fundamentally different from both traditional capitalism and state socialism. While capitalism concentrates control in private hands and socialism centralizes it in state bureaucracies, OVNs distribute agency while maintaining coherence through transparent contribution tracking and fair value distribution systems. Participants maintain sovereignty over their contributions while benefiting from collective intelligence and shared infrastructure.
Sensorica’s Evolutionary Journey
Sensorica’s path to this understanding wasn’t immediate. Their initial phase (2011-2015) focused on demonstrating that peer production could work for physical goods, not just software. They developed open-source sensors like the Mosquito sensor while building the infrastructure to sustain collaborative material production.
An important shift began around 2015, coinciding with Ethereum’s launch and the emergence of early decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Sensoricans began exploring whether peer production could potentially function as an independent economic logic rather than interfacing with traditional market structures. This insight has guided our ongoing experiments with self-sustaining models that might reduce dependence on traditional financial systems.
This evolution reflects a deeper understanding of economic systems as complex adaptive networks rather than mechanical aggregations of individual actors. Instead of trying to optimize within existing market structures, Sensorica began designing alternative structures based on principles of transparency, collaboration, and regenerative circulation of value.
Operational Principles of Regenerative Economics
The OVN model that emerged from this evolution operates on several key principles that distinguish it from both traditional firms and platform capitalism:
Openness and Transparency: All contributions, resource flows, and decision-making processes are visible to network participants. This eliminates the information asymmetries that enable extraction and creates conditions for authentic collaboration. Using tools derived valueflows|ValueFlows]] ontology, Sensorica tracks contributions and resource flows in ways that enable fair distribution while maintaining transparency.
Nondominium Property Relations: Rather than exclusive ownership, Sensorica operates under nondominium principles where resources and knowledge are stewarded collectively. Contributors maintain recognition and influence over their contributions without excluding others from building upon them. This enables the “composting” effect where knowledge and resources continuously circulate and recombine.
Stigmergic Coordination: Like social insects that coordinate through environmental signals, OVNs enable coordination through transparent contribution tracking and shared project visibility. Participants can identify where their skills are needed and self-organize around opportunities without requiring hierarchical management.
Diverse Value Recognition: Beyond monetary compensation, OVNs recognize multiple forms of value contribution - knowledge sharing, community building, infrastructure maintenance, and reputation building. This creates more resilient motivation structures than pure profit-seeking.
Economic Potential and Early Evidence
Our preliminary experiments and prototypes suggest potential efficiency gains compared to traditional organizational structures. Early analysis indicates that participating in OVNs could potentially reduce financial costs for entrepreneurs and R&D costs for traditional companies through shared infrastructure and collective intelligence. We’re developing concrete tools to test these hypotheses:
- True Commons: A proof-of-concept platform for managing shared resources and contributions
- Nondominium: A working prototype for alternative property relations enabling resource sharing without exclusive ownership
- OVN Wiki: Comprehensive documentation of our ongoing experiments, methodologies, and learnings
These tools represent early stages of development, and we continue gathering data to validate potential efficiency gains.
Projects like PEP Master - an open-source therapeutic device currently in testing with 40 patients at Sainte Justine Children’s Hospital and seeking Health Canada regulatory approval - aim to demonstrate how OVNs might address market failures. Rare diseases that lack profitable markets under traditional capitalism can be served through collaborative development models where global knowledge sharing combines with local manufacturing and adaptation.
The PEP Master project exemplifies the “composting” principle in action. Having received a $100K Inven_T grant in 2024 and delivered 20 pressure sensor devices to the hospital, the project creates shareable blueprints, validated production methods, and distributed manufacturing capabilities. We’re exploring cryptography and blockchain applications to establish trust in distributed fabrication, aiming to launch decentralized trust-based applications. This approach increases accessibility while building capacity that can be adapted for other medical devices and therapeutic applications.
The Regenerative Alternative
What makes Sensorica’s approach genuinely regenerative rather than simply alternative is its focus on systems that strengthen through use rather than depleting through extraction. Each project contributes to shared infrastructure, knowledge commons, and social coordination capacity that benefits future initiatives. Failures and conclusions feed learning back into the network rather than being lost to bankruptcy or corporate secrecy.
This regenerative quality addresses one of capitalism’s core contradictions: the tension between individual optimization and system-level resilience. While traditional firms optimize for shareholder returns even when this undermines broader economic stability, OVNs align individual contributor success with network-level flourishing. The better the commons, the better the individual opportunities; the more successful individual projects, the stronger the shared foundation.
As we’ll explore in the following sections, this regenerative foundation creates possibilities for economic organization that spans from local production networks to global knowledge sharing systems. Sensorica’s vision demonstrates that economic alternatives aren’t just possible - they’re already emerging through practical experiments that offer hope for systemic transformation.
Part II: The Science Behind the Vision - Complexity Economics and ValueFlows Ontology
Sensorica’s regenerative economic model isn’t just inspired by ecological metaphors - it’s grounded in rigorous complexity science and formal economic modeling. Their integration of complexity economics principles with the ValueFlows ontology represents one of the most sophisticated attempts to create computational models of post-capitalist economic organization. This scientific foundation enables Sensorica to move beyond ideology and rhetoric toward evidence-based design of alternative economic systems.
Complexity Science in the Information Era
Traditional economics, with its focus on equilibrium models and rational actors, fundamentally misunderstands how modern economies actually function. The information era has revealed economies to be complex adaptive systems characterized by non-linear feedback loops, emergent behaviors, and network effects that linear models cannot capture.
Sensorica’s approach draws from complexity science’s understanding that small changes in system structure can cascade through networks, creating dramatically different outcomes than traditional economic models predict. A single innovation shared through an Open Value Network can spawn dozens of derivative projects, creating value multiplication effects that dwarf traditional return-on-investment calculations. Similarly, a toxic contributor or poorly designed incentive structure can undermine network cooperation in ways that balance-sheet analysis would never detect.
This complexity perspective explains why traditional firm boundaries are increasingly obsolete in information-intensive industries. Knowledge and innovation don’t respect corporate hierarchies - they flow through social networks, professional communities, and online collaboration platforms regardless of formal organizational structures. Sensorica’s OVN model recognizes this reality and designs economic structures that work with these flows rather than against them.
Network Analysis and Economic Structure
The complexity science toolkit provides powerful methods for analyzing economic network structures that Sensorica applies to understanding and designing collaborative production systems. Network analysis reveals critical patterns invisible to traditional economic analysis:
Key Nodes and Bottlenecks: In any collaborative network, certain participants, resources, or coordination points become critical for overall system function. Traditional firms create artificial bottlenecks through hierarchical control, while OVNs can identify and address natural bottlenecks through transparent resource flows and distributed decision-making.
Resilience Patterns: Complex networks exhibit different resilience characteristics depending on their structure. Hub-and-spoke networks (like traditional corporations) are vulnerable to central node failure, while mesh networks (like OVNs) maintain function even when multiple nodes are removed. This has profound implications for economic stability and crisis response.
Emergence and Phase Transitions: Networks can exhibit sudden qualitative shifts - phase transitions - when quantitative parameters cross critical thresholds. Sensorica has observed how OVNs can rapidly shift from coordination problems to self-reinforcing collaboration when transparency and trust metrics reach certain levels.
ValueFlows: The Modeling Language for Post-Capitalist Economics
One of Sensorica’s ongoing contributions is our collaboration with Lynn Foster and Bob Haugen in developing and refining the ValueFlows ontology. This formal semantic framework provides a standardized vocabulary for modeling economic activities that extend far beyond market transactions.
Traditional accounting systems model only monetary exchanges and formal employment relationships. ValueFlows captures the full spectrum of economic activity: knowledge sharing, care work, infrastructure maintenance, community building, and resource stewardship. This comprehensive modeling enables analysis of economic networks that operate partially or entirely outside market mechanisms.
Resource Flow Networks and Feedback Loops
The ValueFlows ontology models economic activity as networks of flows between agents, capturing the non-linear feedback loops that complexity science identifies as crucial for understanding system behavior. Unlike traditional input-output models that treat production as linear transformation, ValueFlows recognizes that economic processes involve multiple concurrent flows that influence each other in complex ways.
Consider the PEP Master project: traditional economic analysis would model this as R&D investment leading to product development leading to sales revenue. ValueFlows reveals a much richer picture: knowledge flows between researchers, tool flows between fabrication labs, reputation flows between contributors, care flows between patients and practitioners, and resource flows between institutions. These flows create feedback loops that traditional analysis misses entirely.
Small changes in any flow can cascade through the network. A successful clinical trial doesn’t just validate the device - it increases contributor motivation, attracts new collaborators, strengthens relationships with medical institutions, and generates reputation that enables future projects. The system exhibits increasing returns to collaboration rather than the diminishing returns assumed by traditional economic models.
Computational Modeling and Algorithmic Governance
We’re exploring how integrating complexity science with ValueFlows could enable computational modeling of collaborative production networks. Our Network Resource Planning (NRP) database system provides rich historical data that we’re beginning to analyze using complexity science models, though this remains an area of active research and development. Rather than relying on market prices as the sole coordination mechanism, they can design algorithmic systems that optimize for multiple objectives simultaneously: individual contributor satisfaction, project success metrics, knowledge commons growth, and network resilience.
We’re exploring what we term “algorithmic governance” - decision-making processes that could combine human judgment with systematic analysis of network flows and outcomes. Our NRP system provides the data foundation for these experiments, allowing us to track resource flows and contribution patterns, though full implementation of algorithmic governance remains under development. Rather than replacing human decision-making, these systems augment it by providing transparent analysis of complex interdependencies that would be impossible to track manually.
For example, when allocating resources to competing projects within the network, algorithmic analysis can consider not just immediate project needs but also impacts on contributor development, knowledge commons enrichment, infrastructure building, and network resilience. This multi-objective optimization creates more robust decisions than either pure human intuition or narrow economic calculation.
Emergence and Economic Phase Transitions
The complexity science perspective suggests that collaborative production networks might exhibit sudden qualitative shifts - economic phase transitions - when certain parameters cross critical thresholds. Through our fifteen years of experimentation and data collection in our NRP system, we’ve observed patterns that suggest several potential transitions:
Trust-to-Collaboration Transition: When transparency metrics and successful collaboration history reach certain levels, networks shift from coordination-heavy collaboration to self-organizing project formation. Contributors begin initiating projects and recruiting collaborators without central planning or approval.
Knowledge-to-Innovation Transition: When knowledge commons reach critical mass in particular domains, the rate of innovation accelerates exponentially as new contributors can rapidly build upon existing work. This creates “innovation avalanches” where breakthrough applications emerge faster than traditional R&D could produce.
Local-to-Global Transition: When local production networks reach sufficient sophistication, they begin sharing designs and coordinating with similar networks globally. This enables economies of scale and knowledge sharing without requiring centralized control or capital accumulation.
Predictive Capacity and System Design
We’re working toward combining complexity science methods with ValueFlows modeling to develop better predictive capacity for collaborative production systems. Our NRP database contains years of network activity data that could enable this analysis, though we’re still developing the methodologies to apply complexity models effectively. Rather than relying on intuition or trial-and-error, they can model proposed changes to network structure, incentive systems, or governance processes before implementation.
This predictive capacity enables sophisticated system design that optimizes for long-term network health rather than short-term outcomes. Traditional economic systems optimize for quarterly profits or annual growth targets, creating perverse incentives that undermine long-term sustainability. Sensorica’s modeling enables optimization for metrics like knowledge commons growth, contributor skill development, network resilience, and innovation capacity over extended time horizons.
The Science of Regenerative Economics
We’re working toward developing a framework for regenerative economics grounded in empirical observation rather than ideological commitment. Our prototypes, NRP data, and ongoing experiments provide initial data points, though much work remains to validate our hypotheses. The complexity science lens reveals why conventional economic structures are wasteful and brittle, while the ValueFlows ontology provides tools for designing alternatives that align individual motivation with collective flourishing.
This scientific approach distinguishes Sensorica’s work from both traditional cooperatives and speculative blockchain projects. Rather than simply hoping that cooperation will emerge or relying on token incentives to motivate collaboration, they design systems based on evidence about how complex networks actually function. The result is economic organization that is both scientifically grounded and practically effective.
As we’ll see in the next section, this scientific foundation enables sophisticated technical infrastructure that can support bioregional governance and cosmo-local production at scales previously impossible for collaborative organizations.
Part III: Technical Infrastructure for Bioregional Governance
The theoretical foundations of complexity science and ValueFlows ontology require robust technical infrastructure to function at the scales Sensorica envisions. Our exploration of Holochain’s agent-centric distributed architecture represents an important experiment in potentially enabling bioregional governance. Both our True Commons and Nondominium prototypes are built on Holochain to test these concepts while maintaining the technical capabilities needed for global coordination and knowledge sharing.
Beyond Blockchain: Agent-Centric Architecture
While much of the decentralized technology space has focused on blockchain solutions, Sensorica recognized early that blockchain’s architecture creates fundamental incompatibilities with regenerative economic principles. Blockchain’s requirement for global consensus and energy-intensive validation processes recreates the centralization and resource waste that OVNs seek to eliminate.
Holochain’s distributed hash table (DHT) architecture solves these problems through an agent-centric approach where each participant maintains their own data chain while participating in a shared validation network. This design perfectly aligns with Sensorica’s vision of economic networks that enhance individual sovereignty while enabling collective coordination.
Unlike blockchain systems where all participants must process all transactions, Holochain enables local autonomy with selective global coordination. Bioregions can operate their own economic applications, maintaining full sovereignty over their data and decision-making processes, while still being able to interoperate with other bioregions when beneficial. This technical architecture directly supports the political and ecological principle of bioregional governance.
Data Sovereignty and Ecological Boundaries
Traditional economic systems ignore ecological boundaries, treating the entire planet as a homogeneous resource extraction zone. Our exploration of bioregional governance investigates how sustainable economic activity might better align with ecological carrying capacity and local knowledge systems.
Holochain’s architecture enables what we term “data sovereignty within ecological networks.” Each bioregion maintains control over its own economic data - resource flows, production capabilities, ecological conditions, and social agreements - while being able to share this information selectively with other bioregions or global networks when it serves their interests.
This approach solves one of the fundamental problems with previous attempts at bioregional organization: how to maintain local autonomy while accessing the benefits of larger-scale coordination. Traditional hierarchical systems require bioregions to surrender sovereignty to higher-level authorities, while pure localism cuts them off from external knowledge and resources. Holochain enables a third path: networked autonomy where bioregions maintain sovereignty while participating in larger systems on their own terms.
The Cosmo-Local Technical Pattern
For cosmo-localism to function - global knowledge sharing combined with local production and governance - requires technical infrastructure that can seamlessly bridge these scales. We’re exploring how integrating Holochain with ValueFlows might create this capability, as demonstrated in our prototype implementations.
Knowledge, designs, and innovations can be shared globally through the Holochain DHT, making them accessible to any bioregion that can benefit from them. However, the implementation of these designs, the allocation of local resources, and the governance decisions about how to adapt global knowledge to local conditions remain under local control.
This technical pattern enables what Sensorica calls “fractal sovereignty” - the same principles of autonomous decision-making apply at household, community, bioregional, and global scales, with each level maintaining agency while participating in larger systems. A local fabrication lab can access globally-shared designs while maintaining control over their production processes, resource allocation, and distribution networks.
Algorithmic Governance and Collective Intelligence
We’re developing technical infrastructure that could enable forms of algorithmic governance to augment rather than replace human decision-making. Our NRP system provides the data foundation for these experiments, tracking contributions and resource flows that could inform collective decisions, though full implementation of these concepts remains in development. Using ValueFlows data about resource flows, contribution patterns, and project outcomes, Holochain applications can provide real-time analysis of complex network dynamics that would be impossible to track manually.
These systems don’t make decisions automatically but rather provide transparent analysis that enables more informed collective decision-making. When a bioregional network needs to allocate scarce resources between competing projects, algorithmic analysis can reveal the full network implications of different choices - impacts on contributor development, knowledge commons growth, inter-bioregional relationships, and long-term sustainability.
This approach to algorithmic governance represents a significant advance over both market-based and bureaucratic decision-making systems. Markets reduce complex decisions to price signals, losing most relevant information, while bureaucracies rely on hierarchical authority that often lacks access to local knowledge. Holochain-enabled algorithmic governance can integrate complex multi-dimensional analysis with distributed human judgment and local knowledge.
Interoperability and Network Effects
One of the most powerful aspects of Sensorica’s technical approach is how it enables interoperability between different economic applications while maintaining their distinctiveness. Different bioregions might develop different governance systems, resource allocation mechanisms, or production processes, but all can use the same underlying ValueFlows ontology and Holochain infrastructure.
This creates positive network effects where innovations in one region can benefit others without requiring standardization or central control. A bioregion that develops an innovative approach to resource sharing can make their governance applications available to others while maintaining control over their own implementation. Knowledge spreads horizontally through the network rather than being imposed vertically through hierarchical systems.
These network effects are crucial for the scalability of regenerative economic systems. Rather than requiring every community to reinvent solutions from scratch, successful innovations can spread rapidly through the network while being adapted to local conditions and preferences.
Security and Resilience
Traditional economic systems create single points of failure through centralized control structures. When banks fail or governments collapse, entire economic regions can be devastated. Sensorica’s distributed technical architecture creates much greater resilience by distributing critical functions across the network.
If one bioregional network experiences problems - natural disasters, social conflicts, technical failures - other parts of the network continue functioning independently. More importantly, the knowledge, social relationships, and production capabilities developed in the affected region remain accessible to the broader network, enabling rapid recovery and mutual aid.
Holochain’s cryptographic integrity provides security without requiring central authorities. Each agent maintains their own identity and validates their own data, while the distributed hash table ensures that false information can be detected and rejected by the network. This creates systems that are simultaneously more secure and more democratic than traditional economic infrastructure.
Integration with Physical Infrastructure
While much of the focus on distributed technologies emphasizes digital applications, Sensorica’s vision requires seamless integration between digital coordination systems and physical production infrastructure. Their work on projects like PEP Master demonstrates how Holochain applications can coordinate distributed manufacturing networks while maintaining quality control and safety standards.
Digital blueprints stored in the DHT can be accessed by fabrication labs globally, but local production decisions remain under local control. Quality validation protocols can be shared across the network while being adapted to local manufacturing capabilities. Resource sourcing can be coordinated regionally while maintaining transparency about environmental and social impacts.
This integration of digital and physical infrastructure creates possibilities for economic organization that combines the efficiency benefits of global coordination with the resilience and sustainability benefits of local production and control.
The Technical Foundation for Multi-Scale Integration
Sensorica’s technical infrastructure creates the foundation for economic organization that spans from household-scale production to global knowledge networks. The same Holochain applications that coordinate resource sharing between neighbors can scale up to coordinate between bioregions and eventually between continental networks.
This technical scalability enables what we’ll explore in the next section: economic systems that gracefully handle lifecycle completion and regeneration. Because the infrastructure is distributed and resilient, economic processes can conclude without destroying the technical foundation that enables new processes to emerge.
The technical architecture thus serves the deeper purpose of Sensorica’s mission: creating economic systems that mirror the regenerative patterns of natural ecosystems while leveraging the coordination capabilities that information technology makes possible.
Part IV: Lifecycle Completion - Economics That Can End
One of the most profound aspects of Sensorica’s vision addresses a question that conventional economics entirely avoids: how do we design economic processes that can gracefully conclude, redistribute resources, and seed new processes without creating permanent extraction or waste? This focus on lifecycle completion represents perhaps their most radical departure from traditional economic thinking, which assumes perpetual growth and accumulation as fundamental goals.
The Problem of Perpetual Growth
Both capitalism and state socialism operate under assumptions of perpetual growth and permanent institutions. Capitalist firms are expected to maximize profits indefinitely, while socialist states aim for continuous expansion of production and consumption. Neither system provides mechanisms for planned conclusion, resource redistribution, or graceful transformation.
This creates fundamental contradictions with both ecological reality and social health. Natural ecosystems thrive through cycles of birth, growth, maturity, decline, death, and decomposition that feed new cycles. Organisms that consume resources without giving back to the system destroy the very foundations they depend on. Yet conventional economic systems reward exactly this kind of extractive behavior.
Sensorica’s fifteen years of experience with collaborative production has revealed the importance of designing economic processes with explicit lifecycle management from the beginning. Projects need to be able to conclude successfully even when they don’t generate perpetual profits. Contributors need to be able to transition between projects without losing their investment in shared infrastructure. Resources and knowledge need to be redistributed in ways that strengthen the broader ecosystem.
Natural Cycles as Economic Models
In forest ecosystems, trees don’t grow forever. They reach maturity, provide habitat and resources for other species, eventually die, and decompose to provide nutrients for new growth. Their lifecycle contributes to the health and resilience of the entire forest ecosystem rather than just maximizing individual tree success.
Sensorica applies this ecological understanding to economic organization. Projects within Open Value Networks are designed with natural lifecycles: initiation, development, maturity, completion, and decomposition into shared resources that enable new projects. Rather than trying to sustain individual projects indefinitely, the focus is on creating conditions where successful project completion strengthens the overall network.
This approach requires fundamental shifts in how we measure success. Instead of profit maximization or perpetual growth, success is measured by contribution to the knowledge commons, development of contributor capabilities, strengthening of social relationships, and enhancement of shared infrastructure. A project that concludes after achieving its goals and redistributing its resources is considered successful, not failed.
Nondominium and Resource Redistribution
The nondominium property relationships that Sensorica operates under are crucial for enabling graceful lifecycle completion. In traditional capitalist systems, when firms fail, their resources are typically either wasted in bankruptcy proceedings or captured by competitors. Knowledge disappears behind intellectual property barriers, social relationships dissolve, and physical infrastructure is often abandoned or sold off to extract maximum value for creditors.
Nondominium property relations ensure that when projects conclude, their accumulated resources remain available to the network. Knowledge contributions become part of the shared commons. Social relationships and reputation transfer to new projects. Physical infrastructure and tools can be redistributed based on network needs rather than market prices.
This creates what Sensorica terms “regenerative completion” - project endings that make the network stronger rather than depleting it. Each completed project increases the foundation available for future projects, creating positive-sum dynamics rather than zero-sum competition for scarce resources.
Stigmergic Inheritance
Just as termite colonies build complex structures through stigmergic coordination - leaving traces that guide future construction without centralized planning - Sensorica’s project lifecycle management creates “stigmergic inheritance” patterns. Completed projects leave transparent traces of their processes, decisions, resources, and relationships that guide future project formation.
When new projects emerge, they can build upon the accumulated wisdom and resources of previous projects without requiring permission from central authorities or negotiating complex licensing arrangements. This creates exponential learning curves where each generation of projects benefits from all previous generations.
The ValueFlows ontology plays a crucial role in enabling this stigmergic inheritance by maintaining comprehensive records of resource flows, contribution patterns, and decision processes. Future projects can analyze what worked well in similar previous projects and adapt successful patterns to new contexts.
Planned Obsolescence vs. Planned Evolution
While capitalism creates planned obsolescence to force continuous consumption, Sensorica designs what they call “planned evolution” - conscious anticipation of how projects will transform and what they will become. Rather than trying to maximize project lifespan, the focus is on maximizing the learning and resource development that occurs during the project’s natural lifecycle.
This requires different types of planning and different metrics of success. Projects begin with explicit consideration of how they will conclude and what they will contribute to the broader network. Success metrics include knowledge documentation, contributor skill development, infrastructure improvements, and relationship building, not just task completion.
Planned evolution also enables more flexible response to changing conditions. When external circumstances shift, projects can evolve or conclude gracefully rather than struggling to maintain outdated approaches. This creates more resilient economic organization that adapts to change rather than being disrupted by it.
The Economics of Regeneration
Sensorica’s lifecycle completion approach creates genuinely regenerative economics where resources circulate continuously rather than accumulating in dead-end stocks. This mirrors natural ecosystem patterns where nutrients cycle continuously through different organisms and processes, maintaining system health and productivity.
In regenerative economics, “waste” becomes impossible because every project output becomes input for other processes. Knowledge shared openly becomes foundation for new innovations. Tools and infrastructure developed for one project become available for others. Social relationships and trust built through one collaboration enable future collaborations.
This regenerative circulation creates abundance rather than scarcity. Instead of competing for limited resources, participants collaborate to create and share expanding commons of knowledge, tools, relationships, and capabilities. The more the commons are used, the more valuable they become - the opposite of traditional scarce goods that deplete through use.
Death as Design Principle
We’re experimenting with incorporating conscious consideration of “death” - project completion and resource redistribution - as a design principle rather than a failure to be avoided. Just as biological organisms that live forever would eventually consume all available resources and destroy their ecosystems, economic projects that attempt perpetual existence create brittleness and resource waste.
Conscious lifecycle completion enables continuous renewal and adaptation. Resources locked up in outdated projects can be redirected to emerging opportunities. Contributors can move between projects based on changing interests and skills rather than being trapped in employment relationships. Knowledge can evolve and improve rather than being frozen in proprietary forms.
This approach to economic “death” as regenerative transformation offers profound alternatives to both capitalism’s boom-bust cycles and socialism’s tendency toward bureaucratic stagnation. Instead of fearing project completion, participants can embrace it as opportunity for renewal and growth.
As we’ll see in the next section, this lifecycle consciousness enables economic organization that spans multiple scales while maintaining coherence and regenerative capacity from household production to global knowledge networks.
Part V: Multi-Scale Integration - From Hyper-Local to Bioregional to Global
We’re exploring how regenerative economics might operate across multiple scales simultaneously, working toward integration between hyper-local production, bioregional governance, and global knowledge networks. This multi-scale approach represents one of our most innovative contributions: demonstrating how economic systems can be simultaneously local and global, autonomous and interconnected, diverse and coherent.
Hyper-Localism: The Foundation Layer
At its most basic level, Sensorica’s model begins with hyper-local production and decision-making - activities that occur at the household and immediate community scale. This includes local fabrication labs, community workshops, neighborhood resource sharing, and household-level production of food, crafts, and services.
Hyper-localism provides the foundation for economic resilience because it creates local capacity to meet basic needs without depending on distant supply chains or global markets. When communities can produce food, tools, clothing, shelter, and energy locally, they gain significant autonomy from economic volatility and supply chain disruptions.
Our experimental approach to hyper-localism aims to differ from isolationist localism by exploring integration with larger scales. Local fabrication labs can access global design libraries through Holochain networks, adapting global knowledge to local materials and preferences. Neighborhood resource sharing systems can coordinate with similar systems in other neighborhoods, creating resilient regional networks.
The key innovation is that hyper-local systems maintain full autonomy over their production processes and resource allocation while being able to participate in broader networks when it benefits them. A community workshop that produces furniture using local wood can access global design innovations while maintaining control over their production methods, working conditions, and distribution networks.
Bioregionalism: Ecological Integration
The bioregional scale represents economic organization aligned with ecological boundaries rather than political ones. Bioregions are defined by watersheds, climate zones, ecosystems, and natural resource patterns rather than arbitrary political boundaries. This scale enables economic activity that works with ecological processes rather than against them.
We’re exploring how to integrate multiple hyper-local communities within ecological boundaries, enabling resource sharing and coordination that respects ecological carrying capacity. Different communities within a bioregion might specialize in different aspects of production - some focusing on agriculture, others on manufacturing, others on knowledge work - while sharing resources and coordinating to maintain ecological balance.
The technical infrastructure enables bioregional coordination without requiring centralized control. Communities can share information about resource availability, ecological conditions, production capacity, and needs through Holochain networks while maintaining local autonomy. When drought affects agricultural communities, manufacturing communities can redirect resources to support them. When manufacturing communities need raw materials, agricultural communities can provide them through transparent resource sharing rather than market transactions.
Bioregional governance operates through voluntary coordination rather than hierarchical authority. Communities participate in bioregional planning and resource allocation because it serves their interests, not because they’re compelled by higher authorities. This creates more resilient governance that adapts to changing conditions rather than imposing fixed structures.
Cosmo-Localism: Global Knowledge, Local Control
The cosmo-local scale enables global knowledge sharing while maintaining local control over implementation. This represents perhaps the most sophisticated aspect of Sensorica’s multi-scale vision: how to capture the benefits of global coordination and knowledge sharing without surrendering local sovereignty and ecological awareness.
Through Holochain networks, design innovations, production techniques, governance experiments, and educational resources can be shared globally, making them available to any community that can benefit from them. However, the decision about whether and how to implement these innovations remains entirely local. Communities can adapt global knowledge to their specific ecological conditions, cultural values, and resource availability.
This creates what Sensorica calls “fractal innovation” - the same basic patterns and principles can be applied at different scales and in different contexts, but the specific implementation varies based on local conditions. A water purification technique developed in one bioregion can be adapted for different water sources, climates, and community sizes around the world, but each implementation reflects local knowledge and preferences.
Cosmo-localism also enables global coordination of resource flows and mutual aid without creating dependencies. When natural disasters or social conflicts affect one region, communities around the world can coordinate response and support through transparent networks rather than hierarchical aid organizations. Knowledge about what worked well in previous disaster responses can be shared globally while implementation remains under local control.
Integration Patterns: How Scales Reinforce Each Other
Our multi-scale experiments investigate how different scales might reinforce rather than compete with each other. Hyper-local resilience provides the foundation that enables communities to participate in bioregional and global networks as equals rather than dependents. Bioregional coordination provides the ecological awareness that keeps local production sustainable and enables resource sharing during crises. Global knowledge sharing provides innovations and techniques that enhance local and regional capacity.
This creates positive feedback loops between scales. Successful local innovations get shared globally, improving local capacity everywhere. Effective bioregional governance models get adapted in other bioregions, strengthening ecological economics worldwide. Global knowledge sharing enables more sophisticated local production, increasing local resilience and bioregional stability.
The integration is enabled by what Sensorica terms “fractal sovereignty” - the same principles of transparent contribution tracking, fair value distribution, and collaborative decision-making apply at all scales, creating coherence without uniformity. Household workshops, community networks, bioregional coordination systems, and global knowledge commons all operate under similar principles while maintaining their distinct characteristics and functions.
Information Flows and Privacy
Managing information flows across multiple scales requires sophisticated privacy and sovereignty protections. Communities need to be able to share information that benefits broader networks while maintaining privacy over sensitive local information. Sensorica’s Holochain infrastructure enables this through selective information sharing protocols.
Communities can choose to share production capacity information, resource availability, and innovation successes with bioregional and global networks while keeping sensitive information about internal conflicts, individual circumstances, or strategic plans private. This enables coordination benefits without sacrificing local autonomy or creating vulnerabilities to external manipulation.
The information flow patterns also create learning opportunities across scales. Local innovations can be documented and shared globally, bioregional governance experiments can inform similar efforts elsewhere, and global knowledge can be adapted and improved through local implementation. This creates continuous improvement cycles that benefit all participants.
Economic Value Flows Across Scales
While information flows globally and governance remains local, economic value flows follow more complex patterns designed to strengthen local resilience while enabling mutual aid and resource sharing. Most value creation and capture occurs locally - communities that produce goods and services capture most of the value from their work. However, portion of value flows “upward” to support shared infrastructure and “outward” to support other communities through mutual aid networks.
This value flow pattern creates economic incentives for participation in broader networks while maintaining local economic sovereignty. Communities benefit from participating in bioregional and global networks through access to shared infrastructure, knowledge commons, and mutual aid systems, but they’re not dependent on these systems for basic survival and prosperity.
The value flows are managed through the ValueFlows ontology and transparent contribution tracking rather than market prices or bureaucratic allocation. Communities can see exactly how their contributions support broader networks and exactly what benefits they receive in return, creating trust and reciprocity rather than dependency relationships.
The Vision of Integrated Abundance
Our experiments with multi-scale integration explore possibilities for what we call “integrated abundance” - economic systems where local resilience, bioregional sustainability, and global knowledge sharing reinforce each other to create expanding possibilities for human flourishing within ecological limits.
In this vision, communities don’t have to choose between local resilience and global connection, between ecological sustainability and technological sophistication, between individual autonomy and collective coordination. Instead, these apparent contradictions are resolved through intelligent system design that aligns individual interests with collective flourishing at multiple scales simultaneously.
The result is economic organization that enhances both individual sovereignty and collective empowerment from household to global scales while remaining within ecological carrying capacity. This represents a genuine alternative to both capitalist globalization and isolationist localism, demonstrating how economic systems can be simultaneously rooted and cosmopolitan, diverse and coherent, autonomous and interconnected.
Conclusion: A Living Mission in Motion
Sensorica’s fifteen-year journey from sensor development to regenerative economic systems represents more than organizational evolution - it embodies a living demonstration that alternative economic futures are not only possible but already emerging through practical experimentation and collaborative innovation.
Their mission has crystallized around a profound recognition: the transition from extractive to regenerative economics requires not just different policies or technologies, but fundamentally different ways of organizing human economic activity. Through ongoing experimentation with Open Value Networks, exploration of complexity science in collaborative governance, testing of distributed technologies, and investigation of lifecycle completion patterns, Sensorica is developing frameworks that addresses the root causes of economic dysfunction rather than just its symptoms.
What makes our vision particularly compelling is its integration of individual sovereignty with collective empowerment. Unlike utopian projects that sacrifice individual agency for collective goods, or libertarian approaches that ignore collective needs, Sensorica’s model demonstrates how intelligent system design can align individual flourishing with community resilience and ecological sustainability. Our “composting capitalism” approach offers a practical pathway for transforming extractive economic relationships into regenerative ones without requiring revolutionary disruption or authoritarian control.
The scientific rigor underlying our work distinguishes it from both traditional cooperatives and speculative blockchain projects. By working to ground our approach in complexity science and formal economic modeling through the ValueFlows ontology, we’re developing systems that we’re testing in practice. Our prototypes like True Commons and Nondominium, along with our NRP system data, provide early validation of these concepts rather than just being ideologically satisfying. Our fifteen years of experimentation with collaborative production, documented in our wiki and NRP database, provides initial evidence that these alternative models might work at scale while maintaining regenerative principles, though we continue to gather data and refine our approaches.
Perhaps most importantly, Sensorica’s multi-scale integration vision demonstrates how economic alternatives can be simultaneously local and global, addressing one of the fundamental challenges facing both bioregional movements and global sustainability efforts. Their framework for hyper-local production, bioregional governance, and cosmo-local knowledge sharing offers a practical alternative to the false choice between isolationist localism and extractive globalization.
As we face mounting ecological and social crises that conventional economic systems seem unable to address, Sensorica’s work provides both hope and practical direction. Their mission is not a static ideology but a living experiment that continues evolving through practice. Each project, each collaboration, each innovation adds to the growing body of evidence that economic systems can be designed for regeneration rather than extraction, abundance rather than scarcity, collaboration rather than competition.
The path forward they illuminate is neither utopian nor easy, but it is real and accessible. Communities, bioregions, and global networks can begin adopting OVN principles, experimenting with distributed technologies, and designing for lifecycle completion without waiting for systemic transformation. The infrastructure and knowledge commons we’re developing, including our prototypes and documented experiments, provide practical starting points for anyone committed to building regenerative economic alternatives.
Sensorica’s living mission continues evolving as we and other communities experiment with these frameworks, contribute to our knowledge commons, and adapt these innovations to local conditions. Our vision of economic systems that mirror natural ecosystems while leveraging information technology capabilities offers a compelling direction for economic evolution that serves both human flourishing and ecological sustainability.
The future they’re building is not inevitable, but it is possible - and increasingly, it is emerging through the collaborative efforts of communities worldwide who refuse to accept that extractive economics is the only option. Sensorica’s fifteen-year journey demonstrates that with scientific rigor, collaborative commitment, and regenerative design principles, economic systems can indeed be transformed to serve life rather than destruction.