Commercial Models
Information about the Business model related considerations; more specifically, about corporate governance, economics, agreement structures, requirements, etc.
As noted in the readme file: The timeline provides some historical content, primarily about Steve Jobs and Tim Berners-Lee. IMO: its always good, to review history...
The Webizen Project, is fundamentally about 'interpersonal computing' and the ability to provide technology to people that they own as an alternative to accounts on free platforms.
This in-turn relies upon considerations about the broader components, entitled 'social-factors', as to gain a better understanding about the broader vision and various framework related considerations that are important to consider, beyond simply creating the software tooling in and of itself. Therein, BestEfforts solutions that are supportive via ValuesCredentials is considered to be an absolute must; which in-turn invokes a need for SafetyProtocols.
The Commercial structures required to support WebScience works via WebCivics (see 'old-work-archives'); as well as developing the WebizenAlliance frameworks, to support the development of an ecosystem to support the creation, manufacture, sale, support and value-added-services associated with the development of Webizen Technology and Implementations; whilst supporting the development of means to support, develop and maintain capacities required for Currencies, TheValuesProject, SafetyProtocols and in-turn, overtime the growth of the PeaceInfrastructureProject - Whilst certainly 'commercial', and indeed also able to bring about substantial cash-flows and economic ecosystems growth; its not simply about exploitative or purely consumptive and/or exploitative behaviours or any such form of related commercial structure.
Fundamentally; the economic models seek to support HumanCentricDigitalIdentity, whilst acting to improve Relationships(Social) as well as EndingDigitalSlavery and ensuring support for FreedomOfThought, through the development of ArtificialMinds as tools.
People who purchase a Webizen System, will be the owner of it. It is not a 'service', although there are some requirements to either provide services or that the end-user is able to set one up themselves (although, that may not be what is in their best interest, in the end)...
The Economic Models built into the software seek to support multiple currencies, which in-turn seek to provide bi-directional economic flows; that take into consideration energy use and a raft of other factors - basically, the first target, is to support the needs of people who work on computers to be provided a better solution to perform that work with others; and in-turn also, through the use of the Webizen3.0 developing Webizen3.5 which in-turn incorporates WebizenPro and WebizenPro-Edge which is intended to be supported by the WebizenAlliance to support juristictional support alongside 'Value Added Resellers' in the form of software development houses that would build specific solutions for customers built upon the Webizen WebizenAiOS-Platform.
These commercial models take into consideration that the platform itself needs to be open-source - notwithstanding the licensing frameworks and related EconomicSystems; but that, it is most-likely that developers who have a lot of time, are likely to want to build their own systems, by either buying the parts and building it themselves; or, modifying the software stack so that they can get it running on alternative hardware. The modelling, in-turn, seeks to provide support for these sorts of situations; as they're not expected to do harm to the growth of the webizen ecosystem. Additionally, it is entirely possible that the cheapest dedicated unit that has some capacity to usefully operate the WebizenAiOS-Platform may well be something that is already made available by other manufacturers. Related considerations will be expanded upon in the HardwareStrategy document.
In-order to support an international ecosystem of participants who are in-turn able to work collaboratively / cooperatively to produce Webizen Specifications in a Decentralised and fairly open way (whilst not supporting 'digital slavery' nor 'rents in perpetuity', etc.); involving many stakeholders, there needs to be a structure, it needs to be able to be made comprehensible to people from different backgrounds, different skills, and they in-turn need to have an understanding of what it is Webizen is about; which is only reasonably made able to occur, by building an earlier and very much simplified solution; that will in-turn be used by those who get involved, to help deliver the Webizen Vision; and thereby also, becomes well positioned to competitively progress PeaceInfrastructureProject opportunities that exist, but are difficult to do well, without a platform and related capability.
In future; the Webizen platform aims to produce a device that consumers can deploy at home, on their home-networks and in-turn also - connect into their phones and IoT environments. Yet, the commercial problem about this objective, is that it is expensive to produce consumer hardware, the margins are relatively low; with 'apps' (software) its not very attractive to consumers, and those who are 'geek enough' are unlikely to want to pay for anything, other than going down to their local computer store to build themselves a Webizen Compatible PC... (note: innovation curve).
However; the belief is that there are many high-net-worth individuals, and all sorts of other commercial opportunities to build infrastructure that supports the ability to deploy personal, private and propriatery cloud environments for inter-personal and inter-community operation of advanced computing with advanced 'Artificial Intelligence' capabilities, that are community developed and fundamentally open - in-effect, the ability to democratise AI.
To illustrate how difficult this is to achieve, the tech Crunch article There’s now an open source alternative to ChatGPT, but good luck running it illustrates that an alternative to OpenAI (powered by Microsoft Azure);
"PaLM is 540 billion parameters in size, “parameters” referring to the parts of the language model learned from the training data. A 2020 study pegged the expenses for developing a text-generating model with only 1.5 billion parameters at as much as $1.6 million. And to train the open source model Bloom, which has 176 billion parameters, it took three months using 384 Nvidia A100 GPUs; a single A100 costs thousands of dollars."
*"And to train the open source model Bloom, which has 176 billion parameters, it took three months using 384 Nvidia A100 GPUs; a single A100 costs thousands of dollars.
Running a trained model of PaLM + RLHF’s size isn’t trivial, either. Bloom requires a dedicated PC with around eight A100 GPUs"*
noting also;
Training a 540-Billion Parameter Language Model with Pathways
PaLM demonstrates the first large-scale use of the Pathways system to scale training to 6144 chips, the largest TPU-based system configuration used for training to date. The training is scaled using data parallelism at the Pod level across two Cloud TPU v4 Pods, while using standard data and model parallelism within each Pod. This is a significant increase in scale compared to most previous LLMs, which were either trained on a single TPU v3 Pod (e.g., GLaM, LaMDA), used pipeline parallelism to scale to 2240 A100 GPUs across GPU clusters (Megatron-Turing NLG) or used multiple TPU v3 Pods (Gopher) with a maximum scale of 4096 TPU v3 chips.*
Therein; there's effectively three different sorts of issues, the first is about creating the models, the next is about having the computational equipment needed to train the models; and the final issue is how to run the models privately.
So, The webizen ecosystem provides a framework to radically improve the means to support the creation of the models. Then, through a network of webizen powered systems, communities can collaboratively support training the models (a bit like the way blockchains work, in collaboratively 'mining' blocks); then, lastly, the networks can be used to collaboratively process various sorts of models...
There's a bunch of use-cases for these sorts of opportunities; noting, the ability to have an interopable ecosystem - is very important, as is the ability to rapidly develop apps (ie: using just HTML/JS/CSS); that in-turn rely upon an underlying WebizenAiOS-Platform that provides capabilities for all sorts of customers, from those with a collection of million dollar cars; to those who are operating major IoT networks or advanced engineering, biomedical, academia (ie: universities and k12); and so many other fields, the scope of opportunity, is enormous.
Yet, the most important part of what needs to be done well, is to address the social fabric related issues to make sure that its infrastructure that's able to support the PeaceInfrastructureProject rather than becoming something that ends-up being a disabler.
Business Model Considerations
When i’m thinking about Business Model considerations, to support people who support the development of this project (ie; useful work); it is particularly important to improve circumstances.
The value chain image, represented a basic illustration of forming an ‘effort calculation’, whilst an earlier document (moreover focused on the ‘knowledge banking’ concept) illustrates this further
Often projects when they start have no funding - as is the case with my work, now. Yet, when a project develops to a position where funding might become available; then, too often, it's not the people who were doing the work to start something - from concept to useful outcome that get economic recognition - rather, they’re often treated poorly; whilst others, are sought to engage; who only do so, as a consequence of funding being available to pay them for their work.
These behaviours, impact - not only, the circumstances of innovators; but also, the ideology that becomes built-into the products that are made as a consequence of the embodiment of decisions made by those involved in creating ‘new things’...
Part of the solution requirements for webizen, will include a means to support equitable treatment for work activities; which is not so much focused on ‘royalties in perpetuity’ rather, defining systems to support human dignity and the right to have rights in relation to work & contract law. As such, part of the project to produce webizen, will be about producing the tools that will later be better empowered by webizen. These considerations do not confer the same sorts of rights considerations, to robots - although; there are costs associated with operating systems, and if they’re put to good use for good purpose by others; perhaps this should also incur a fee, yet, in a manner that is different to the use of a human beings time undertaking work activities; whereby the intended implications of doing useful work, if / when valued by others - is to ensure, it supports the human dignity of workers.
This process; does in-turn also lead to a means to support accountability, should wrongdoings occur.
So, i do not see a clear answer / solution, to addressing this problem easily; rather, it appears to me - that there's a body of work & testing / R&D, to perform - where initial solutions, will evolve to produce better solutions; and an appropriately flexible environment to achieve growth of solutions in this very difficult area, is as required as attentiveness & commitment; to the process of undertaking works, that intend to address this problem. In-effect - it's a bit like producing the infrastructure tooling needed, to build infrastructure.
Presently; there is no infrastructure in place; which is both, due to this project being ‘new’ (or a new way of seeking to address an old problem, by pivoting the approach to seek to address it, in a different way); and, that there’s no money (i haven't been paid for the vast majority of my work done over more than a decade; even though, some of the ‘things’ i helped create, have rolled out globally).
Investigating Co-Op Models
Whilst there has not been enough work put into it yet, i have briefly looked at the Co-Operative models that are described to be built around 7 principals
Cooperative Principles
1. Open and Voluntary Membership
Membership in a cooperative is open to all people who can reasonably use its services and stand willing to accept the responsibilities of membership, regardless of race, religion, gender, or economic circumstances.
2. Democratic Member Control
Cooperatives are democratic organizations controlled by their members, who actively participate in setting policies and making decisions. Representatives (directors/trustees) are elected among the membership and are accountable to them. In primary cooperatives, members have equal voting rights (one member, one vote); cooperatives at other levels are organized in a democratic manner.
3. Members’ Economic Participation
Members contribute equitably to, and democratically control, the capital of their cooperative. At least part of that capital remains the common property of the cooperative. Members allocate surpluses for any or all of the following purposes: developing the cooperative; setting up reserves; benefiting members in proportion to their transactions with the cooperative; and supporting other activities approved by the membership.
4. Autonomy and Independence
Cooperatives are autonomous, self-help organizations controlled by their members. If they enter into agreements with other organizations, including governments, or raise capital from external sources, they do so on terms that ensure democratic control as well as their unique identity.
5. Education, Training, and Information
Education and training for members, elected representatives (directors/trustees), CEOs, and employees help them effectively contribute to the development of their cooperatives. Communications about the nature and benefits of cooperatives, particularly with the general public and opinion leaders, help boost cooperative understanding.
6. Cooperation Among Cooperatives
By working together through local, national, regional and international structures, cooperatives improve services, bolster local economies, and deal more effectively with social and community needs.
7. Concern for Community
Cooperatives work for the sustainable development of their communities through policies supported by the membership.
Source: electric.coop/seven-cooperative-principles
Related links;
Whilst these values are very much consistant with the objectives of these works; the specifics need to be investigated further; alongside any other models that make some sense, to figure out what makes most sense in relation to the establishment of the WebizenAlliance and related legal structures for developing the broader ecosystem.