Prowl

[els]

I hope it's ok to make this announcement here.


PROWL

Prowl is a short-hand term for Publisher-Reporter Oriented Web
Ledgers. The aim of the project is to enable existing web publishing
platforms to support different currency or payment frameworks through
the specification of community, lending or brand-oriented accounting
models.


Why Publish?
The idea is to popularize different means of assigning value to
economic activities that are marginalized in traditional, centralized
currency frameworks. Public awareness and appreciation of such
activity is expected to grow with each record that is published and
accounted in community, brand or lender currency. Over time, it is
hoped that a diversity of viable, ledger-based currencies will emerge
to help regulate economic stability and improve market accessibility.


How to Publish?
Prowl seeks to standardize published record syntax, report structure
and accounting semantics to enable different reporter applications to
reproducibly verify, audit and evaluate reports according to standard
conventions and accounting model specifications. This type of inter-
operability is similar to how different web browsers are able to
access and render HTML pages according to standard content types and
mark-up. Through web-accessible and mobile-compatible reporter
services, Prowl should not require new software installation or
dedicated transaction devices. End-users could simply use existing
publishing platforms, such as freely-hosted blogs, and mobile devices
to publish records and access report data.


Try It
Please try the demonstration at http://tyaga.org/prowl/reporter_services.php
and post comments at http://groups.google.com/group/prowl-users. If
you’d like to register your blog or domain as a test publisher site,
please announce your URL in the discussion group. Preliminary
transactions might be donation-based, such as for work performed on
the Prowl project itself or other type of activity that you publish in
your blog. There is also technical documentation at http://tyaga.org/prowl/prowl_doc.php,
which will hopefully generate discussions towards a standardization
process. Suggestions on the development of different accounting models
will be greatly appreciated.

Edgar

[Joe Edelman]

Edgar,

This is awesome.

--Joe

--
J.E. -- http://nxhx.org -- 413.250.8007

[Thomas Hartman]

I'm with Joe.

Edgar, have you heard of Todd Boyle, or ledgerism.net? (Gone, but
accessible through the wayback machine)

This reminds me of the "Shared Transaction Repository" concept
described there, which I have thought was a good idea for almost ten
years.

I'll definitely be having a closer look at this.

Thomas.

[els]

I'm glad you guys like the idea.

I actually switched from using 'alternative currency' to 'ledger-based
currency' based on the concepts from ledgerism.net, as the latter
terminology seemed more neutral. Ledgerism is compatible with Prowl,
but the accounting/publishing platform needs to pre-authorize requests
by settlement-agents to intermediate and automatically clear
outstanding obligations between two parties. Prowl reports could also
be used for exposing limits, etc. in case Ripple moves away from a
shared account as explained at http://ripplep2p.com/wiki/Main/AccountCreation
- but again, some kind of pre-authorization would be necessary.

I've contacted Todd this past summer but I only had vague ideas back
then. I was trying to see if there was some way to *ensure* a self-
balancing feature when ledgers are independently maintained by
participants, similar to what is found in mutual-credit type systems,
such as LETS, but without an intermediating account or agent. I
eventually came to the conclusion that preventing an imbalance from
ever occuring is not realistic at large-scale. As mentioned in other
threads, there is no fool-proof system. And so instead, Prowl is
focused on being able to cross-verify, audit and evaluate published
ledger information from different payment/currency frameworks.

I'm not as experienced in programming and accounting, and I still
think the query syntax could be better, so please give suggestions,
comments whenever you see something that could be improved.

Edgar


On Jan 5, 3:07 pm, "Thomas Hartman" <thomashartm...@googlemail.com>
wrote:

> I'm with Joe.
>
> Edgar, have you heard of Todd Boyle, or ledgerism.net? (Gone, but
> accessible through the wayback machine)
>
> This reminds me of the "Shared Transaction Repository" concept
> described there, which I have thought was a good idea for almost ten
> years.
>
> I'll definitely be having a closer look at this.
>
> Thomas.
>
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 10:06 PM, Joe Edelman <joe.edel...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Edgar,
>
> > This is awesome.
>
> > --Joe
>
> > --

> > J.E. --http://nxhx.org-- 413.250.8007

> >>and post comments athttp://groups.google.com/group/prowl-users.  If

> >>you'd like to register your blog or domain as a test publisher site,
> >>please announce your URL in the discussion group. Preliminary
> >>transactions might be donation-based, such as for work performed on
> >>the Prowl project itself or other type of activity that you publish in

> >>your blog. There is also technical documentation athttp://tyaga.org/prowl/prowl_doc.php,

> >>which will hopefully generate discussions towards a standardization
> >>process. Suggestions on the development of different accounting models
> >>will be greatly appreciated.
>

> >>Edgar- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[David Watson]

It seems ledgerism.net is out of commission. Was this related to work
Robin Upton has done over at altruists.org?

On Jan 5, 5:23 pm, els <sioso...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> I'm glad you guys like the idea.
>
> I actually switched from using 'alternative currency' to 'ledger-based
> currency' based on the concepts from ledgerism.net, as the latter
> terminology seemed more neutral. Ledgerism is compatible with Prowl,
> but the accounting/publishing platform needs to pre-authorize requests
> by settlement-agents to intermediate and automatically clear
> outstanding obligations between two parties. Prowl reports could also
> be used for exposing limits, etc. in case Ripple moves away from a

> shared account as explained athttp://ripplep2p.com/wiki/Main/AccountCreation

[Thomas Hartman]

As I said in the initial email, ledgerism.net is expired, but
accessible via the wayback machine (archive.org).

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://ledgerism.net

Highly, HIGHLY recommend giving this interesting website a read.

Fascinating stuff, and not just about ledgers.