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Welcome to the OCP wiki!

The "Open Collaborative Platform" is an integral system of data management created to promote cooperativism and the Common Good. It is based on the accounting system REA (Resource Event Agent) solving the incoherence issue of double accounting: in short, each agent maintains two lists of economic events, entries and exits (collections and expenses) that need to match the economic events recorded by other agents. This way overcoming the so called 'problem of double counting', in fact, economic events do not always match the entries between the parties involved and creative accounting can be done.

OCP, for the present, is the tool used mainly by FreedomCoop and Bank of the Commons to manage their membership processes, the management of members' shares and their payment methods. OCP is currently a common database that can be configured to be used from several domains at the same time, with different services, login pages and registration forms, definition of shares and custom payment gateways per project.

With the REA accounting system economic events are recorded in a shared database where each event has at least two sides/agent; buying/selling. In an exchange or in a sale two resources are transferred through two events, the delivery of a resource and the payment or exchange with another resource, so that, with a collective platform working with REA, each agent has automatic accounting, once the economic events are registered and the information is agreed between the parties.

OCP also records processes and ingredients of each product or service (resources, tools, hours of a trade, spaces, etc.), being able to reuse recipes to perform actions such as plan productions or manage projects. Also, the fact of registering economic events, with information on the types of resources moved, and based on a common tree of types of things, allows us to trace human values to be promoted in products or services: e.g. if we want to know to what extent a product or service is ecologically or socially fair, knowing the type/origin/economic conditions of each ingredient the product/service has, we could automatically obtain, with simple algorithms, which degree of fairness or ecology it has. With the increase in using the platform a reputation system could be built, fair enough to base the FairCredit mutual credit system, and also improve the 'web of trust' proposed to boost Circular Economy.

The upcoming evolution of the OCP is database distribution (first phase of 'refactoring') and afterwards the distribution of the server tasks in python-django framework. The current development team plan is to give rise to the CommonDB, which would serve to evolve the OCP on the basis of a system distributed by design.