This post is a strategic collaboration announcement between Immu.ai, the Holochain Foundation, and Holo. You can check out Immu.ai's announcement here and then continue to the rest of this post to get a deeper sense and the wider context of why this collaboration matters.
I have a garden. I love eating the tomatoes that come out of my garden. Sometimes I love it because they taste better than supermarket tomatoes, but honestly they don’t always taste better than ones I get from the local farmers market, and I still love eating them. Why? Because I know the full story of the tomatoes. I know where I got the seeds. I know how they grew, what went into them, how they fared a dry-spell and more. There’s something deeply satisfying about knowing the story of what we eat, what we use, what we wear.
And it’s more than just satisfying, it’s actually critical to creating healthy systems. In any system where there is no information about an input to that system, there will be an inability to respond. If I don’t know what went into the growing of my tomatoes, I cannot respond to differences between tomato sources. If I know about pesticide use, carbon footprint, labor practices, transportation distances, then I can respond in my choices about which tomatoes to buy. This story is meant simply to show a systemic truth, that in a complex society where goods are produced and flow through a supply chain, we need mechanisms to have that data aggregated and attached to products as they make their way through the economy for the effects of producing those goods to not just be “externalities”.
We have seen for quite some time formal mechanisms to add some data to our products. USDA Organic, Fair-trade and similar certifications create a bit of added information. It’s rather easy to see the need for generalized, high resolution versions of these kinds of product indicators, but for the whole supply chain of products. It’s rather difficult to figure out how to build ones that have the reliability, transparency, systemic neutrality and incorruptibility we would want for such systems. And now, critically, the EU has mandated phasing in Digital Product Passports that will need to do just that.
In designing Holochain one of the core principles behind its architecture was for it to provide a substrate in which parties could create a space of engagement in the digital world in which they could all hold each other to account without having to have an intermediary keeping the accounts. These core design criteria led us to create a system where data provenance is a native feature of the framework. This is what is meant when people describe Holochain as “agent-centric”. All actions taken by agents in a given Holochain network include the provenance of that action, and only valid actions determined by the rules-of-engagement of that particular Holochain network, can get recorded. And all of this happens with no intermediary.
Such a substrate is ideal for creating the kind of transparency and accountability framework that can deliver on the demands of robust Digital Product Passport solutions that are truly decentralized.
Immu.ai is working on a platform for providing, data modeling, validation, and transparency, in service of Digital Product Passports, and has recognized the value proposition of Holochain to deliver on their commitment to decentralization of their platform. This is why the Holochain Foundation is taking on this strategic collaboration immu.ai together with Holo. We believe it will help deliver on the possibility of living in a world where the full story of the products we consume is available, and can be used to steer our economic participation in directions that aren’t full of collateral damage due to lack of information.
As a final note, this isn’t the only collaboration in this domain. The Holochain Foundation supports the development of hREA, a Holochain based implementation of the Resource, Event, Agent accounting framework and valueflows ontology. You can read more about hREA and the Holochain community efforts here.
