Friday, March 31, 2017

Implement milestones as activities

I did #1546 (Use courses.Course as milestone_model). This is a great example of how flexible Lino applications are.

Some days ago I added the courses and cal plugins into Lino Noi. That was for my quick demo last Saturday for Lino Vilma. This made me realize that an “activity” (AKA “course” or “workshop”) in lino_xl.lib.courses is equivalent to what we have been calling a milestone until now. And that the “room” of the calendar module is equivalent to what we called a “site” until now.

So now I removed the models deploy.Milestone and tickets.Site. Existing deploy.Milestone objects must be migrated to courses.Course, existing tickets.Site to cal.Room.

I also removed tickets.Competence because that notion is not useful. Existing rows can be thrown away. Note that I plan to change the verbose_name of tickets.Project from “project” to “mission”.

Side effect I stumbled over a little bug which caused a TypeError: unorderable types: str() and <type 'str'>. And I fixed it.

About economic democracy

I read parts of A wealth of possibilities: Alternatives to Growth (found via this). My quotation:

In general, a post-growth economy should resemble what Johanishova and Wolf (2012) describe as “economic democracy”, a concept that advances the right of citizens to participate in the economy, shifting their role from passive consumers to engaged and productive subjects with access to a new typology of means of production. In this way, employment opportunities would shift from capitalist corporations to collaboratives; that is to say, social, individual and informal enterprises fomenting local economies.

Put differently but implying similar ideas, Christian Felber defines the Economy of the Common Good as an attempt to create an alternative economic system to both the planned and the capitalist economy, seeking implementation from the bottom up directed at individuals, enterprises or municipalities.

(…) Since a specific answer cannot be given concerning the future outcome, we can only acknowledge that we face a bifurcation where the global outcome will be the result of many different local outcomes, and prepare for successes as well as tragedies. The policy-makers should therefore adopt a flexible role in devising policies that facilitate the creation of democratic processes and can, in parallel with technological innovation, foment social innovation which, in turn, will instigate the post-growth economy and its new institutions.

This confirms to me that Lino Vilma is something that the world needs. One of the key points in Vilma is a new style of democracy. Unlike many projects Vilma encourages volunteer agents to become qualified representatives for their neighbors.