Decentralized Autonomous Industry (DAI)

Global fisheries, a core planetary industry, and source of food are endangered. At the same time, good actors, advocates, industry leaders, and technologists are rallying to establish the economy necessary to meet the challenge. https://seafoodcommons.org

The seafood industry contributes US$230 billion to the global economy, creating jobs that support 8% of the world's population and provides the world's prime source of high-quality protein: 14–16% of the animal protein consumed worldwide; over one billion people rely on seafood as their primary source of animal protein.

Environmental degradation, ocean acidification, plastics and loss of biodiversity are crossing major tipping points. The authors of a study released in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined 78 percent of the world's annual catch and found that only a third were in decent biological shape. The journal Science published a four-year study predicting the world would run out of wild-caught seafood in twenty years with business as usual. There are key challenges affecting the world's seafood industry and oceans - uneven international enforcement, human rights violations; extensive fraud and lack of transparency; overfishing and increasing piracy issues.

But there is good news. Well known best practices integrated with Open Source technology can reverse these prevailing trends in a surprisingly short amount of time.

"RESTORING THE OCEAN COULD FEED 1 BILLION PEOPLE A HEALTHY SEAFOOD MEAL EVERY DAY." - Oceana.org

The Seafood Commons (SFC) team started to connect stakeholders in 2016 and now partners with Ambrosus the world's leading blockchain-IoT platform for sensor-based quality assurance in food and pharmaceutical supply chains, Ululaconnecting businesses, workers, communities and governments to de-risk operations and create value across global supply chains, and the World Ocean Observatory to create the architecture for the first Decentralized Autonomous Industry (DAI) - see Decentralized Autonomous Organization as a reference.

SFC is inviting others to roll up their sleeves and help lead this ambitious undertaking to perfect a technical backbone of bioregional social development for planetary impact. The SFC will release its White Paper and Smart Industry Contract in June at the Seafood Sustainability Summit in Spain, and an Alpha Launch in the autumn of 2018 during the World Seafood Expos in Hong Kong.

The DAI offers stakeholders governance, advanced collaboration and decision making tools, and open standards for innovation; designed as a seamless twenty-first-century intelligent infrastructure at a global industry scale. The DAI will connect local fisheries, communities, and regional ecosystem development programs with the Internet of Things (IoT) to scale to global traceability of seafood quality.

Stakeholders, research institutions, and consumers will be able to access a comprehensive system as a gateway to the IoT. Users have access to Big Data and analytics to develop predictive algorithms that can increase productivity and reduce the marginal cost of producing and delivering a full range of products and services.

Applying sound management reforms to global fisheries in the dataset could generate annual increases exceeding 16 million metric tons (MMT) in catch, $53 billion in profit, and 619 MMT in biomass relative to business as usual. With appropriate reforms, recovery can happen quickly, with the median fishery taking under 10 years to reach recovery targets. Results show that common sense reforms to fishery management would dramatically improve overall fish abundance while increasing food security and profits.

A DAI breaks down an industry's needs according to key layers and components. Key industry processes are mapped and their relationship to each layer can be fully understood. 

The seafood industry DAI begins with the people layer. This layer incorporates all governing bodies, consumers, and retailers. All of these stakeholders have a bearing on how fish are caught, transported, and sold.

People then interact with the business process layer which is composed of user-facing software. In this case, ERP systems for managing orders, software for managing exchanges, and software for decision making.

The governing bodies will use enhanced decision-making software to create and update regulations which are a key part of the transport logistics layer. Also contained in this layer are all the low-level components that report on catch location, shipment status, and other business-essential tracking data. Each component here gathers and cross-checks data from the industry cloud layer.

The industry cloud layer is a catch-all location for the massive amounts of data necessary for a trustworthy supply chain. It consists of databases for fish names and types, audio/video recordings, certification records, and data exchanged with other services via API calls (for example map and virtual/augmented reality information via the geolocation layer).

The feedback loops layer is also incorporated here as this information is used to determine the environmental impact of business and consumer practices on the world's oceans. The two circular diagrams in this layer represent.

Circle icon 1, The International Futures Forum World System Model a clear and memorable way of looking at the challenge of the global problematique in a way that keeps it together in our minds, helps us talk to others about it, and helps us focus on what really matters in generating positive ideas for the future in any local situation.

Circle icon 2, The Centre for Citizenship Enterprise and Governance Social Earnings Ratio, sometimes abbreviated to S/E, is a single-number metric, used to measure the social impact of various organizations. The non-financial metric is similar to the price-earnings ratio but instead focuses on valuation against social impact, rather than projected earnings.

When environmental benefits or hazards are discovered, information flows to the ecosystem layer where local communities are alerted and change can be enacted where needed. Via the feedback loops, governing bodies and industry leaders can be brought in to address systemic concerns.

Data would not be available to the other layers without the IoT physical layer. Ports, ships, intermediaries, and supermarkets will be fitted with internet-of-things connected devices to communicate all the variables that need to be collected and analyzed to ensure proper supply chain management. Kicking this data up to the people layer gives everyone the bird's eye view they need to make better decisions in the industry.

The DAI as defined here provides a model for how various industries can better self-regulate for the benefit of their consumers and the environment. Such a model will become increasingly important as the world looks for ways to tackle environmental crises while offering regenerative solutions, greatly increased yields, quality and transparency for a market to support these practices.

Informed by an Integrative and Integral approach we view this emerging technology as an evolutionary aspect of human civilization. While the technical systems may be viewed as complex machines. When human interaction is included we start to see the Internet of Everything (IoE), a collaborative global "brain" and nervous system that has the potential to positively transform society and its relationship to the physical world.