Sensorica is an open value network, established in 2011 in Montreal, Canada, dedicated to open source hardware development. It is a pilot project for commons-based peer production applied to hardware, designed to operate at large scale. It was established in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in February 2011. Inspired by free and open-source projects, the vision of Sensorica has been to devise an appropriate business model and support infrastructure to make such forms of production economically sustainable. Sensorica is arguably more complex than a traditional enterprise. It is a productive network that is simultaneously a commons-based community, as well as a market-oriented entity. On one hand, individuals and organizations pool resources to initiate projects, driven primarily by intrinsic motivations, rather than financial rewards. On the other hand, the innovative solutions developed in Sensorica are introduced to the market to generate income by “exchange firms”, i.e. independent internal or external entities which undertake marketing and logistics operations while being liable for maintaining ethical and quality standards of the solutions. Sensorica identifies itself as a new type of organization, which is referred as an Open Value Network. An OVN is a generic organizational and business model, which could possibly enhance and support commons-based peer production. As an organization it is highly adaptive, fully decentralized, and governed through distributed decision-making processes and resource allocation. As the name implies, it supports open participation, has very low barriers of entry, and is designed to empower permissionless individual action through open knowledge and transparent processes. Sensorica uses the Resources, events, agents as a basis of its network resource planning and contribution / value accounting system. The NRP is an Enterprise Resource Planning type of software based on the REA model to support the complexity of operations in an OVN. It collects, stores, and interprets data from all the different types of activities in the network and connects them to specific resources, events, and agents to keep track of the contributed value on resource level. In NRP, everything is connected together. Economic agents are associated with other agents and participate in events of various types, such as processes, exchanges, or transfers. Events change the state of resources by using, citing, consuming, creating, or transferring them. A certain resource may be an output from one event and then an input to another one. Those events are then again connected with a resource flow. The advent of blockchain technology and Ethereum facilitates the OVN model proposed by SENSORICA. It is featured in the documentary movie.
