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Solidarity Commons Protocol

Community Procurement and Solidarity Markets

Community procurement and solidarity markets matter because communities often need to coordinate buying, selling, sharing, and fulfillment across many organizations without becoming dependent on a central marketplace owner.

Basic Pattern

Section titled “Basic Pattern”

Democracy Collaborative names progressive procurement as one pillar of community wealth building: local governments and anchor institutions can use procurement to relocalize economic activity and reduce extraction.

Open Food Network gives a concrete software example. It describes an open source platform for farmers, food producers, community hubs, food collectives, and values-driven food enterprises that collaborate and sell together.

ValueFlows proposals gives the economic vocabulary: proposals can publish offers and requests, and those proposals can carry intents, reciprocal intents, audiences, and matches. ValueFlows flows then distinguishes intents, commitments, economic events, and claims.

Why It Matters Here

Section titled “Why It Matters Here”

Community procurement creates records that link economic exchange to governance and membership:

  • supplier eligibility and community benefit criteria;
  • requests, offers, proposals, and matches;
  • commitments, delivery events, acknowledgements, and disputes;
  • cooperative or anchor-institution purchasing rules;
  • local benefit reporting;
  • privacy and reputation boundaries.

This is the mechanism where ValueFlows may become central, not just referenced.

What Software Should Not Flatten

Section titled “What Software Should Not Flatten”

The dangerous simplification is treating solidarity markets as ordinary e-commerce. A solidarity market may care about eligibility, local benefit, democratic ownership, relationship history, ecological constraints, and reciprocity.

Solidarity Commons Protocol should model the social and governance context around the economic flow, then use a clear economic vocabulary for the flow itself.

Section titled “Read Next”