Tracked resource governance

[orthecreedence]

This issue extends #140.

This allows tracking resources in costs objects. It's definition:

Resource: Tracker {
  standard_unit: <om2::Unit>
  externality_cost: 0 < x <= 1
  sources: [ Source ... ]
}

Source: Translatable {
  lat: <latitude>
  lon: <longitude>
  externality_cost: 0 < x <= 1
  merge_function: <sum|avg>
}

Let's go over the fields:

• standard_unit - The unit this resource tracker uses. It might be liters, kilograms, etc. See om2::Unit.
• externality_cost - A value between 0 and 1 that determines how much externalities this resource is responsible for (as a ratio). 0 would mean "has no known externalities" and 1 would be "critically damaging to the environment or humanity."
• sources - A list of known sources for this resources, ie "Forestville rock quarry" or "Amazon rainforest". Each of these has their own externality_cost which is combined with the tracker's main externality cost via the merge_function.

[orthecreedence]

I've been trying to find a way to incentivize tracking of raw materials (and also labor time tracking #91). An idea hit me a night or two ago: people track their labor value because they get paid for it! There is a matching incentive to not charge more than the value of your labor because otherwise people will not order your products (there is still a competitive nature at play here: if your chairs cost 500 credits and someone else can make a similar chair for 50, then you will get less orders).

So why not use the same structure for resources (and also labor hours)? A resource tracked at a certain credit cost (decided via the resource plan #58) would then be credited to each of the members of the company that stewards that resource. And this makes sense: because they are the ones managing that resource collectively, they should be compensated for its extraction.

Going to just throw this here for now, will develop more when I am not, well, you know.

[orthecreedence]

Adding the original issue description here for historical purposes:

---

So, we have companies, products, and orders. However, when tracking costs of products, it seems the most effective way is to track the raw materials used. So, if a chair uses 4 2x4s and 2 widgets, if each 2x4 is 4kg raw material "wood" and each widget is 6kg steel, which is 9kg raw material "iron ore" then we can say that a chair is 16kg wood and 18kg iron ore.

However, since raw materials are going to essentially be yet another output from a company, we need some way to tag them as "special" since we want to attribute raw materials to products.

In essence, we could say "these are products that have no other inputs" and that makes sense, however it's unlikely that every company will enter all inputs to all their products. Secondly, we don't necessarily want to give companies the ability to mark their own products as raw materials (lest "widgets" show up in the raw material list rather than "iron ore").

So we need some way to tag products as raw materials so when they're included as inputs to other products, we know to track them directly. Here are some ideas I have around this:

• Allow a socially curated list of raw materials
• Allow tagging a product as some one of the socially listed raw materials (say, "iron"). Maybe this will be tagged by the company producing the material and validated socially.
• Allow attaching various metadata to the product. This might be "came from X iron mine." This metadata should be propagated along with products using it as an input to production. So instead of seeing "this widget uses 5kg iron" it will be "this widget uses 3kg of iron from the Minnesota Mesabi range and 2kg iron from Michigan"

The tagging and the attachment of metadata allows a number of things:

1. Marking of raw materials so we know to account for them as such in our costs
2. Bucketing raw materials not just by type, but by source, which in the spirit of disaggregate costs, might tell us more than just "5kg iron" but rather "3kg iron from a mine that is near depletion"

So if we want to just see how much iron a product has, we simply add all raw materials tagged as "iron" but if we want to see source information, it is disaggregated in the list of raw materials.

As far as the socially curated tags and the assignment of tags to products, that's another topic. Perhaps there's a way to automatically tag the company's location to the resulting raw material product so they don't need to perform any data entry at all.

[orthecreedence]

Note that tagging the source of resources, while ultimately extremely useful information, might not be feasible. It adds another layer of crowsourcing and requires participation from blocs with no incentives which is ultimately not going to end well. On top of this, it will balloon costs objects significantly...this is a practical consideration. If we're tracking 500 resources, and each of them has 100 sources, all of a sudden a popsicle has 50000 costs tracked in it.

Devil's advocate though...if we're clearcutting the rainforest, it would be very important to be able to set costs on resources derived from that specific location. Having this built into the protocol allows more granular estimation and pricing of externalities of resources (and processes). Also, it might be possible to set certain resources as requiring a source, and specify the possible sources inside the tracker with a "none of the above" option. This would keep sources under the pervue of crowdsourcing while allowing blocs to pick one if it matches their location.