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Comment by plaidfuji | Hacker News Reader

> their workflows remain to be very email-based and driven by traditional ERPs

This really is the crux of the issue. It comes down to “your ERP has some information I want in my ERP” - followed by twenty emails, redirects to find the person who actually understands the schema of the ERP on each end, mapping the fields, and finally sending the info.

What’s missing is not some omniscient decentralized master system, but a standard framework to rapidly conduct data negotiations between private parties and systems. Each party needs a public-facing searchable data catalog of some kind so requests can be made precisely the first time, and so each party understands what they’re agreeing to.

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> What’s missing is not some omniscient decentralized master system, but a standard framework to rapidly conduct data negotiations between private parties and systems.

What is the difference? You seem to be recommending a protocol (maybe with some level of human involvement) between two centralized systems. OK now that sounds more like federation than decentralization, but still, there's not much of a distinction.

This happens in the cannabis game. There are 120+ software vendors, so to make it easy humans email each other links, those links also have pointers to the data (JSON), so that the receving end can just paste it into their end.

But, wow! Is it hard to get your competitors to adopt an open protocol. Whole bunch of NIH syndrome. And each player can sit on the sidelines, or invent their own "protocol" and not adopt another (que that XKCD about 14+ standards).

Converstaions: A: our clients want to work together, so our softwares should work together. B: Yea, well, how many clients do you have? A: Well how many do you have? B: Use my protocol, we'll build a spec. A: here's our protocol with public spec & moderate adoption. B: Well, we didn't get to have input so we don't like it, you're clearly not a team player. A: It's on Github! I'm literally inviting you to participate right now!? B: ...

It's very hard to build open, distributed, federated systems when all the other parties in the game are more interested in building up their own walled garden.

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