Open Metrics Exchange
Metricsrouter.
Let's build.
The open metrics exchange for a sovereign economy. Embracing trust, collaboration and symbiosis through the exchange of company metrics for tomorrow's economy.
The Start
The journey of Metricsrouter started in October 2023 after the data software company dbt Labs launched a major update of their software. Their updated interface, that they call the Semantic Layer offers companies the opportunity to standardize their internal data and thereby standardize all performance metrics.
This new feature allows dashboards, reports and metric-data-feeds to get their information from one single source of truth. The semantic layer is expected to spark an explosion of metric-sharing from companies towards academia, suppliers, customers, investors, environmental agencies, unions, banks, municipalities, public health officials, insurance companies, subsidy providers and tax authorities.
This next generation exchange of metrics will have a high degree of trust because its sourcing is auditable, clean and if needed near-real-time.
The Idea
The semantic data layer provides standardized metrics available to the outside world for each individual company. This allows us to look-up hundreds of performance metrics on all kinds of granularities. As a company you are therefore now able to share specific metrics with a broad range of organizations and stakeholders.
The exchange of metrics has already started with financial metrics, but as the exchange becomes more robust and feature-rich, people will expand the portfolio of metrics — such as metrics describing pollution emitted, waste generated and chemical concentrations in products sold.
This exchange should allow suppliers to define which metrics should be shared, with a predefined date range and for a predefined duration.
The Challenge
The journey of setting up a metrics exchange starts off with a conversation on how monopolies should be organized in the information age. Over the centuries we have agreed that central banks should have a monopoly on money creation, we have agreed that the state should have a monopoly on violence and we have agreed that the law should have a monopoly on justice.
This brings us to the conversation of who should have the monopoly over our economy. In our opinion all essential services that are monopolistic in nature and have strong network effects should be owned by society itself.
All the other remaining domains of society should be a free place for our entrepreneurial energy to thrive, for all our ideas to be heard and for our human spirit to soar.
The Vision
In our vision the economy and human society are one integrated body. In this body each human is a cell with each cell being part of an organ. Each organ plays a vital role in the overall health and functioning of the body. The organs have learned that collaboration and trust sparks life and isolation invites disease and death.
In our modern societies we have built a semi-functional collaboration between all our organs and it has brought us tremendous amounts of energy, oxygen and nutrition. Over the millennia our organs have found ways to communicate to each other how much resources they each need. But most organs distrust each other and see other organs as competitors and not as part of a collective enterprise for the betterment of the entire body.
It is our dream that our human society will find their cohesion, warmth and balance so that it can flourish, spark new life and be a blessing for all generations that come after.
The Mission
It is our primary mission to increase the mutual trust, symbiosis and inter-dependence between legal entities by facilitating a universal system that enables the exchange of open standard based metrics. All of the spending of Metricsrouter will be allocated to this first mission.
It is our secondary mission to empower the next generation of citizens that will be involved with scoping, crafting and maintaining metrics. We will fund the education in data engineering, analytics engineering and analytics governance.
Throughout the educational programs, the students should be taught that they are rooted in a broader societal context and that they can take up their civic responsibility through entrepreneurship and by shaping their local communities in a positive way through decentralised self-governance. All the net profit of Metricsrouter will be allocated to this second mission.
The Service
Inside the Metricsrouter system each supplier can look up a legal entity and create a metric exchange contract. Inside this contract the supplier defines which metrics, over which period and for how long will be available to the consumer.
Whenever a metric supplier wants to share a specific set of metrics to multiple metric consumers, templates can be created that contain all desired metrics which can then be re-used.
The majority of metrics will be financial metrics, such as gross profit margins, debt to asset ratios, days sales outstanding, days payables outstanding. Apart from financial metrics, production metrics can be exchanged — and hybrid metrics combining operational and financial measures such as kilogram CO₂ emitted per revenue generated.
The Environment
In the field of analytics the first conversations have started on how to work towards an open standard. Metricsrouter is expected to become an active contributor to these conversations and start applying the standards that have solidified.
Since metrics are a combination of two measures, the potential combinations can easily run in the thousands. In parallel, each company will most likely apply a slightly different definition of a metric, or will use differing names or might use different calculations to come up with the end-metric.
Creating an open standard together with the global analytics community is key when we want to create a universal language of collaboration.
The Ecosystem
The Metricsrouter metric exchange empowers new forms of collaboration across society. In local communities, entrepreneurs can share a portion of their revenue with stewards, who monitor the financial health of businesses and foster collaboration.
Employee unions can become business performance stewards by helping workers become more effective contributors. By focusing on team-specific metrics and best-practice sharing, unions can boost productivity across companies.
Environmental impact can be tackled when industry leaders share data through Metricsrouter and commit to reducing harmful substances in products. Investors can play a role by promoting financial practices that stabilize the economy, such as faster payments to suppliers and maintaining rainy-day buffers.
The Engineering
The software will be open and will be developed by a broad set of contributors from across the world. This means that anyone can look at the architecture, security and consistency of the metrics exchange software.
Any person can contribute to the architecture by pinpointing potential issues in the code to the development team or by writing and improving pieces of code that can then be audited, adjusted and potentially deployed to the main production branch.
The development roadmap will be administered by the product owners and can be publicly accessed, which allows specialists and laymen to contribute in community chat-channels to debate the quality and relevance of items inside the development pipeline.
The Roadmap
Four tiers of implementation, from manual to autonomous.
Peer-to-Peer Spreadsheet
The first step allows all users to manually fill out their respective metrics in a spreadsheet according to a standard setup, which is then shared with external users. This setup is fully peer-to-peer and can be set up independently of the Metricsrouter service.
Semantic API Credentials
The MR2 setup allows metric suppliers to share their semantics API access credentials with specific metric consumers. These consumers can then sync with multiple metric suppliers by setting up an API connection with each of the legal entities they want to pull data from.
Metricsrouter API
In the MR3 setup, the metric consumers connect to the Metricsrouter API to pull the required metric data. The system will then check if the requested metric request is valid and the consumer has the correct rights to ask that specific question.
Direct Connections
Once all major and relevant connections have been made, the work will begin on MR4 which should allow metric consumers to directly connect to metric suppliers — similar to the currently existing Domain Name System used to visit websites.
The Security
The tool will be designed with security and privacy in mind. The tool will implement the secure-by-design tactics recommended by the CISA.
Starting with the first version, users will only be able to access the application by using multi-factor authentication. Multi-factor authentication requires a user to present two pieces of evidence to verify their identity.
Users will have full control over the metrics access — they decide who has access to their data by granting or revoking access. All actions of users are logged and will provide a time-stamped record of which data was accessed by whom.
The Revenues
MetricsRouter will finance its operations by charging a monthly subscription to each company that either provides or consumes metric records using MR3. Monthly contributions will be reduced when long-term profitability goals are reached and financial buffers are full.
Subscription
€50/month
For companies providing or consuming metric records using MR3.
Patron
€100/month
For organizations that want to actively support the mission of Metricsrouter.
Ambassador
€500/month
For organizations leading the way in open metrics and economic collaboration.
The Spending
The spending of the company will be allocated using a revenue based normation method. Every year the spending-center-leaders and company leaders will decide how to re-allocate the spending within the 90% of Net-Revenue norm, which leaves 10% for Earnings-before-Tax.
Employees will be given compensation that is conform compensation medians for roles similar to that of the people in their respective region.
The Balance Sheet
The company will pay all creditors within 10 working days, no loans will be extended, no debt will be incurred and redundant cash will not be invested in money market funds but be deposited on an interest bearing bank account.
Metricsrouter applies a 3 month operational buffer that should be sufficient to cover at least 3 months of operational expenditures. The interest income will be used to fund the operational expenditures of the company.
The Profits
The profits will be used to materialise the educational mission of the company. In accordance with the vision of the company, all cells in the body are citizens of one collective economy — therefore the profits will be distributed per country based on the numbers of inhabitants.
Local educators have the mandate to allocate the profits in accordance with the company's mission. Educators have the freedom to create their own principles, norms and priorities on how to allocate the profits.
Educators are encouraged to exchange best-practices, educational ideas and successes between countries.
The Governance
The company will be incorporated as a "Rentmeester Vennootschap" (Steward Owned Limited Liability Company) under Dutch law. In the statutory notes a clear mission will be formulated that properly scopes the goal and purpose of Metricsrouter.
The RV will be governed by 15 stewards — 5 internal and 10 external — with each a single vote.
10 External Steward Disciplines
The Contributors
The following citizens have contributed to the business plan with their domain expertise, critical mind and invigorating energy, in alphabetic order:
The Current State
The business plan is currently mature enough that proof of concepts of MR1 and MR2 are being built. We continue to refine the data model as we are deploying it across the registered companies.
In our dashboard all companies that use any of the MR levels can be found and all the metrics in our registry are shown that are currently used in any MR1 and MR2 level metrics exchanges. We regularly hold conversations with investors, stewards, consultants, entrepreneurs, philosophers, politicians and scholars to receive feedback and guidance.
Feel free to reach out to any of the contributors.
