Well, market fundamentalism aside, we've already made progress on the core question just by characterizing it: we need information about relative commodity scarcities and people's desires to be transmitted and collated efficiently, so that commodities can be produced to maximally meet human needs with minimum wastage.

Now we just need to find an expert in information economics and start asking them good questions!

Also, I'm not exactly a supporter of central planning, but it is worth noting, against conventional "market fundamentalism", that firms make fairly centralized and definite plans internally. So it seems that where information is scarce and radically incomplete, the stochasticity of markets helps achieve good outcomes in the same way that we might do empirical experiments in science rather than prove theorems. Likewise, where information is abundant, well-understood, and fairly complete (and where goals can be specified clearly -- extremely important!) - and where only success will be rewarded rather than failure! - the kind of planning done by firms and governments works well.