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Open Economy v3.1b (HTML)
Tech infrastructure for grassroots economy
This is an extension, and more focused redo, of this project description.
General agreement: we’re at a critical moment when lots of people are looking for ways to directly support each other, rather than depending on an evermore tenuous dominant financial infrastructure. Whatever the tools that are used – local currencies, barter networks, neighborhood asset mapping, etc. – the opportunity and the challenge is for information to flow in ways that allow better-informed, values-based economic decision-making among and between person-to-person trust networks. As this grows and can incrementally replace external $$ flows, economic activity can remain robust, while becoming more democratic, even as global finance collapses.
Many of the key tools for this kind of (economic) information sharing already exist. After all, what is an economy? A system for matching needs and resources, for coordinating production, distribution, consumption, and recycling. So “economic” information is that which helps individuals and groups choose to do work and do it well, choose to use goods and services and use them well.
- Classifieds: Craigslist is the great example, but there’s many more of course. Wanteds, for sales, jobs listings, etc. In our knowledge economy, these tend to become more and more fine-grained.
- Productivity tools: coordinating “to do” lists, projects, etc., once they’ve been chosen.
- Events: from meetings to classes, networking sessions to parties, these are ways that people connect face to face and stuff happens.
- News: discussion of what’s happening as the basis for wise action.
It’s not that there’s a lack of information, really. It’s that there’s too much of it to make head or tail of, which diminishes the utility of using it. Google pageranks determine who we buy stuff from — or our daughter’s friend’s mother’s unsolicited advice. But probably neither are who I really trust to find goods and services (and jobs) that match my values. That’s the role of perhaps the most important aspect of a new economy: ratings, reviews, reputations, trust.
- Ratings & reviews: Consumer Reports or the like for movies, food, products, etc.
- Reputations and trust: ratings for people and groups!
- Identity: how you can know (pretty confidently) that “X” is X.
Of course, it makes an enormous difference who rates what. Even for sites that have “the users” rate everything and provide an average, there’s still (potential or actual) editorial control, and who knows if all those “average” film watchers on IMDb really get 80’s experimental cinema like I do?
This, then, is the power of allowing trust to apply to raters themselves. In other words, I trust this site, or this reviewer on this site, more than I trust that other service. This trust can be explicit (I click on my trust level) or implicit (“users who liked X also liked Y”). But, of course, I might trust my science prof to choose good telescopes, but that doesn’t mean I trust her to choose the most labor-friendly printshop in the area. That’s why we need:
- Tags: organized into folksonomies and/or hierarchies, some standardized and some made up on the spot.
- Geographical data: how local is this person/place/thing? What’s close to it?
This finally allows all our data to be tuned with more or less detail. Ratings can be applied specifically: I trust Juanita 85% on “work quality”, only 35% on “work speed”, but 95% on “intelligence”. Task requests, offerings, events, etc. can be searched by category. Finally, our computers can filter our data to make it sensible and useful to us.
In some form or another, these all exist.
In short: adequate user adoption, and fluid integration of the various kinds of information.
There exist wide varieties of social networking sites, project management systems, Craigslists, auctions, currency exchanges, reputation systems, organizational records (eg. meeting minutes), etc. Each has pros and cons, and there are advantages to the multiplicity of data pools (ie. “buckets”). So…
Distribution of data is more robust; different interfaces match different user profiles; multiple organizational/development approaches encourage innovation on goals, strategies, and practices. And, it’s a fact of life: most developers resist centralization.
At the same time, many of the existing systems seek to become the sole or predominant data pool. Why? Besides commercial reasons, having a single bucket makes a lot of sense…
Just one place to collectively point people to, increasing adoption; people hate having to go to multiple sites to get key information, increasing adoption; a single data pool makes integrating different kinds of information more useful; especially with something like an economy, the more people use it the more useful it becomes.
Aggregation is the way to gather all that economic information from many actual buckets into a single virtual bucket for each user. This requires that each participating data pool make its information available to the aggregator in a way that keeps structure intact. This allows multiple aggregation implementations: these could be thick clients like Flock extensions or Chandler 2.0, or web clients built into BrightNeighbor or integrated into Drupal, etc.
For each new data pool, the user would simply need to create an account and click on the feed once: from then on, all relevant data would show up in the aggregator, to be acted upon through the parent site when selected. More importantly, this economic data can be filtered and prioritized according to user-defined client-side preferences. Thus adding new buckets will not overwhelm the user with information, but simply improve the quality and breadth of what’s available. So it is in the user’s interest to add additional sites, it’s easy to do so, the user doesn’t have to learn new interfaces to know what’s available, and so user adoption can increase rapidly.
For this to function effectively, we need open standards for the data to be aggregated. One good approach is to use what’s already there: RSS and Atom for the feed itself; Microformats for most of the data structure.
Microformats are standard XHTML marked up with CSS to present human-readable text that also carries “semantic” information about the data.
- Events: hCalendar already used broadly, allows events posted on websites to be automatically imported in calendars.
- Identity: hCard uses the vcard format to represent people and organizations.
- Tags: RelTag provides very simple inline technique for tagging anything else. (See also hashtags below.)
- Reviews/ratings: hReview allows a simple but flexible system for giving numerical ratings of items, people, events. Includes support for separately rated tags.
- Listings (Wanteds/Offers): hListing in proposal form, creates a standard for all kinds of offering or requests.
- And lots more: currency, product, adr[ress], geo[graphical location], meeting minutes, etc.
(One additional convention that we might start aggregating in the beginning, are hashtags, which began on Twitter and are migrating elsewhere. This could complement the microformat tags above.)
The key next step is to get together a basic team to develop a simple proof-of-concept open source aggregator, perhaps working off Calagator. Obviously, down the road, a smooth UI with easily tunable access to the different kinds of data (and filtering) is going to be key. But for now, getting something basic in play is prime.
At the same time, we start a campaign (inside and outside the tech community) to urge existing data pools to make their information available in relevant microformats. For sites that already have RSS feeds, this shouldn’t be too hard: perhaps some technical handholding on the specs will be appropriate.