embracing DIVERSITY
As human community, part of Earth’s ecosystem, we all participate in flow or resources and services. In this flow we have our wishes and offers, which I compare to inputs and outputs. We have them both as individuals as well as organizations, which I see as collectives of individuals.
In such network of peers, we match our wishes and offers creating flows. We can approach organizing such flow in many different ways. Nowadays it looks like majority of people tend to organize this flow around certain child of our collective imagination – money. Current information and communication technologies give us an opportunity of crating great diversity of systems. Having various coexisting alternatives, including variants with and without currencies, everyone can choose according to one’s own preference in which to participate an in which not.
To have foundation for developing such diversity of complementary systems, I see very practical to have common way of describing our wishes and offers. As well as dependencies among them – offer X depends on wish Y. We can use web technologies to help us with matching wishes and offers, visualize their interdependencies and predict how our contributions propagate and support desired outcomes.
To name just few general directions, systems developed by people can take:
- various currency variants
- timebanks
- direct and indirect barter
- commons and peer-production
- reputation systems
- gift culture
I would like to start inviting to our group people working with various existing sharing networks. Together we can work with real world cases which could than take advantage of standards we develop.
