It strikes me that there need to be two types of RSS feeds (likely canned):
- A public feed that provides a limited set of information about the person’s help requests
- A private feed that provides information on the requests for assistance of people in your network and responses to your requests for assistance. The private feed would have a GUID in the path that only the user would be able to see.
Reputation is a key aspect of kularing. I am not sure if people should rate each encounter (ala ebay) or just rate the reliability of each person. I am leaning toward the later. The options would be: High, Medium, Low, Unreliable. Everyone would start at Low and could be upgraded. Responses to help requests would be sorted by a person’s reliability. People who are Unreliable would not even appear to the person seeking help. However, no person would be able to see how each user has ranked the reliability of their contacts. Except for the person who selected the rankings.
Probably won’t have “friends”, just contacts. A helper’s reliability would be shown to all. There would be two reliability numbers. One is based on the average reliability rating given by the helper’s contacts. The other is based on the average reliability rating given by the helpee’s contacts who are shared by the helpee and helper. Would need to be a large enough group of people so individual rankings cannot be discerned.
Eli suggested that I take a look at www.community-exchange.org and possibly use its system as the basis of kularing. community-exchange.org implies exchanging products and services and looks similar to LETS systems like Ithaca Hours. Kularing shouldn’t work that way.
In kularing, there is no exchange rate between an hour of effort and the local currency. There is no exchange at all.
People give their time without expectation that they will get something directly. Members will gain status based on the gifts of their time, the quality of their efforts and how much the receivers appreciates her/his gifts.
Before I proceed, let me define two terms: need and offer. A need is a task that a member, the receiver, needs done whether she participates in the need or not. Another member, the giver, makes an offer to fulfill another member’s need. The receiver chooses from among the givers as they desire.
The system works by letting each person or group list their needs, and then the receiver can review and agree to offers by givers.
Status can then be used to filter what is presented such that a person with higher status will be listed earlier in a search of needs or offers. So if you give your time a lot and make a quality effort, your resulting higher status will mean that your needs will be more likely to be seen by others and that you should get better offers. Likewise, you the higher your status, the more likely your offers will be selected.
Listing your friends in the system would help with issues of trust since you could confine yourself to only offers from your friends and through friend of a friend features you could ask how reliable a particular giver is.
Hmmm… offers sounds too much like an exchange system. Need to rethink using that word.
Filed under: software platform | Tags: Kula Ring Gift economy time software platform
After much searching for a name (well, really searching for a domain name that that was possible, but not taken), I settled on kularing. A Kula Ring is a type of gift economy practiced in the Trobriand Islands. This site is the start of my attempt to create a software platform that will allow friends to create their own virtual Kula Ring to exchange gifts of their time.
I have lots of ideas for how to build kularing, but the key thing is to start implementing them. First up, writing my ideas down and working out what works. I guess that is the first gift I get to create.
