Project: How to Marry the Needs and Offers

@Simon Grant I've been intending to contact you for some time. We're overdue for a catch-up. There have been a number of relevant developments since we last spoke, and I'd appreciate your perspective on these.

@John Waters Thanks for the mention @John Waters ! Indeed we had good conversations around these points, would be good to revisit sometime. I'm inviting people to come together on this, so that we can build systems that enable people to come together on … whatever 🙏

Unfortunately, I haven't had time to pay attention to what's going on here because I've had to keep my focus on the strait and straight (currently developing a VSM-isomorphic skeleton for collaboration and exchange at scale). That's still a work in progress, but can't hope to achieve fruition without an ecosystem of components and modules to add flesh to its skeleton.

The issue of matching resources (offers) to needs (requests) is a perennial problem. I'm sure the few notes I'm about to dump here will have been considered (possibly in some depth) by others here but I don't have time to follow and assimilate the various threads. I just want to drop in a few very brief points about what I consider important. I apologize to anyone whose points I may be duplicating or repeating.

(1) With regards to offers and wants, provision should be made to accommodate different "properties". For example:

- Urgency of a want/need - is it crucial at this time? Are other things immediately dependent upon it?

- Duration of an offer - is this continuous, continual, recurring or once only? When will the offer expire (if ever)?

- Window of need - after how long a period will the need become irrelevant?

- Recurrence, cadence, regularity - is this a regular need? If so, what pattern does it follow?

- Is this something that might most easily be met if anonymity can be ensured (both ways)? (This question relates to matters that Simon Grant and I were discussing two or three years ago in the context of knowledge-sharing, and it still crops up regularly in many contexts.)

- Scale - is this a need that might reasonably be met at a very local level? Is this something that might require collaboration at a larger scale?

- Conditionality of an offer - e.g. ethical constraints/conditions imposed, geographical constraints, etc.

There will be more variations to accommodate, but extrapolation is unlikely to present much of a challenge.

I have considered writing some very simple code to do the above, but it's not my highest priority right now. I'd rather someone else wrote something in the shorter term, but I'd be very happy to have a conversation about it.

(2) Whatever the solution(s) developed, it would be unnecessarily limiting to place a dependency on any particular platform. Flexibility and convenience are the most important things. Although a variety of protocols facilitate connectivity and utility to varying extents, especially when it comes to automated extraction and enrichment of information, sometimes it may be more than sufficient to simply embed a very simple user interface within an iFrame. There's no need for a universal solution. Anything would be better than nothing, and the fewer the complications in any component, the fewer the restrictions on its development and eventual replacement.

Nice one @Oli SB ! Two sides to this that I'd like to take forward, with what I've settled now on calling RegenCHOICE: (1) The fact that in some situations people prefer not be public about their offers or wants, and only want them to be seen by specific others; (2) going beyond simple tags to narrow down things, and opening up to a whole range of supplementary questions to focus in much more precisely and quickly on what is wanted or offered.

Just needed to add: all this work is excellent and to be admired for all it does and enables! I'm just looking forward, and that doesn't detract in any way from the great work still being done by the Murm team :-)

Hi @asimong , I looked at your writing on RegenCHOICE and it definitely resonates! Right now we are focused on getting something built which is truly useful for us, and then we will be networking and hopefully working with others like potentially your project and maybe Murmurations and the offers and needs plugin!

@Jennifer Damashek Hi Jennifer, good to read about your work! My sense is that we are working on complementary approaches to the three problems which you outlined — and I completely agree with the importance of these issues. If you're interested in my own insights into ways to address these issues, please get in touch. I have always believed that collectively we can do better than any one of us alone, or any small group alone for that matter. My stuff you can find by searching for RegenCHOICE.

Hi Oli,

Thank you for sharing your Wordpress plugin for Offers and Needs. I can't believe it has been 2.5 years since this thread was started!

In that time, I've been working on a project with a few other people to create communities of care, which are small groups of people who get to know each other very well and commit to long-term relationships of mutual support.

Three of us in our first community of care, which we call the Seed COC, were members of the Post Growth Institute ( https://postgrowth.org/ ) (PGI). The PGI developed a process for sharing Offers and Needs, called the Offers and Needs Market. We experienced shortcomings in this way of approaching sharing offers and needs. Here are a few main problems:

• It takes a lot of energy to contact other people and follow up on offers and needs
• It's a surface-level interaction, rather than being in the context of caring for each other and having a deep relationship
• Many people aren't interested in sharing their offers and needs publicly, including in small groups where they don't know people well

In the past few years, our Seed COC has been successful in developing deep relationships, even though we have yet to meet in person. Our lives have been profoundly changed in multiple ways. I have started another, separate, community of care with people I do know personally, which is dedicated to land stewardship. I'm exploring the formation of two additional COC.

Our Seed COC has also taken on a project my husband, Robert, and I have thought about for decades, and now with Gen AI it's possible to start building. It is basically a protocol for knowledge and resource sharing in the context of mutual care. It's a huge long-term project. Robert is an Enterprise and Solutions Architect.

We've finally gotten to a point where we know where to start. Robert and I will soon be spending three months in person with our Seed COC members working on getting a prototype that will be useful for our small group. We will be using an open source graph database (Neo4J) to create a knowledge vault linked to a large language model. We are committed to applying open protocols throughout our solution.

Each member will have their own knowledge vault, and we will have a shared knowledge vault. This will allow us to easily share and link our networks, resources, knowledge, insights, basically anything that can be stored digitally. This includes our offers and needs. Our goal is to center care for each other and support each other in all areas of our lives.

If we are successful, the next step would be to build knowledge vaults for other small communities like ours. Then we would link them, and communities of mutual care would be able to support each other.

To get an idea of what the knowledge vaults will be like, you can watch this video ( https://www.youtube.com/live/Q7E97TSmGyI?si=t6ty2HVb_OKDY2OO ) by Mike Morley, who did exactly what we want to do, except he did it for himself and another individual. (FYI we don't know Mike Morley or have any connection with him.)

If you've read this far and you're interested in what we are doing, please let me know! My email address is [email protected].

We need to find at least one developer who is skilled with graph databases like Neo4J.

Best wishes,
Jennifer

Hi All,

It was almost 2.5 years ago that Ivana started this thread, which is one of the most read and commented on threads on here... presumably because a lot of us agree that better sharing of Offers and Wants is a key stepping stone towards a better economy. But 2.5 years on, not much has progressed in terms of sharing... and one reason for that might be 'the platform problem'. It's obvious really, in a world of 8 billion people, with millions of platforms vying for our attention, we're never going to all agree to use the same platform. But what if we could agree to use the same protocol...?

In the same way that http enables us to all use different devices and browsers to access the web, a protocol for sharing Offers & Wants would enable anyone, anywhere, on any platform to post their Offers on their preferred platform and anyone else, using any other platform, to find their Offers and get in touch.

As we know, there are loads of simple Offers and Wants systems, and marketplaces out there, but small markets rarely take off because they lack the breadth of Offers to meet peoples needs...

But what if all the little markets were linked, and could expand the number of Offers they display, by leveraging an open protocol for Offers and Wants? Perhaps this collaborative way of working could deliver the kind of scale and diversity required to meet peoples needs...?

Well, that's the theory we've been working on at Murmurations... and we've now got a simple WordPress Plugins working for Offers and Wants, meaning that anyone with a WordPress can publish their Offers using an open protocol, which enables anyone else with a WordPress to find and display those Offers from any location, and/or containing certain tags... we've also got a standalone Offers & Wants generator and an API working too, so you don't have to use WordPress to use the protocol. So, now we have the ability to work collaboratively across networks - and we don't all need to use the same platform to share our Offers & Wants!

We made a little video demonstrating how the Plugins make it easy to publish Offers & Wants and for curators to manage maps and Directories of Offers and Wants... and we'd love to know what you think about this?

Perhaps, if there is any interest, we could explore how to encourage further adoption in order to achieve the kind of critical mass required to get this to fly...

@Simon Grant Working together on projects is a nice way to get to know people. (But I remember the emails we exchanged about a different way of meeting people - the idea that still resonates with you.. I hope you find a way forward with it and I hope it brings you lots of fun.)

@Ivana for volunteering perhaps... I can't see anything at all to find other people of interest