Art of Harvesting

@Gary: Thanks for explaining. Very good to know more of the background thinking. Let me know if and when you manage to implement the discussion system. Would be very interested to see it in action. And yes, let's keep talking about how we are re-shaping the world!

Hello Gary,

Finally have time to read through your 20-pages spec! Great piece of work!

Copy pasting the main features description...

1. For individuals, a personal profile page giving basic information about themselves and summarising their contribution to the network, and which can be expanded to a personal website if desired. To enhance the sense of connection, people have ‘partners’ (who are people who do favours for each other) instead of ‘friends’ as in conventional social networking sites.

2. Each group/sub-group/region/etc. has their own site that feels individual and has a clear (somewhat customisable) identity, with content created easily by its members (using simple templates), yet is clearly connected with information to and from other groups at the same, larger and smaller scales.

3. Standard facilities are included such as events listings with calendars, news/blogs, resource centre for sharing files, pictures, and media with good indexing and search, map pages. All are individual to the group but with feeds and links to and from other groups as desired.

4. Organisational support such as group editable pages (wiki), member lists with roles, agreement lists, task trackers.

5. Enhanced communication facilities including a discussion system optimised to promote groups coming to agreement, with email notification and online archives, and also group chat, telephone conferencing and community telephone call centres.

6. Exchange/trading system designed to promote exchange on a basis of personal relationship, integrity, quality, need, and environmental soundness rather than simply for money. (But it does include exchange for money.) It includes an innovative moneyless exchange based around favours.

I find the "discussion system optimized to promote groups coming to agreement" and "exchange/trading system" particularly interesting.

On the "discussion system optimized to promote groups coming to agreement"

Can you provide some background on why you wanted to have these features in the discussion system? (page 11 of PDF)

3. In addition, the editor should have buttons for three types of special message: ‘summary’, ‘poll’, ‘sensitive’, intended to promote convergent conversations, where people are encouraged to come to agreement.

4. A ‘summary’ message, is an ordinary message, indicated in some fashion, such as a different coloured border. It’s use (purely social, no attempt to enforce it through software controls) is to summarise recent messages. Thus users wishing to get an overall sense of the thread can scroll through, looking for the summaries. At the head of a thread should be a ‘show summaries’ button, changing to ‘show all’ when pressed. When pressed, all messages that aren’t summaries should be greyed out to make summaries stand out clearly.

5. A ‘sensitive’ message is meant to used in situations where there is an actual or possible conflict between users. It is an ordinary editable message with three fields defined headed, respectively: ‘Your view as I understand it’, ‘Where I agree’, ‘Where I disagree’.

I particularly love the idea of a 'summary' message and the ability to differentiate and highlight such message. Could be very useful for newcomers to a long thread to quickly grasp the flow of the conversation and then post a reply without missing too much.

The 'sensitive' message is also pretty interesting. Is there a working model of discussion system implementing this kind of message type and how it worked out? Or would this be something original and untested?

How about the 'poll' message? Found no explanation on that on the draft spec.

On the exchange/trading system

Have you managed to write that appendix?

"The major innovation of the exchange is that it sets up a system of money-less exchange based around ‘favours’, which, unlike a currency, are not measured or denominated. This is a simpler alternative to complementary/community/local currencies that are denominated in hours or arbitrary units. Favours are acknowledged with feedback and recorded so that people’s contributions to each other, to a group or organisation or to the community can be seen and appreciated. [Appendix to be written fully explaining and justifying this.]"

Sounds like a good online representation and facilitation of an onlife gift economy within a community. Will it be extendable to larger scales (city, regional, national, international)?

One other question: Would you only have Partner Network? or would you also have Friends Network?

I think you should still have both, with the Partner Network being a subset of the Friends Network. It is still important to just facilitate connection-making between people who've known each other (without any favours exchanged), even if the intention is to then make it easy for them to exchange favors.

Got any example of a working model of such Partner Network?

Btw, we explored quite extensively how a feedback/rating system could look like in WiserEarth. Perhaps this can be useful for your work: Recognize Users contributions / review content (posted in WiserEarth Suggestions group quite a while back). Also, would something like Open Money fit with your spec? I know someone in WiserEarth (SheriHerndon) who is part of a network developing this concept and the software.

Thanks for posting this. Good learning for WiserEarth too actually.

In solidarity,

Bowo

Fair points, although there are benefits as well as risks to having control of a Transition hub. It seems likely that some things are suitable to have at a 'core' and some that could be aggregated... What needs to be a core service (project information and reporting? website hosting? aggregation of all existing activities?)?

Found this from your comment particularly interesting:

"...start building networks to organizations that have been doing this work long before TT was around."

Good point - what platforms are hosting these organisations then?