At some point I was searching for an open source car pooling service. I realized there weren’t any so I started developing one on my free weekends.
While I haven’t made much progress so far, I have been observing how much as a society we have been relying on route planning software. Also, I cannot overlook the effect of such services on the planet (see Amazon, Uber, and many more).
With all this as a context, I have been asking myself the following questions:
- What would be the impact on society (especially inequality) if there were open source alternatives to such services?
- What would a common core look like? (i.e. what is the WordPress equivalent for transportation/route planning, is OpenStreetMaps enough?)
- What domain specific knowledge would it require to build such a software? (while in university I researched about the travelling salesman problem, anything else?)
- What safety protocols would we need to develop when there is no corporation insuring users? (i.e. if I order something from Amazon and it’s dead on arrival, I get either a refund or a replacement shipped to me for free)
- What’s the proper terminology to describe what I am describing?
Feel free to add any questions of your own. I created this post because I am free this afternoon and I wondered what it would like to discuss this with strangers instead of pondering on my own.
Edit: My free afternoon was taken away by an incident I had to respond to, it’s now late o’clock here, but I will do my best to reply to all you magnificent people.
I’ve had this idea of a larger trading economy based on boardgamegeeks “math trades.” You could list an inventory of good used items you’d like to get rid of and then you can select other people’s items that you would like to receive in exchange. Then the trading software kicks in and tells you who to send your item to and you receive an item from someone else.
This works for boardgames on a smaller scale, but on a larger scale it lacks a trust system.
A website like ebay would be required to handle the amount of inventory and user rating system. Government id and a chargeback system for disputes would probably be required to help mitigate misrepresentations.
I honestly don’t think such a service could be free, but it could work well in other niches than just board games and it would be nice to be able to trade between niches like a car starter in exchange for a blender.
I think it could be federated as well, with different instances being ran for different types of things.
We could call it “freebay”
I suppose the site operator would charge a listing fee. This would prevent people from flooding the site with too many items or a bunch of fakes.