Re: Digest for api-for-sharing@googlegroups.com - 4 Messages in 1 Topic

[Matthew Slater]

Thanks Juho,
It's good to know that your are building a sharing business consistent with the sharing values!
In my work I'm not able to anticipate the next gen social networking tools because I have so much on my plate supporting existing work, and because we are far from establishing a leading platform in that field. I'll be continuing down the drupal road for the foreseeable.
I've written to Dropis introducing myself.
Matthew

On 10 August 2012 00:09, <api-for...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

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Matthew Slater <mats...@gmail.com> Aug 09 12:36AM +0200  

Hello Juho,
Your new Sharetribe<http://www.shareable.net/blog/using-tribes-to-enable-sharing-within-offline-networks>looks
nice, though I have some questions.
 
- Might tribal boundaries be unnecessarily restrictive for people who
want to share more widely?
- Is it wise, when building a community, to focus on just one activity,
namely sharing?
- Are you making communities dependent on your server and your roadmap,
and hence less resilient?
 
My work in Drupal adresses all of these questions.
 
I'm still hoping someone will build a web API for sharing as you talked
about in your original article on shareable.net
I'm making a lot of progress with accounting and LETS and Time Banks and
Transition towns, and I have even built an API for paying between different
tribes; so the need for a global marketplace, searchable by location and
keyword, is growing.
Today, the largest community currency system in the world (www.ces.org.za)
and the most popular community accounting solution (that's me with
http://drupal.org/project/mutual_credit), agreed to aim for this same goal,
except neither has the skills to do it, let alone the time!
Matthew
 
--
Find out more about my work in local money systems
My personal web site <http://matslats.net> including my blog, Adventures in
mutual credit <http://matslats.net/complementary_currencies>
Interview on Corbett Report
Radio<http://www.corbettreport.com/corbett-report-radio-057-solving-the-money-problem-with-matthew-slater/>
Brief bio and articles on
shareable.net<http://shareable.net/users/matthew-slater>
Community Forge
<http://communityforge.net>


 

Juho Makkonen <juho.m...@gmail.com> Aug 08 11:54PM -0700  

Hello Matthew,
 
Thanks a lot, very good questions! Let me explain my thoughts on the issues
you raised.
 
1) On our big vision, tribal boundaries are just a start to make things
easier. Sharing is not yet mainstream, and for most people it's not that
easy to start. By starting from trusted tribes, we want to make it easier
for those people to start sharing. However, in the future I see Sharetribe
as more like a Google Plus style solution, where you can easily switch
between different sharing contexts, from global to local.
 
2) Sharetribe is currently mainly targeted for communities that already
exist, but don't have a good tool for sharing, like associations,
university campuses, companies and so on. It is true that in some contexts
a wider approach - like the one Nextdoor.com is taking with neighborhoods -
might be better. But we know very well that we have limited resources so we
simply can't offer everything for everyone. That's why we have chosen the
current focus. In the future we might either broaden our own offering or
then simply work with other tools that provide other aspects of community
building.
 
3) We definitely don't want to force the communities to be dependent on our
server and our product roadmap. That's why Sharetribe is completely open
source, so any community can install it on their own server and modify it
as they will. They can even install our whole community network and start
hosting tribes for other communities, for free or for a fee. Our model is a
lot like the WordPress model, which I like a lot. In the future we also
want to enable federation, so that tribes hosted on different servers could
be connected, Diaspora style. That would be really cool. But it's a
technically challenging task, and again our time is unfortunately limited,
so we'll probably need help in building that. I hope our open source
approach will inspire some developers to look into it. We hope that if
someone develops code on top of their platform, they contribute it back so
other developers can benefit from it too, but we don't force them to do so.
 
We are currently building our own API with a goal of making it easy to take
your Sharetribe data with you to other services, if other services wish to
implement such a connection. We try to put as much effort as possible into
thinking how our API could be as generic as possible, so that similar calls
would suit to many other services too. And obviously the API will be open
source too, so others can check out how we built it when designing their
own APIs, if they wish. We've realized that we don't have the resources to
convince all the big guys to build such APIs, so we have to do it bottom up
- starting from ourselves.
 
I'm the first to admit that when we make decisions on where to concentrate
efforts, we do need to think about money too. We currently have three
people working on Sharetribe full time, and our living depends on it. If we
can't make money with it, we'll have to start doing other projects and we
will not have enough time to put as much effort into fullfilling the
Sharetribe vision as we liked. But the example of WordPress and many others
has shown that you can build great open tools and still make money. I'm
pretty sure that most organizations - Universities, Associations,
Companies, etc - don't want to dedicate anyone from their own staff to
maintain Sharetribe on their own servers, but they'd still love to have a
trusted local marketplace for their members. For those organizations we
provide paid services, like hosting, moderation and customization.
 
As a company, it's very tempting to create "lock-ins" of all kinds to keep
your customers. However, we are doing all in our power to fight those
temptations. I really hope we can create a company that is truly
transparent and really brings good things to the world without creating
walled gardens.
 
Let me know if you have any more questions, I'm happy to answer the best I
can.
 
Cheers,
Juho
 
On Thursday, August 9, 2012 1:36:01 AM UTC+3, matslats wrote:


 

"Albert Cañigueral" <aca...@gmail.com> Aug 09 05:36PM +0200  

Hi,
 
You should talk with http://www.dropis.com/ for an online exchange
system with a published API ... and I think they even plan to support
a mix of social currency and hardcore currency
 
---
HOW DROPIS WORKS
 
Alice uses a social eating website to share her dinners. Bob uses a
ridesharing website to share his trips.
 
Without Dropis:
Alice earns €15 for cooking a dinner. The next day Alice spends €15
for the train ride to her seaside place. In the meanwhile, Bob earns
€15 for giving a ride to a stranger. The next day Bob spends €15 at
the restaurant closest to his home.
 
With Dropis:
Alice earns €10 + D5 for cooking a dinner. She's challenged to think
about how to use those 5 dropis. Instead of taking the usual train,
this time she'll rideshare to her seaside place, for the first time in
her life. Bob earns €10 + D5 for giving a ride. He's challenged to
think about how to use those 5 dropis. Instead of eating at the usual
restaurant, this time he'll eat at a social dinner event in his town,
for the first time in his life.
 
HOW TO JOIN
We're now in stealth mode, and we're partnering with collaborative
economy startups who share our values and vision. We'll launch to the
public on September 27th, at the Techcrunch event in Rome, Italy. We
just closed API deals for the Italian market, and we're now looking
for European collaborative economy startups interested in joining the
Dropis network.
 
WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR
European collaborative economy startups (social eating, ridesharing,
hospitality, etc), where buyers can pay sellers with mainstream
currency (eg USD, Euro, etc). In order to keep things fair within the
network, we only accept one partner per market (eg only one Italian
social eating platform is in the network, not more), and we tend to
prefer partners who share our core values. This way, we expect to
build a "collaborative city" where the best collaborative economy
platforms help each other creating a powerful network effect. If you'd
like to be part of it, contact us immediately.
 
ABOUT US
After working for 10 years on local and complementary currencies in
Italy, we decided to mix our currency expertise with our tech skills,
and founded Dropis in 2012. We're currently based in Rome, Italy. We
launched a private beta, and you can ask for an invite at
www.dropis.com. We have a big long-term vision on how to create the
p2p and abundance-based economy our world needs right now. If you're
interested in knowing more about Dropis and abundance economics you
can watch this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV9AdZM8rEM or ask me.
--
 


 

elf Pavlik <perpetua...@wwelves.org> Aug 09 06:40PM  

Excerpts from Juho Makkonen's message of 2012-08-09 06:54:31 +0000:
> can't make money with it, we'll have to start doing other projects and we
> will not have enough time to put as much effort into fullfilling the
> Sharetribe vision as we liked.
 
ehem... i know that for many people it may sound bit *futuristic* and a thoughts can ramble in our heads... 'maybe one day in far, far future'... but i still will throw it in :D
 
once we roll out sharing & collaboration systems allowing us (people) to secure all goods & services which we still may get access to via money, i believe you will consider yourself your statement above as not valid any more!
 
i strongly encourage everyone who feels dependent on money while working on sharing & collaboration systems to 'dog feed' fruits of your own work as much as you can. here i wouldn't like anyone to feel pressured, or get in some longer discussion, but rather everyone oneself just reflect on possibility of: 'YES WE CAN!' and see how it feels :D
 
☮ elf pavlik ☮


 

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--

Find out more about my work in local money systems

My personal web site including my blog, Adventures in mutual credit

Interview on Corbett Report Radio

Brief bio and articles on shareable.net

Community Forge

[elf Pavlik]

Excerpts from Matthew Slater's message of 2012-08-10 00:30:20 +0000:

> Thanks Juho,
> It's good to know that your are building a sharing business consistent with
> the sharing values!
> In my work I'm not able to anticipate the next gen social networking tools
> because I have so much on my plate supporting existing work, and because we
> are far from establishing a leading platform in that field. I'll be
> continuing down the drupal road for the foreseeable.
> I've written to Dropis introducing myself.
> Matthew

Hey Matthew, have you seen Juho's TED talk? http://youtu.be/LBs5XkkC3u4

BTW i plan after visiting Helsinki go to Tallinn and meetup with folks from
http://communitytools.info/en (your fellow drupalistas ;) shame they don't have this video on their webpage any more: http://youtu.be/c4vR-MJZ3ac :(... we already stay in touch and pick up planning meeting in next weeks!
and http://www.bankofhappiness.org :D
possibly also with people who have originally started what have become: http://www.letsdoitworld.org
again friends from Community Tools offered help with connecting me with people from those two other projects \o/

I hope I can hitch a ferry over the see otherwise I would need to hitchhike >4000km to visit a city 100km away... no eastern path atm for someone with a #stateless altitude like mine :D

☮ elf Pavlik ☮

[Kaushal Desaih]

Hi,

How do I add my two team members to Nextgen API users googlegroups?

Thanks a lot!

Kaushal Desai

TriNet Medical

908-875-6892