[Matthew Slater]

Hello Juho,
Your new Sharetribe 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 including my blog, Adventures in mutual credit

Interview on Corbett Report Radio

Brief bio and articles on shareable.net

Community Forge

[Juho Makkonen]

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

[Albert Cañigueral]

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]

Excerpts from Juho Makkonen's message of 2012-08-09 06:54:31 +0000:

> 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.

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 ☮

[Juho Makkonen]

Pavlik, I'm really looking forward to meeting you next month, I really want to learn more about how you manage without any money. :) I'm definitely trying to cope with as little money as I can (ok, actually I'm really lazy, I know I could and should do a lot better than I do on that front - the truth is i have a pretty normal western lifestyle), but I always notice it's not so easy, when I start to think about it. Lots of questions. What happens if you get sick and need surgery or some other expensive treatment? What if you have parents, friends, a significant other or kids that don't want to live without money, doesn't that exclude you from lots of activities?

I have to say that I think money is really convenient. :) I don't necessarily mean the money we currently have, but just the concept of currency in general. It would be really difficult if we'd always need to swap goods and services directly (or rely on indirect reciprocity) since many matters are so complicated. I'm not sure our current economic system is the best one, but I'm pretty sure we will - and should - always rely on a currency of some sort. It simply makes people's lives so much easier, that's why it was invented at some point. But I'm happy to hear counter-arguments on this. :)

Cheers,

Juho

[Paul Mackay]

Hi,

Having just finished reading it, I'd recommend Mark Boyle's The Moneyless Man. I'm not necessarily advocating one way or the other but it was a fascinating read, some great insights to the benefits and challenges of life without money.

cheers

paul

[Juho Makkonen]

Hey,

Yeah Pavlik mentioned the book too, I definitely want to read it. However, based on quick googling it seems that I need to pay money to read it, which I find a bit weird. :D Do you guys know if it's available as a free download somewhere?

Cheers,

Juho

[Paul Mackay]

I dont know of a free download, the ebook is a bit cheaper. However at the end of the book Mark talks about what he decides to do next. His choice is to produce the book and invest the money into a trust to create a freeconomic community (which is currently being developed at a yet-to-be-named location in Devon). So the profits are going towards that. He mentions a few times the tussle between his ideal of no money and the reality of the world we are in, and the choice to use money strategically to move towards a better situation. Similarly how we should be using oil to build a more renewable energy grid, etc. I guess this is one of those examples :)

paul

[Hans Schoenburg]

I can't help myself but chime in here. Having originally started by espousing the evils of money, I've since tried to keep my mouth shut on the topic for fear of turning people off to what I really want to tell them: that we can use the web to build a better system!

Heidemarie Schwermer's story is quite powerful. She just starred in a documentary called Living Without Money that is definitely worth watching.

http://livingwithoutmoney.org/

For reasons why money might not be the optimal economic system, I would recommend http://www.themoneyfix.org/ for a very straightforward description of how the system pits all against all in an unwinnable zero-sum game. This doc also has a great interview with Bernard Lieater, a former central-banker and founder of the euro. Fractional reserve banking, interest rates and the incompatibility of the profit motive with ecological harmony are all concepts worth looking into as well. 

David Graeber's Debt: The First Five Thousand Years is an amazing anthropological history of economy. (I attached a short introductory essay by him)

It is an honor to be on a panlist with people such as yourselves. 

-h

--
www.GiftFlow.org

[Paul Mackay]

Just noticed this post today (rather timely):

http://www.justfortheloveofit.org/blog-6655~the-moneyless-manifesto-%28out-in-nov-2012%29

So if you wait a bit looks like Mark's next book will be free :)

[elf Pavlik]

Excerpts from Juho Makkonen's message of 2012-08-14 08:38:53 +0000:

> Hey,
>
> Yeah Pavlik mentioned the book too, I definitely want to read it. However,
> based on quick googling it seems that I need to pay money to read it, which
> I find a bit weird. :D Do you guys know if it's available as a free
> download somewhere?
>
> Cheers,
> Juho

not the most pleasing usability of website but maybe with little luck ;)
http://www.bookcrossing.com/searchbooks?title=moneyless%20man#preResult

also posts with Mark's struggle 'to sell or not to sell':
http://www.justfortheloveofit.org/blog-1371~my-impending-dilemma
http://www.justfortheloveofit.org/blog-1736~my-decision

[Juho Makkonen]

Mark Boyle in Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2009/oct/28/live-without-money