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Mooch Me - some thoughts! And Suggestions to your Problems
Hi John I have been involved in quite a few alternative things. There are sites that have been giving away things - for example couchsurfing.com, hospitality.org and bewelcome.org - have all given away accommodation for free. Care and Share Wien is for people to share tips and also give away anything they no longer want or for others to get (like a furniture bank, but people have also offered massage etc.) SADLY Jerk Tech is turning these via commodification into the kind of economy that is money based instead of favor or friendship- solidarity based. FOR example Uber (turning sites like freewheelers.com) and Air BnB (so people do not offer rooms for free anymore) are 2 that have monetarized things that were there for free sharing. Having said that there are a bunch of sites where people have been looking at alternative currencies and economics. One is called Value For People
http://valueforpeople.co.uk/ and is run by John Rogers - he is a consultant that has worked on helping people to set up time banks (which is essentially what you are proposing - though you want to avoid the commodification aspect that stops people only doing it for money). I know John personally and ontop of a great first name :P he also is a very apporachable person. Another is Reconomy where Kevin Parcell is trying to build a global level time bank. http://reconomyglobaltimebank.net/ I can give you these guys´ contacts and more if you want? I have more thoughts, but to keep the post manageble I want to give some quick feedback on the points you ask about specifically: 1. this is a new idea, never (to my knowledge) tried, It has been tried on a local level - it is a form of cooperative, whereby everyone agrees the value of a task. Also some ecovillages do this with rewards (kind of like stars) for nice things done - but without obligation. BUT for sure I never came accross this at a successful international level. PERHAPS on sharewiki http://sharewiki.org/en/Main_Page (but it is a hard site to navigate) but there are related ideas, such as Time Banking, and local currencies. YES However, none of those have focussed on the hobbies people are good at, that they love doing, but that they don't want to do professionally. True - but there has been something like this with the Arts and Crafts movement (1880s England) and nowadays Maker Fayres These are the things that, for many people, give life meaning. When I explain MoochMe to non-moochers, they invariably (mis)interpret as something that's already been done. How can I explain this idea quicker and more clearly? I would relate it to the Living Library concept - in the Living Libraries you "borrow a person" who is a book so for example I can borrow a rock star, a wheelchair user or a small girl - and then I can "read" the book as in ask questions of them and they answer them. There is no set time or requirements. SO I would say that Moochme is "Borrowing a friend" in that way so they are PRACTICAL MANUAL or a service rather than a product - so your service might be portrait photography or pottery - this is distinct from you giving away pictures or pottery or furniture you made. THOSE aspects woudl have a cost just like mooching a book also costs in postage, book purchase cost, packaging (these are externalized in our Bookmooch market) and we trade only on book to book basis. 2 how should the exchange currency work? I dislike the time banking concept of "1 hour spent is 1 hour earned" because, like communism, it doesn't reward improving your efficiency, your quality, and doesn't reward years of effort to get to this point. At the same time, if everyone prices their work with variable "mooch points" this idea could very quickly feel like a marketplace, more like etsy, than a non-professional exchange. Another possibility is for MoochMe to operate without a currency: reputation is all that matters. Reputation is a hard thing to measure as it is very variable, perhaps my friends like me so they say my crappy art paintings are good, but professional artists won`t let me exhibit with their artistically superior works? It affects their standing to be mixed in with worse stuff - I cannot just go on peer review. I like the simple idea of different levels - so hobbyist (1): experienced (2): master craftsman (3) - and that each service is rated by the recipient and the offerer. It could be more complicated in that you have to give away some 1 pointers before you can offer 3 pointers (so the community is rating you with a reputation). As it is a service it is not based on a value time-wise nor cost-wise. So it does not become a market place. AGAIN it works on trust - the key thing is how can you see someone´s quality of work? And what if you are not happy? I think that Bookmoochers understand some trades do not go well with books, but here I am not so sure. 3. Many people lack the self-confidence That can be improved by a standard form to help people and support from the community. or don't want to make the effort to very clearly describe what they can do. If they don´t want to make the effort then they are not reliable. AGAIN a simple way of doing this helps - that can grow with some thought on categories. I would say to keep it simple with only a few to start with so Language services, visual arts, cooking - 10 top categories to begin with. And then allow new ones to develop organically when there is a community to support them. Subcategories can be there for people to describe - for example - I come and perform music: could be all kinds of music. Fiverr.com does a great job of getting around that problem. I like and use Fiverr, but to me that site feels like exploitation, and Fiverr actively discourages the social dimension to the work. Fiverr seems to be focused on a business model of the world. Some of us want to help people and share our time. I think that we can build the social dimension and perhaps we can do that with some others like Michel Bauwens of the P2P Society - who I also know. I think we can support the social dimension, but this might work with MoochMe meetups? I would want to support people to have useful hobbies - and not have 90% of people making Xmass cards - that they like doing, yet there is no real market / demand for. So this suggests bigger ideas, such as we see with Gamification that the Kahn Academy does where people learn skills for badges. I am personally not a big fan of that - but it does work and I would like to improve my repertoir - for example I can write poetry in French and English, but have written very little in Latin or Finnish and none in German, so to understand some of those forms could be good. And at the same time I cannot play guitar - so I am happy to share tips in creative writing for help in playing music - THIS kind of social experience and dimension can be encouraged. IT IS SLIGHTLY different as there is an emergent property of building a community and NOT just swapping something. I did a similar project called Collective Kitchens - it worked very simply like this: A different ethnic food would be decided upon, someone would be Chef de Cuisine and anyone who wanted could take part. The Chef would order the food, share tips and the others would cook, shop and wash-up. Everyone paid the same and everyone got to eat good food and we socialized. As we were a very international group we had French, Italian, English, Swedish, Finnish, Indian and even Australian food cooked on different times. Poor cooks got better, good cooks learnt new techniques, people ate cheaper, less food was used etc. Everyone had a social circle once a week - and no pressure to do what they could not - anyone can carry food from the store or clean a table. I hope these few thoughts help m
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