PPP experiment
From PPP
eng
What social patterns evolve, when physical goods get supported by a convinient infrastructure making them as easy publicly view- and searchable as we get used to handle virtual goods ?
One of the main problems evolving towards a peer economy is the problem of transitivity: using money you can "cooperate" with strangers, having a common protocoll for transaction.
PPP is a proposal for a research project to discover protocolls, which could make transactions between strangers as easy as using money.
Contents |
Goals
- make it easy to publish physical goods to the web
- make it easy to find physical goods
- make it easy to use physical goods as commons not knowing each other (licensing)
- support the growth of community through co-using things
We can not offer solutions to this questions, but maybe we can tell stories, to nourish your imagination.
Publish
You once registered in a social site (like http://ppid.it). You created a personal profile. You are supported with ppid-stickers.
If you want to publish a physical good, you take your mobile phone, start the ppp-app, make a picture of the ean barcode of the good, make a picture of one of the ppid-stickers and you are done.
This could get even easier, if RFID gets commonly used.
Find
You are already used to find physical goods on the internet. Anybody wanting to sell something tries to be easily found. But he does not support his competitor to be eaqually easilly found. With PPP goods this is different: there is no competition, so the cooperative effort of individuals to publish and make findable will be free of this artificial scarcity.
CoUse
The owner of a property and the user agree to a licence agreement, which can be conveniently combined of several PPP-Modules. We are already used to this: the Creative-Commons Licenses are made like this.
Possible interesting Modules are:
- Transitivity: a user can co-license the usage to a next user, diminishing the work to handle the good (it does not have to be brought back to the owner). This allows for example physical media like DVDs, CDs and Books to travel freely.
- Keep It In Order: the user agrees to return the good in good order, beeing responsible for a repair, if he damages it. To ensure this, the user may be asked to join a repair assurance: an association of people, managing a community fund, to pay for repairs.
This kind of sharing of physical goods has already started: Networks like Hospitality-Club or Couchsurfing share usage of their private rooms, to allow money-less accomodation around the planet.
Support Community
The usage of PPP-goods is traceable. Goods create pathes of usage, which like minded people can follow, to start common endeavours.
If someone in your neighborhood is using similar tools as you do, she or he is a interresting person to talk to, if you have questions or ideas.
This might be one of the driving forces behind the success of LibraryThing: to get to know people with similar or interesting minds.
how to go on
PPP is beeing created with the confidence, that evolution into supportive structures und culture has to take place in small steps, which individuals can decide to do individually, not depending on bigger structures to change.
If you want to join the free software moovement, you just do it, individually, by writing free software, publishing your already written software with a free license, or support one of the many projects.
