The Open Co-op : PlaNet

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PlaNet: The Open Co-op's dream communications system

Components of PlaNet

An easy to use Geographical Information System (GIS) style interface

A friendship network based on trust and reputation.

Start pages for any individual, group or organisation that displays their chosen news, events and other feeds.

An online accounts and payment system featuring conventional and community currencies and a ‘time bank’ for community service. Users have the facility to rate and give feedback to product/service providers.

Guides to products and services, showing ratings and reviews (as in Alonovo) of both companies and products.

An online 'Skills Exchange’ to find work and workers, which acts as the employment hub of PlaNet. It offers a wide range of skills and offers payment in conventional or local currency, acting as a source of part time jobs and low-cost services for businesses. Ratings and reviews on peoples service maintain confidence, as on eBay.

Management software specificaly designed to provide stability and optimisation for all types of businesses and other organisations. Quality is maintained by feedback and peer inspection, not fear of loss of customers.

An online Swap Shop (like Freecycle) which lists items that members no longer want and are prepared to barter, some things are even given away and collected from Swap Shop by charity.This encourages the efficient circulation of children's clothes, books, videos, old TVs and all sorts of other products which used to be dumped in landfills. The Swap Shop employs a team to repair faulty and broken goods, It saves people money and helps them consume far fewer precious resources.

Other things we'd like to see included as part of PlaNet

Decision making tools
Organisational support for the Collaborative Groups
Planning and workflow (Project Management) tools
Sign-up sheets for rotas (allocation of tasks)
Discussion zones (e.g. IRC channels) for instant communication
Forums for online help and support.

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Created by: garyalex last modification: 10 Mar 07 [21:48:45] by qopi

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jethro_swan

Re: Software Design
by jethro_swan on 21 Aug 07 [21:25:56] (Score:0.62) Vote: 1 2 3 4 5

> What has allowed the Internet flourish so extensively is Open Source
> standards - not Open Source applications. I think that this point is very
> important here, because it could save us a lot of work in the long run.
> What I am suggesting is that we a set of Open Source protocols for
> communication between different local websites. This way an application
> such as PlaNet can collate the information from different local economies
> without constraining to use one particular software tool.

This points overlap considerably with some I was making (in particular earlier this year on the MRS-DEV and Cyfranogi mailing lists).

With regard to the complementary currency aspects in particular, there's a lot of potentially resuable code already developed - but mostly by individuals or very small, time-constrained teams - so progress is slow, There's some PHP, some Java and some Perl. There even some C. A lot of skill and enthusiasm and good will have gone into these, but they (mostly, anyway) seem to have their demise built in: they can't inter-communicate (easily), and they're not (generally) easily extended or adapted.

To mobilize the vast pool of available skill and good will, we (imho) need a flexible framework to allow developers to use languages with which they feel comfortable - and which are best suited for a particular purpose. (W.r.t. the latter: while PHP, Python and Ruby may be preferable as hyptertext pre-processors, for statistical processing R or Octave may be preferable). Open standards (protocols, interfaces, structural models, etc.) are far more important than a particular application.

To me, PlaNet looks like an interesting reference model/prototype for part of a system rather than the core of extensible application.

> As second layer, I suggest a set of Open Source libraries for handling
> the basic replicable tasks of managing such data. These libraries would
> function just like any programming language extension and could be
> implemented for many different languages.

I'm glad I'm not the only one arguing for this.

> The third layer would then be implementations of these protocols and
> libraries such as PlaNet. This way, no particular website/local economy is
> constrained to using one interface, design of new local economies will be
> simplified due to the implementation-independent libraries, and an
> application such as PlaNet can search across all such local economies
> because they are running a common protocol. The key point here is to
> isolate the most generalizable tasks.

Yes!

> While it will be necessary to work on an implementation (such as PlaNet),
> let's make sure that the fundamentals are taken care of. As a direction
> to start from - I suggest that we dovetail onto the already widespread
> XML movement. What about a set of XML datatypes (schemas) for
> describing the information in a local economy?

Some of the prototypes XML descriptors may already exist.

There's a lot to learnt from (and interfaced to?) Cyclos, I believe.

Bye

John :)

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