It was almost 2.5 years ago that Ivana started a thread about marrying needs and offers on The Open Co-op Loomio, which is one of the most read and commented on threads in the forum presumably because a lot of people agree that better sharing of Offers and Wants is a key stepping stone towards a better economy.
But 2.5 years on, not much has progressed in terms of sharing… and one reason for that might be ‘the platform problem’.
It’s obvious really, in a world of 8 billion people, with millions of platforms vying for our attention, we’re never going to all agree to use the same platform.
But what if we could agree to use the same protocol…?
In the same way that http enables us to all use different devices and browsers to access the web, a protocol for sharing Offers & Wants would enable anyone, anywhere, on any platform to post their Offers on their preferred platform and anyone else, using any other platform, to find their Offers and get in touch.
As we know, there are loads of simple Offers and Wants systems, and marketplaces out there, but small markets rarely take off because they lack the breadth of Offers to meet peoples needs. But what if all the little markets were linked, and could expand the number of Offers they display, by leveraging an open protocol for Offers and Wants? Perhaps this collaborative way of working could deliver the kind of scale and diversity required to meet peoples needs?
That’s the theory we’ve been working on at Murmurations – and now we’ve got a simple WordPress Plugins working for Offers and Wants, meaning that anyone with a WordPress can publish their Offers using an open protocol, which enables anyone else with a WordPress to find and display those Offers from any location, and/or containing certain tags. We’ve also got a standalone Offers & Wants generator and an API working too, so you don’t have to use WordPress to use the protocol.
So, now we have the ability to work collaboratively across networks – and we don’t all need to use the same platform to share our Offers & Wants!
Here’s a little video demonstrating how the Plugins make it easy to publish Offers & Wants and for curators to manage maps and Directories of Offers and Wants:
We’d love to know what you think about this? If you have any thoughts or feedback, please add comments to the Loomio thread.