from Platforms to Protocols - How PLANET paves the way to a collaborative economy

Breaking Free from Walled Gardens: How PLANET paves the way to a collaborative economy

Imagine a world where every individual and organisation working towards a regenerative future could seamlessly connect, share resources, and collaborate—without being trapped in a single platform’s ecosystem. This is exactly what PLANET is designed to enable, using open protocols instead of closed platforms.

The Platform Problem 

Traditional platforms operate as walled gardens, controlling the flow of information, dictating how users interact, and ultimately profiting from their data. Whether it’s social media, marketplaces, or project management tools, these platforms create artificial barriers that prevent seamless collaboration between different networks. If an organisation wants to share opportunities, research, or requests, they often have to duplicate the same information across multiple platforms, wasting time and reducing efficiency.

For a regenerative economy to flourish, collaboration is essential but these barriers prevent organisations from discovering aligned partners, sharing resources, and building meaningful connections beyond their immediate networks. This fragmentation stifles the potential for collective impact.

Introducing PLANET: A Federated Network Built on Open Protocols

PLANET takes a radically different approach. Instead of locking users into a single platform, PLANET is being built as an open network where data can be freely exchanged using decentralised protocols. This means that instead of competing for users, different applications and tools can interoperate, giving people and organisations more flexibility, ownership, and reach.

By utilising open protocols, PLANET enables individuals and organisations to share data across multiple platforms simultaneously, increasing visibility, fostering collaboration, and helping resources flow to where they’re needed most.

PLANET - Welcome screen

A Practical Example – Offers and Wants

One use case of PLANET’s open approach is the sharing of offers and wants. Let’s say a permaculture farm in Spain has surplus seedlings and is looking for volunteers. At the same time, a community garden in the UK is searching for sustainable seeds, and a group of travellers are looking for hands-on learning opportunities in regenerative agriculture.

In a traditional, closed platform model, the farm would have to list these offers and requests on multiple sites—perhaps a local sustainability forum, a regenerative agriculture Facebook group, and an ethical marketplace. Each listing would be confined to its respective platform, limiting its reach and making it harder to connect with the right people.

With PLANET the farm’s offers and wants would be published using an open protocol, making them discoverable across all participating platforms. Whether someone is browsing a regenerative directory, an alternative economy marketplace, or a global permaculture map, the same data appears—without the farm having to re-enter it multiple times. This drastically increases the chances of meaningful connections happening organically and efficiently.

PLANET - filtered feeds

From Offers and Wants to a Collaborative Economy

Offers and wants are just one example of what’s possible when we move beyond walled gardens. PLANET goes further by introducing tools for further democratic collaboration, including:

  • Local and Topic Groups – Enabling communities to self-organise in a local area or around shared interests, projects, or causes.
  • Proposals – Allowing members to suggest initiatives, debate alternative ideas and collaborate on improvements to their local communities, the PLANET network, or anything else.
  • Voting – To enable anyone that is affected by a decision to have a say encouraging transparent and collective decision-making.
  • Bounties – Incentivising contributions by rewarding those who complete critical tasks or provide value.
  • Crowdfunding – Empowering communities to finance the projects they care about directly, without reliance on traditional funding sources.

By integrating these features within an open ecosystem, PLANET isn’t just helping people share resources—it’s laying the groundwork for a genuinely democratic and collaborative economy. One where individuals and organisations have the freedom to connect, cooperate, and co-create solutions that benefit people and the planet.

Join the Movement

The shift from walled gardens to open protocols represents a fundamental change in how we build digital ecosystems. Instead of locking users into proprietary platforms, PLANET aims to create a world where data flows freely, connections form naturally, and collaboration becomes the norm rather than the exception.

The current competitive economic model is driving our life support systems off a cliff and we urgently need to create new systems which make the current system obsolete. PLANET is an open project to research, design and co-create the seeds of a regenerative economy — driven by the collective intelligence of those who care about our planet and want to make a difference.

The screenshots in this post are initial designs not built software. We are aiming to build a minimum viable product of PLANET in 2025 and welcome your input to help co-create the best possible solution. This is a collaborative effort and nothing is set in stone, please share your views, ideas and design improvements via the Loomio.

4 thoughts on “Breaking Free from Walled Gardens: How PLANET paves the way to a collaborative economy”

  1. I think this is a very good start. It is explicitly about offers and wants so it is very personal and brings practical benefits to its users and builds a collaborative community. Of course it differs from FaceBook Marketplace or NextDoor in that it isn’t on a profit-oriented platform, but they are also quite local.

    However, as described, it doesn’t differ from them in showing an explicit relationship, and I think that needs to be included too. We are building an exchange mechanism based upon trust and personal connection and that needs to be built into the MVP. I think it is those two parts, that constitute the M of MVP. So, as one possibility, I would have the identifying icons of the participants clickable to a ‘WhoWeAre’ section that includes their connection to the user, as a friends-of-friends-of-friends list, or map, or something as well as their personal profiles. Also, being part of that WhoWeAre is a public statement that we are the people (and businesses) who are building this movement, that we all care for people and planet and want to work with others who do so too.

    1. Oliver Sylvester-Bradley

      Thanks Gary,
      This is useful feedback. We will work on updating the designs accordingly. A full ‘web of trust’ illustrating trusted connections might not be possible in phase 1 but what you describe is where we want to get to asap.

  2. The general model of open protocols is awesome, and I tend to agree with this approach. The main issue at this point is practical application and adoption.

    When it comes to Needs and Wants, we have seen a few successful models, but they tend to fall into two categories (which arguably are just two ends of a spectrum), which I’ll call “Expedia” and “Amazon”. I often say: We didn’t get Semantic Web, but we did get flight aggregators. Expedia aggregates same-type offers and needs and does data standardization over whatever format each supplier provides. Amazon is more of a storefront model, where the supplier has to conform to the Amazon seller format. (It also steals its suppliers’ business by making knockoff products, but let’s not go there for now).

    Both the flight aggregator and the storefront model suggest to me that the “standardized protocol for needs and offers” is not going to be the right approach. Also note that the existing needs/offers have limited themselves to a particular domain and expanded on it. Flight aggregators began to offer cars, hotels, etc., but didn’t wander too far out of hospitality. Amazon started with books and expanded from there. I know of dozens of needs/offers platforms that have failed and I haven’t seen an assessment of why that is so, but the examples I have given of how it works in the commercial world give some good hints at what directions are more likely to work.

    1. Oliver Sylvester-Bradley

      Hi Grace,
      Insightful feedback – thanks 🙂
      Practical application and adoption is indeed the main issue!
      I don’t think our proposal of a “standardized protocol for needs and offers” (and other content) is the same as the Expedia or Amazon model. Yes, we’re proposing a standardized data model, like Amazon, but we’re not aiming to be the only organisation to benefit from this (as in the case of Amazon). By contrast the protocol we’re proposing is open, as is the data which is published via the protocol, meaning that anyone who runs an instance of the PLANET infrastructure, or integrates the protocol on their own platform can benefit, as can all of their members / users.

      It is true that “dozens of needs/offers platforms that have failed” presumably because they failed to reach the critical mass required to deliver value to users. Our hope is that by making data interoperable, and enabling all the platforms that adopt the protocol to find and aggregate content, that this connects the multitude of small platforms into a distributed global marketplace which is more likely to deliver value to users.

      Starting in a particular domain and expanding out is definitely wise… our default domain (collaborative, regenerative economy building) is already (sadly) fairly niche so, perhaps that’s an OK place to start?

      But, like you said, adoption is the main issue and we will need to make it simple enough for other platforms to adopt the procols for this to work. That said, Trash Nothing recently found Murmurations and implemented the protocol using the existing Offers and Wants schema without any help from us – so, combined with the other networks which have already adopted the protocol, there are now more than 138k live Offers and Wants in the index (see https://tools.murmurations.network/index-explorer?schema=offers_wants_schema-v0.1.0&tags_filter=or&tags_exact=false ) which feels like a pretty good start.

      But if anyone knows of other platforms that might be interested in joining the network we’d love to hear from you.

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