[p2p-research] Fwd: Gift Nodes for a Network of Gift Communities

Mon Nov 26 15:15:10 CET 2007

This is a reply to "Gift Nodes/Exchange Nodes" from Andrius

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <ms at auste.elnet.lt>
Date: Nov 26, 2007 5:19 AM
Subject: Gift Nodes for a Network of Gift Communities
To: workinginparallel at yahoogroups.com, cyfranogi at yahoogroups.com,
holistichelping at yahoogroups.com, p2presearch at listcultures.org

Sam,

I'm very glad for the steps that we're taking to work together to create an
online environment for for facilitating our work on all many of endeavors.
 I
look forward to working with you, Steve Bosserman and others as organizers,
innovators and software developers.  I will write to our working groups
Working In Parallel (online environments) and Cyfranogi (community currency)
and Holistic Helping (especially in Africa) and thank you if you might share
my letter with the P2Presearch list and our groups converse.

I'm appreciating more and more your interests in setting up the Gift nodes
across a variety of wikis.  What we could do then is to create a page that
aggregates information from such pages.  That page could help us understand
which community is active and/or interested in giving and receiving what
kinds of gifts.  Then we could engage wiki communities but also work with
community currency communities (which often have such directories) and with
global villages (which I think often have a strong gift ethic).

One of my purposes is to encourage outreach amongst communities so that we
have a wider economy. I'm starting to think that the economy is a spectrum
of
relationships from "strangers" to "friends".  A different kind of instrument
is effective at each point on the spectrum.  So, for example, the usual
money
is a very effective way of engaging, including total strangers, but it can
also make total strangers out of friends.  A LETS system is a great way of
meeting people and making friends in a community, but it might destroy a
civic organization run by volunteers.  A timebank is a great way to enroll
new volunteers, but it might cause unhelpful friction if a family ran itself
with one.  There are different kinds of gift giving and they are appropriate
I suppose for different kinds of relationships.  Love is at the extreme of
the spectrum, because it is an unconditional giving, as when parents give to
their children or spouses to each other or we help those who can't help
themselves.

I have noticed that our Minciu Sodas laboratory http://www.ms.lt has a
vibrant economy of gift giving http://www.worknets.org/wiki.cgi?Gifts  These
are generally gifts from one person to another.  They are quite voluntary.
They express a wish to give and receive help.  They come with an expectation
that the gift will be used well.  I encourage that this also be structured
as
"work" so that the expectation is indeed satisfied and not left hanging, and
so that the giver also grows by being engaged in the purpose of the work.
 So
often (but not always) it is the gift of paid work.  I think our
participants
appreciate that our laboratory attracts wonderful people who need and want
help.  But generally I think our givers know that if the gift is used well,
then by definition, others will benefit - even if they don't benefit
directly, or anybody else within our lab, for that matter.  I will add that
each such gift makes our lab more valuable for our participants.

Our laboratory is a business and the hardest part is always finding new work
and new clients.  I don't want to "work on speculation" unless that is on
projects of strategic interest to myself and our lab.  I am developing
certain capabilities that might be valuable to others.  Here is a simple
example: for our lab, I have downloaded 20,000 of our Yahoo groups letters
and am making that available for distribution on USB flash drives.  I could
do something similar for other organizations.  Perhaps they would pay me,
but
I imagine it would be hard to make a business of it.  Instead, however, I
might do that for others as a "gift".  That would make economic sense for me
if I knew that they would acknowledge it as a gift they want and likely
reciprocate with a gift - maybe not for me, but for somebody in our lab.
That would be enough for me to justify spending a lot of energy on such
gifts
as it would strengthen our gift economy, create value, and most importantly
for me - extend the reach of our lab's economy so that more people might see
us work and consider giving us paid work.  My business goal is therefore to
encourage us to document our gift economies - not the tit-for-tat exchanges
-
but rather the directory of services, both offered/desired, but also
given/received.  This information would allow our communities to have a
wider
economy.  I think that is crucial because, as I am realizing, in a group of
friends there may be a lot of sharing but there isn't too much role for
money, because money is an instrument for engaging strangers.  So we need
more strangers! so we could get more paid work.

Sam, Steve, Lion and all, I'm excited at how we might organize around such
gift communities, encourage the creation of gift nodes, and then the
aggregation of information from then, and then the incorporation of other
kinds of useful knowledge about people's endeavors, locations, values,
investigations and designing maps of ecosystems of endeavors that we might
show and navigate.

John Rogers http://www.valueforpeople.co.uk of Cyfranogi
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cyfranogi/ has a set of questions for
designing
such a community economy that we might apply here.  They go to the heart of
the power relationships in such a system, what are they to be?

I also ask our African participants at Holistic Helping, what are other
online communities that we might like to exchange gifts with?  Likewise,
what
are community currency communities that might be interested?  Or global
villages?

Andrius

Andrius Kulikauskas
Minciu Sodas
http://www.ms.lt
ms at ms.lt
in Chicago, then Missouri, San Diego, Chicago, Rome, Lithuania

Data , "Samuel Rose" <samuel.rose at gmail.com> Rašyta:
>I had a great conference call with Steve Bosserman, and  Andrius
>Kulikauskas, of Minciu Sodas yesterday. One of the items Andrius mentioned
>was a project on Work Nets wiki where participants are listing "gifts" they
>have to offer, or items they'd like to receive, on their site:
>
>http://www.worknets.org/wiki.cgi?Gifts
>
>One of the things we talked about is that it seems to be more successful
for
>smaller  groups who collaborate together, to create these types of
>exchanges, or giving "boards" amongst themselves, rather than creating a
>monolithic "service" that is meant to attract many people who are anonymous
>to one another. The groups of people who know each other are more at ease
>giving and sharing like this.
>
>We have been exploring a bartering exchange at
>http://www.communitywiki.org/en/InternetExchange. This is a bit different,
>in that it is meant to be a list of skills that can be bartered for in some
>way, either for LETS, or for some "equivalent" skill.
>
>And, of course in P2P foundation, we're developing a resource pool.
>
>An idea that Andrius raised in our conference call was to think about how
to
>connect "giving" networks between groups, so that, for instance if no one
at
>http://www.worknets.org/wiki.cgi?Gifts is interested in what is being
>offered or requested there, maybe people in groups where there is overlap
in
>participants, would be interested? It might be possible to create "Gift
>nodes" that connect these giving pages on different communities?  This is
>kind of like we've created at http://www.communitywiki.org/en/WikiNode, but
>specifically centered on connecting pages like
>http://www.worknets.org/wiki.cgi?Gifts
>
>My friend Lion Kimbor, who helped me create
>http://www.communitywiki.org/en/InternetExchange, has brought up the point
>that there are some things that we would like to offer, but cannot really
>afford to offer for free. There are some types of work that we would like
to
>post as being available to do for the greater community, but would need
>something in exchange for (even if that is just LETS or community currency
>that is used solely for those exchanges.)
>
>So, what I would like to propose is that it we could create a "Gift" page
>that is similar to http://www.worknets.org/wiki.cgi?Gifts for the P2P
>foundation, and one for CommunityWiki. And, if there is interest, that we
>might also create a local "InternetExchange" for P2P foundation and perhaps
>Worknets, that is similar to
>http://www.communitywiki.org/en/InternetExchange, and that we create links
>between these ("Gift Nodes", "Exchange Nodes"). And, we think about how to
>keep these first centered and catered to their respective communities, but
>also open for access between communities, mostly through symbolic link. I
>propose that these pages would be public facing, like
>http://www.communitywiki.org/en/InternetExchange and
>http://www.worknets.org/wiki.cgi?Gifts
>
>If people are interested, I will make this a public-facing, openly-editable
>"wiki" page on http://socialsynergyweb.com/resourcepool
>
>Lion, and Andrius, I have copied you on this email, and please feel free to
>join
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.orgif
>you'd like this is a mailing list that grew from
>http://www.ntu.ac.uk/p2pworkshop2007/programme/index.html
>
>--
>Sam Rose
>Social Synergy
>Cel: +1-517-974-6451
>AIM: Str9960
>Linkedin Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samrose
>skype: samuelrose
>email: samuel.rose at gmail.com
>http://socialsynergyweb.com/services
>http://blog.socialsynergyweb.com
>
>Related Sites/Blogs/Projects:
>OpenBusinessModels: http://socialsynergyweb.net/cgi-bin/wiki/FrontPage
>http://p2pfoundation.net
>http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>http://www.cooperationcommons.com
>http://barcampbank.org
>http://bfwatch.barcampbank.org
>http://communitywiki.org
>http://extinctionlevelevent.com
>
>Information Filtering:
>http://socialsynergyweb.com/gregarius/
>http://ma.gnolia.com/people/srose/bookmarks
>http://del.icio.us/srose
>http://twitter.com/SamRose
>
>

-- 
Sam Rose
Social Synergy
Cel: +1-517-974-6451
AIM: Str9960
Linkedin Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samrose
skype: samuelrose
email: samuel.rose at gmail.com
http://socialsynergyweb.com/services
http://blog.socialsynergyweb.com

Related Sites/Blogs/Projects:
OpenBusinessModels: http://socialsynergyweb.net/cgi-bin/wiki/FrontPage
http://p2pfoundation.net
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
http://www.cooperationcommons.com
http://barcampbank.org
http://bfwatch.barcampbank.org
http://communitywiki.org
http://extinctionlevelevent.com

Information Filtering:
http://socialsynergyweb.com/gregarius/
http://ma.gnolia.com/people/srose/bookmarks
http://del.icio.us/srose
http://twitter.com/SamRose
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