[p2p-research] Walkability: check it before choosing your next home!

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Patrick Anderson wrote:
> Governments have traditionally taken the approach of "gather a bunch
> of money into a slush-fund, then dole-out funding to projects as some
> 'representative' council sees fit".
 >
> A much more direct, and in my opinion, "P2P" approach that avoids some
> of the "Tyranny of the Majority", allowing citizens to retain much
> more control would be:
> 
> 1. Allow any citizen to 'advertise' any project proposal.
> 2. Other citizens that become interested may choose to fund those projects.
> 2a. Funding can be in the form of Money (Will add X$) or Labor (Will
> work to accomlish Y amount of some goal) or Physical assets (Will
> supply a roto-tiller during some window of time).
> 3. When any project receives enough funding, then it can begin implementation.
> 4. Citizens who helped fund the project are stakeholders in the same %
> that they invested.
> 5. Citizen do not fund projects they do not care about, so have much
> more control.

This is a bit of a meshworks/hierarchies thing. Any project can cause 
externalities (good and bad ones).
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

If, say, your fish cannery making slurry

"The Old Man and the Lisa"
http://www.tv.com/the-simpsons/the-old-man-and-the-lisa/episode/1459/summary.html

is going to make it so no one can walk to my bagel shop nearby, then what 
recourse do I have?

Sure, there is plenty of incentive for you and your "open source" friends to 
build a fish cannery, but what about the consequences to me?  :-)

But, as soon as you start talking about them, then we are back to 
"representative councils" or some other mechanism.

I'm wondering if maybe I'm more for doing urban planning via email and via 
rough consensus than "incentives". Even with incentives, who sets them? :-)

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/