Why Not Save the World


The other night I decided it was time for me to start to save the world.

Recent macro-level financial events have spurred me to act, but I fear I may be too late. Hopefully not. How am I saving the world? Through a babysitting co-op. Babysitting co-ops consist of a bunch of families getting together and deciding take care or each other's kids, giving time for the sittee to go out and do something. A night out, grocery shopping, maybe just time off. Something. Co-op have rules - a fee schedule - that define how much one sitting session will cost. Co-op also define their own currency. Strictly speaking, this currency is not forbidden to be a national currency (e.g. US Dollars), but most likely, the co-op currency is something else: poker chips, beads, hockey pucks or 'units' on a ledger.

We belong to one such co-op which uses the 'units' on a ledger approach. [wait, how is this going to save the world? Patience, I'm getting there]. I found some Open Source Software that allows me to host a service which can replace the ledger. The service is called Happy Co-op and it is a transactional service - people generate invoices and people remit payments. The currency is a private electronic currency. Call it hockey pucks if you want, but it is really just numbers moving in a database.

I presented the Happy Co-op service to other members of the co-op we belong to and it was well-recieved. No decisions yet, but I expect to convert the ledger to Happy Co-op in due time.

How does on get from a babysitting co-op to saving the world? Carefully, and a bit idealistically.

  1. Flesh out the service to increase its value proposition. I can do things like scheduling and calendaring, auto-invoicing based on codified rules and allowing for a dual currency model
  2. Roll the service out to more than just the co-op I belong to. Get other local co-ops, but also get some in New York City and Des Moines.
  3. Expand the service to tackle other co-op models: healthcare, shopping, whatever. Admittedly, I need some more thinking here.
  4. Generalize the service. Make it so that the 'income' I earn by sitting for someone can be applied to having my spark plugs changed. Pay for parts in US Dollars, but pay for the service in co-op units. There are some regulatory pitfalls here.

How do I sell it? I start with the babysitting co-op members. These already exist and the members already enjoy the benefits of co-op behaviors. I'm not really too worried here. How does this save the world? Once I get to Step 4, I'm reducing the pressure on the national currencies - economic transactions can still happen without a dependency on, for example, dollars. Also, Step 4 increases local community ties - I'm performing a service for someone which forms a bond. Both of those things will save the world.

Idealistic? Sure. But hey, some people dream of a flatscreen TV or of a faster car. I dream of saving the world.

(thoughts contained herein are more fully fleshed out in "The Future Of Money" by Bernard Lietaer. It is a good read, but it is pretty hard to find)

November 21, 2008 by Brent Schneeman

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Sitegeister, huh?

I recently mentioned something called "Sitegeister". This is a little concept I came up with back in the Spring and wanted to do something with it.

The name is a play on both "web site" and "zeitgeist", and a "sitegeist" is a summary of the topic of a site, in much the same way a "zeitgeist" is the topic of an era. "Sitegeister", then, is the actor that determines the sitegeist.

Sitegeister subscribes to RSS/Atom feeds from various websites (news aggregators, blogs, whatever) and analyzes the content of the feeds to determine the topics (topics are reset weekly). These topics are located at the bottom of the main Sitegeister page. For example, as I write this, the top topics (or concepts) on the Yahoo! most popular news feeds are  "candidate palin", "candidate sarah", "gulf hurricane", "hurricane orleans", "palin running", "running sarah", and others. Obviously, some overlap between these concepts exist.

After determining the top concepts, Sitegeister then draws the blob on the top of the main page. This is a link-map and tries to connect sites to other sites. Each blob is a Site and is surrounded by it's top concepts. Concepts from one site that are related to another site's concepts are linked via an edge. This is all good stuff and relies heavily on Latent Semantic Indexing and Vector Space Models and angles between vectors and really helped me marry my math background with my love of language.

Unfortunately, I geisted the wrong sites. Most of my sites are news aggregators and they all tend to converge on the same concepts. That means that the blob-map tends towards fully-connectedness (which means it is a mess) and really doesn't reveal anything. I need to choose other sites that may or may not be related, like various blogs. It may be interesting to determine links between blogs that advertise different topics.

Or maybe not. Either way, it was a fun excercise, and demonstrates that Google AdSense works really, really well. The FAQ at Sitegeister.com has more information.

September 05, 2008 by Brent Schneeman

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