Skill Exchange in a Virtual Village

Software	Language with good web and database tools, DBMS, probably HTML/CSS
Covers	Programming, interface design, databases
Skills Required	Programming, database design
Challenge	Conceptual ?? Technical ?? Programming ??

Brief Description

How can people keep busy, help their neighbours and feel valued, and conversely get help when they need it, in a society where few of us live in small groups in physical villages, and where we do a lot of interaction through the internet?

We think that in early communities, before people relied on money, people gave each other part of what they produced, helped each other, and so on, in the expectation that this was mutual exchange; every so often they would sit around in a circle and work out who owed whom what, and cancelled out debts according to what the community deemed fair. Larger, more diverse, more stratified societies have used money to put a value on goods and services. Barter economies seem only to have existed where people previously used money but the monetary system had broken down, after war or hyperinflation.

The aim of this project is to figure out how to bring back informal, local exchanges of help in the information age, and build the technological infrastructure to support it. This means thinking about how such an exchange of help might work, and building a web database system to manage offers and requests for help in a local community.

Examples of exchanges might be borrowing a wood shredder in return for mowing a lawn periodically, or looking after children sitting quietly doing their homework for a couple of hours after school in return for doing some shopping that an old person can't easily do, or driving a heavy load in a van... Such a system might help people stay occupied and feel useful in retirement, and build up social contacts when they are new to an area.

Variants and Extensions

Depending on your interests and ambitions, you could bias this towards designing and building a web database system with the required functionality, towards implementing the appropriate security mechanisms, towards a rich and detailed analysis of how the system would operate in society and what would be needed both technologically and socially to get a village-like social exchange to work within a larger-scale money-based society like the ones we live it, or towards the deisgn and implementation of a trust mechanism that would meet the needs of people wanting to be reassured about the trustworthiness of their neighbours. In any event, serious consideration of how trust would work, and what sort of computational trust mechanism would or would not be appropriate for this kind of system, would be a good topic for a literature review.

The community the system operates in would need to be geographically local for most kinds of exchanges of help, but what other non-geographic communities might benefit from exchanges of help that doesn't require physical proximity?

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