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• 

  Giving: Ad-hoc safety nets, and collective trust-network problem solving

  Posted: August 29th, 2007, 4:03pm PDT by Sam Rose

  In How do we take care of each other?, Chris Messina writes about Kevin Burton, a dedicated Open Source software project leader, who was attacked, and how a growing social network is donating money to help demonstrate that there are some good people in this world, to someone who does so much good.

  Chris writes:

  Kevin Burton IM’d me yesterday and asked if he could give me a call. “Y’know Greg Stein?” “Yeah,” I said, “I just finally met him at BarCampBlock. What’s up?” “I just heard that he was mugged on his way home yesterday.” “Is he okay?” I asked. “No.”

  Apparently two guys jumped Greg (who happened to be on crutches), gave him a black eye and serious laceration that was bleeding profusely when the ambulance arrived.

  All for a hundred bucks and a credit card.

  Now, for those of you who don’t know, Greg is a great guy, and one who has done a tremendous amount of good for the open source world. He’s now at Google doing loads of good work open sourcing their innards while chairing and acting as director of the Apache Software Foundation, lead developer of Subversion, and all things WebDAV.

  And it’s really too bad that terrible things happen to good people like Greg.

  So Kevin decided he wanted to do something. And that’s why he IM’d and then called me. He’s collecting donations in order to buy flowers, buy dinner and generally prove that, even when shit like this happens, that there is still good people and humanity in the world. And that when you give so much of yourself away to others and expect nothing in return, you’re the best candidate to receive the support of the community you’ve helped for so long.

  So as I talked to Kevin about what we could do for Greg, it become abundantly clear that in all the social networking and digital ephemera that we’ve wrapped ourselves in we’ve done a pretty shoddy job of creating simple or obvious ways to help each other out in meaningful and effective ways when we’re most in need. Our networks are self-healing; people are not. So what have we done to make it possible to immediately mobilize ourselves when things do go wrong in order to provide the most effective and helpful response? When it comes to taking care of one individual out of our hundreds of friends across these online networks, does the network confound or enhance our ability to pitch in and materially help out?

  This idea is new, natural, and yet confounding at the same time. Because, it is so easy and affordable for many of us to chip in some money towards helping others. And yet, it is so counter-intuitive to so many people’s world-view. A giving attitude is one of the biggest changes that I believe has emerged from online cooperation networks. People are slowly more and more able to build trust among their networks, and to put that trust into action.

  Chris goes on to write:

  If the government’s response to Katrina proved anything, it’s that our safety and well-being is in each others’ hands. And that we have to figure out how to put these new networks into our employ, and to figure out how design them to serve our human needs in the most vital times. It’s ideas like Brian Caldwell’s Emergency Social-Repeater System or the recent thread on the coworking mailing list for P2P health care that suggest that we’re beginning the work to figure this stuff out for ourselves.

  In the meantime, Kevin is just about half way through raising $2000 to send Greg out to Big Sur where he can relax and recuperate. Even though no one deserves to experience the kind of thing that Greg did on Friday, I think he’s more than earned the support of the community here. The systems of supporting ourselves and keeping each other safe certainly have a long way to go and deserve our attention; however, in the meantime, there is a more pressing need. For the moment we’ll make due, and do the best that we can, for each other.

  $20

  $40

  $60

  $80

  $100

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• 

  DonationBasedHealthCare

  Posted: August 29th, 2007, 3:59pm PDT by Sam Rose

  DonationBasedHealthCare Posted: August 28th, 2007, 9:30pm PDT

  The following is wiki post that I made recent to the coworking wiki, in it’s entirety. Feedback is most welcome

  Context

  As detailed at HealthCareArchive, previously, we tentatively figured out (http://tinyurl.com/328dk8) that creating a formalized health care entity might:

  • push Coworking into territory that could be detrimental to the core values/principles of this decentralized movement.
  • local/state laws make creating one network-wide solution very problematic.

  ChrisMessina, TaraHunt, and maybe others were thinking about the idea of

  group-buying, to help coworkers leverage their numbers. This is a good idea,

  yet, if I recall correctly, we also seemed to find geography is still an

  issue, because one provider cannot cover many different states, in many

  cases.

  Inspiration from “Church Plan”

  Thinking back on a phenomenon that I research for the

  http://cooperationcommons.com project, and the

  http://p2pfoundation.net project. SamRose came across the “Faith Based Health

  Insurance” phenomenon:

  [www.medicalnewstoday.com]

  The way this works is that “members send a monthly check, or “share,” that

  ranges from $200 to $400 to the plan or to members the plan designates with

  “needs,” or medical bills. The plans subtract overhead and administrative

  expenses from the total collected and use the remainder to pay claims”

  Members are “vetted” or qualified to join the “plan” based on a letter from

  their clergy person verifying they are an active church member, and

  trustworthy person.

  So, what does this have to do with Coworking?

  This “church plan” shows a plausible legal international route to

  sharing health care costs among a network of people, religious or otherwise.

  These “church plan” participants are really just donating money to one

  another, facilitated by their churches, and by “plan” coordinators. Might a

  non-religious network of people also think about a way to pool money, and

  route it to people who need it in this way? Some of us think so.

  The idea here is that it is legal for us to give money to each other for

  pretty much anything we want to, so it becomes a matter of figuring out how

  we can give each other money in an equitable, not-for-profit way, that can

  systematize some aspects, and can buil on inherent trust.

  The System Evisioned:

  1. Participation is based upon the trust metrics of others who are already in the network (others “vouch” for you on the local CoWorking level). Each participant joins a local group made up of people they actually know. Each group votes on whether it will participate with other groups, based on an AggregatedRating for each group.

  2. Each donor is given a mechnism for splitting their donation up and paying out to all others in the network who have donation requests

  3. The system calculates the minimum that each donor would need to pay to ensure that all donation requests in the network or the month are fulfilled. (When possible, larger lump sum requests are split up across as many months as possible per donation request)

  Goal: 100% coverage for all users.

  Factors that impact use of system - Items To Do

  • The IRS holds donor responsible for gifts, you may

  currently give $12,000.00 US per year, $1,000,000 ove lifetime before paying these taxes (don’t

  know what state laws are) [www.irs.gov]

  1. You would not be able to write off your contributions into the

  system

  2. You would not have to pay taxes on your contributions into the

  system, because even if you contributed as much as $500 per month,

  you would only have contributed 6000.00 per year (this would of course

  eat into you ability to give other gifts, except to qualifying

  charities, which would then allow you to claim a deduction)

  3. It would appear that you would still be allowed to write off your

  health care costs off of the top of your income, even though they

  would all presumably be payed by the donation system. This is because

  the recipient does not have to declare the gift as income. This needs

  further research, but I believe I am right about this.

  This also does not factor in what you state government may do with

  regards to taxing gifts, if anything.

  4. Total actual healthcare costs for US citizen (not monthly insurance premiums, but actual billed costs from care providers) per capita (average) in 2005 is $6401.00 (from http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/46/36/38979632.xls) about 533.00 per month. So, given that this is average, monthly minimum donation to create 100% coverage for all involved could range from roughly $50-$500 per month. Donation requests might need to be “throttled” to a maximum per month to keep system stable. These are only quick rough numbers. Full research needed to create accurate picture of system dynamics.

  5. 50 state legality needs to be researched, and vetted by lawyer before any actual exchange of money takes place

  Example tools that can facilitate exchange

  • http://donorge.org (modified or recreated from scratch)

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• 

  P2P Explained

  Posted: August 24th, 2007, 7:46am PDT by Sam Rose

  Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation discusses the core P2P concepts at Swinburne in Australia recently:

  View on Google Video

  This video is probably the best, most concise explanation of these concepts so far. Definitely worth watching. Also, visit [p2pfoundation.net] for more information on what is discussed in this video.

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• 

  The Prosper Lender Rebellion, and the US Credit/Borrowing Black Hole

  Posted: August 16th, 2007, 9:14am PDT by Sam Rose

  (via P2P-Kredite)

  The P2P Lending enabler-site [prosper.com] is experiencing a rebellion by it’s lenders, mostly found on it’s forums:

  See: ”FLASH:Prosper bans $100.000 lender“, “Prosper Mng. Living Under a Rock“, “Shooting the Messenger“, “What happens if Prosper goes under?“, “I am done lending on Prosper“, “Hello Prosper Moderator“, “Lender’s WHO are DONE with Prosper“, “My letter to Prosper” and ”Open letter to John Witchel“.

  Apparently, the problem lies in Prosper’s reported un-responsiveness to their lender community. The lenders have raised issues about Prosper’s lack of effective collections on deliquent loans, and Prosper’s reported past inaction on preventing “blenders” (people who are both borrowers and lenders, or group leaders who are also borrowers) from lending money when they are deliquent on their own Prosper loan payments. Apparently Prosper.com has since announced that it will take action on deliquent “blenders”.
  My own analysis is that some of these problems appear to be inevitable given the conditions on Prosper.com’s loan marketplace:

  • Many unsecured loans are bid down to a very low interest rate, making ROI (return on investment) more difficult for lenders
  • Unsecured loans are of course, very easy to default on. There is really no immediate consequence for the person who defaults.
  • Prosper lacks the resources to collect on the apparent high volume of defaulted loans. The centralized, profit-focused nature of Prosper as a system and company pushes them to focus on short term profits for the company at the expense of working on behalf of their communities to make their system sustainable.
  • Although pretty much anyone can lend money on Prosper, there is no easy way for the lender to judge whether the person they are lending to is already over-extended, which is a very common problem in the US

  It is my theory that many people are likely defaulting on their Prosper loans because they are over-extended in credit. Because of the huge problem in the US with people being over-extended on their credit, Prosper is affected by the same factor as any unsecured credit lending entity. When people find out that they have a chance to obtain unsecured credit, whether they are over-extended or not, they are flocking to Prosper, and they are getting money, and they are not paying it back.

  This actually reflects a deeper problem with the economy in America (and possibly elsewhere): for a huge amount of individuals, borrowing money is the only way to raise capital in the immediate future. roughly 6 in 10 US citizens are in Debt. Especially given economy slowdowns in many areas across the US over the past 8+ years, this also means things like getting a raise from your employer, or changing employers to increase wages is less likely of an option for a huge amount of people. So, people are turning to borrowing money.For the last 8+ years, there has also been an explosion in US subprime lending. This led to a mortgage bubble that is now collapsing in the US. In my opinion, our total societal system is broken when companies respond to economic downturns by stepping in to tempt people with quick money that the companies know many of them will not be able to pay back. In the case of mortgages, this means that finance companies acquire property when borrowers default.

  For a system like Prosper to work in the long term, lenders and borrowers need literacies and knowledge to know when to borrow, and when to lend. Otherwise, Prosper will end up becoming part of the problem.

  And, in general, there is a greater need now more than ever, for people to have other ways to invest in one another, and for individuals to raise capital, and to have the knowledge and personal infrstructure to use the capital in sustainable ways, that increase the chances that investors see ROI.

  We’ve been discussing these ideas at [barcampbank.com,] and at [www.aboutus.org] and Open Business Models Wiki Hive. These ideas have also been discussed at [solari.com]
  The idea is to create a P2P investing marketplace, that is tied to a fast-growing knowledge commons, and that is coupled with ongoing efforts to help people seek and use investment on a personal level wisely. People need open access to data about their local and regional conditions, and ways to pool their money without going into debt. Borrowing money is a great option, but only if you can pay it back. Otherwise, people need a way to leverage their abilities and resources to attract investment, and use it to grow wealth for themselves and investors in ways that can be sustained. Right now, the law makes little or no provision for this type of investment.

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