Hi Timothy,
Some of the non-anonymous details seem a bit Big Brother. As we all have a unique EMail address I see no need for such detail as date/place of birth (especially for the ladies !). Maybe your system could generate a unique permanent
alias email id anyway for members, as my site does (to cater for possible ISP changes) ?
'Community' may be a problem, as this is 'world wide', clarity in the scope of physical aid (and even phone aid) is needed to avoid Australians offering to drive Americans about say ! Maybe a location field would suffice ?
You distinguish Action/Things but this is a bit dualist and I think unsatisfactory. Many offers/wants involve both, i.e. loan of 'machine' plus instructions on how to use it... Why not just one general form ?
The 'Wants' section seems very underplayed, I'd make it the main part of the system. After all we all have lots of abilities/things, not only our 'professional' jobs and we'd never post them all as 'Offers'. We know far better our 'Wants', and can often help people to find things or help even if we'd never dream of offering that old LP or teaching them how to solder...
Depending upon size of membership, I could see the database of comments becoming unwieldy and very large over time, one sentence doesn't seem much but Darwin's lasted for most of the page ;-) Maybe an archiving system would be useful keeping
only the last 5 or 10 ? A keyword seach system would also be essential I think on offer/want databases.
Chris Lucas
CALResCo Group
http://www.calresco.org/
Timothy:
Although you distinguish the GIFTegrity from LETS and barter systems, I think that in terms of organization and practice, there are probably enough parallels that you can develop GIFTtegrity by adapting previous practices. It seems to me that barter systems are especially similar to what you have in mind.
This Web site has a variety of links for LETS and barter (including software). If you do a search for barter software, something in the results list may provide you with the functionality you want without the need for developing software from scratch.
Something I thought of was to do a search for "barter club Argentina" in Google. There are a good number of articles about how barter "self-organized" in Argentina from necessity; my feeling is if you read about the forced, spontaneous manner in which "cash-less" exchange developed in Argentina, it'd help you with your thinking about GIFTegrity.
Synergetically,
Don Steehler
