[rdfweb-dev] foaf:beerTokens ... (fwd)

[jo walsh]

jim wrote: 
> I've been thinking that one of the things the foaf universe lacks is a
> currency, if I want someone to do something for me, I have to use
> cajoling, and coercion, and can't offer anything but thanks in return,
> what we need is a currency that we can "pay" for stuff with.
> foaf:beerTokens are a possible solution to this, how this might be
> modeled still needs work, but this is one suggestion ...
> Then of course we need to add in trust and everything layered on top ...
>
> Thoughts on foaf:beerTokens?

gosh. one thought is that the way beerTokens work looks the same as the
way regular money works - which is not particularly well, subjectively. 
to build foaf tech into something approaching a community transaction
system seems an interesting and desirable project though. 

the trust and transaction models you require need a much careful
thinking and some time in implementation. the kind of energy i'd want to
put into this would call for a good endgame, something very interesting
and perhaps useful. i wouldn't like to end up with an implementation of
something that looked just like money. 

danbri mentioned Lets schemes, a friend of mine has worked on a web
implementation - http://www.hughbarnard.org/cgi-bin/weblets/webtool.cgi -
i havent looked into their workings and there doesnt seem much
authoritative on the web but i liked the few brief points here: 
http://www.lancasterukonline.net/market/alternatives/lets.htm 

- co-operation: no-one owns the network.

- self-regulation: the network is controlled by its users.

it has a strong idea of money which is interest-free. does money tend to
interest though, investment, borrowing? but potentially a means to lift an
entire community free of the conventional banking system, make it
financially and materially self-supporting...

this has abstracted a bit from thoughts on beerTokens ;) i think they
could work more like a simple karma system, a bit like the karma in the
infobot, but when you offer someone a bit of it, yours goes down a little.
so you just store one number, the amount of beer your beerTokens entitle
you to give or to receive. 

there are temporal aspects missing though in my rdf implementations, in
the crawlers and model storage and query interfaces available to me...
does that get bolted on at each level, like i add a timestamp to each
triple, and the crawler checks the page for change, and what if that page 
is dynamic, i would like a more ontological way to tell whether certain
things are liable to change and how often they need be updated; can that
be modelled in DAML, which is in foaf to a small extent already, and how
are processing tools with daml support? 

jo
--
"Common sense won't tell you. We have to tell each other." -DNA