General Luxury Production System (GLuPS)

Christian Siefkes

August 2008

Motivation

What can people do if the open flatrate approach of the Commons Network doesn't work? If nobody is ready to produce the goods you like to have, and you can't produce them for yourself?

-> For such cases, peers can enter a joint agreement to help each other to produce what each of them likes to have, and to divide in a fair manner the effort that's necessary to do so.

Open Flatrate vs. Luxury Production

(Optimistic) assumption: the open flatrate model of the Commons Network should be able to produce all the “normal” things and services that people need (the “8 Essentials”).

-> Explicit agreements about effort sharing (effort recovery) are therefore necessary only (if at all) for goods that most people don't consider as relevant—for goods that aren't part of the usual standard of living (“luxury goods”).

That's why we call the complementary network for producing such goods the General Luxury Production System (GLuPS).

Effort Distribution

People help each other to produce the “luxury goods” they like to have, by contributing effort proportional to the effort necessary to produce the “luxury goods” they like to have.

In order to ensure that the different kinds of tasks (more or less popular ones) are picked up, a task weighting (weighted labor) approach as described in the peerconomy book can be used.

… Effort Distribution

Possible modification to make formal task auctioning unnecessary:

… Effort Distribution

Overall task weight is determined by combining task niceness (lower niceness -> higher weight) with task priority (higher priority -> higher weight). The production effort of a good is the sum of the task weight multiplied with the time spent on all tasks necessary for producing it (averaged over all goods of the same kind).

People give back the production effort spent on all the goods they take by contributing the same amount of production effort back to the system (helping to produce “luxury goods” that other people want).

… Effort Distribution

Dealing with Cheating

People Who Cannot Contribute

As described in the peerconomy book, people who cannot effort (e.g. because they are old, ill, or disabled) must not be excluded from consumption because of that.

-> There must be an effort redistribution mechanism in order to ensure that “luxury goods” are available to people who cannot contribute effort.