Enquiry types

I don't know of any service that puts together dating and recruitment in the same package. They are clearly different. And yet they can work in similar ways. After considering those two common services, the question then stayed with me, what other kinds of related services are there? And, how do we choose how many to have? If the list of different services is too short, different things will be pushed together that should be separate. Too long, and it looks too complex and hard to decide which one to go for.

Over the years I've come down to my current selection of 7 separate types of “enquiry”. That's not meant to be final or definitive: there might be other important factors that I haven't yet taken into consideration. But whatever the number is, a vital part of the user experience will be to have these explained, and therefore be clearly guided to the most appropriate type.

Here they are:

• personal sharing including dating/relationships, interests, activities
• collaborating in business partnerships, collectives, ventures, etc.
• living arrangements: communities, communes, co-housing projects, ecovillages, etc.
• individuals helping or serving other individuals, including trades and many other services
• people joining groups, such as clubs, associations, religious bodies
• playing: inviting people together to play with specific roles and rules
• employment of people by organisations, usually paid, sometimes unpaid.

Follow each of the links above for more detail. These 7 are not necessarily the last word in enquiry types, therefore they will be stored uniformly (redundant and distributed) and changes propagated if they are changed.

The following summary helps to choose between the types, based on the characteristics of symmetry of relationship, whether money is likely to be involved, and the level of commitment.

• If there are just two individuals involved, then, if they relate as equals, with no money likely to be involved, it is a case of sharing. The intention may be for high or low commitment.
• There are two clear reasons why individuals might get together as equal in status, and with money being implicated somewhere, and relatively high commitment. One is collaborating on a business venture and potentially earning money; the other is for sharing living arrangements. The same enquiry type of sharing living arrangements also applies to the asymmetric situation of individuals looking for established living groups, or vice versa.
• If individuals relate asymmetrically, and there may be money involved, but typically with low or short-term commitment only, it comes under individuals helping individuals.
• If individuals relate asymmetrically, without unequal costs, then it could be playing.
• If the potential relationship is between individual and an organisation, and clearly therefore asymmetrical, then if the organisation is an employer, the relationship is well-known as a case of employment, with high legally defined commitments; but if the organisation is not an employer, then it is most likely to be one of the kinds of joining groups, with a wide range of degrees of commitment.
• But if the organisation is specifically about living, use sharing living arrangements.

The main category of relationships that are not supported by RegenCHOICE (see below) is commercial relations between organisations and individuals, which is a dominant form of relationship in our current society.

Selecting any one of the links will take the user to the page relevant to the specific enquiry type.

There is also a link to the enquiries overview.

At first sight it may not be clear what is left out of the above categories, so here it is spelled out which areas of life are not envisaged being covered by enquiry types (which include much of our present economy), why these are not currently suitable for RegenCHOICE, and how they could start to be brought within its scope.

A prevalent aspect of live in contemporary society is businesses selling goods or services to an individual, generally through a market mechanism. However, the market mechanism effectively neglects or conceals the kind of information that is central to the operation of RegenCHOICE. The individual has no easy means of choice on ethical issues.

For example, some retail chains have questionable ethics. In most cases, the business is run on capitalist lines, making money for shareholders, typically contributing to, rather than reducing, the problems of inequality.

A start towards a RegenCHOICE approach to retail operations would be to have retailers committing to answer all questions asked by consumers about provenance and ethics. This would begin with the existing ethical retail practices (Fairtrade, organic, cruelty free, etc.) and build an increasingly rich platform for individual ethical choice in consumption. In effect, this would amount to building in transparency and ethical choice centrally into the market mechanisms.

In our current society, most courses other than compulsory education are provided by organisations run on business principles (even if they are technically charities, as universities and many schools are), and the market for these services is similar to other business markets. For similar reasons to the “business market to consumer” category above, this is problematic for RegenCHOICE.

A RegenCHOICE approach would facilitate six approaches to learning, rather than trying to box all learning up in a separate category.

1. Learning is expected in the workplace as a natural and expected consequence of most work, including collaborating and employment.
2. People can form peer-to-peer relationships around sharing learning activities, which may be a natural extension of sharing interest, or may choose to come together to share their following of a (traditionally provided) course.
3. Individuals may offer or receive tuition: this comes under helping.
4. People could consider joining a club, society or other group, set up expressly for the learning and development of its members. Like any club, this can have criteria for membership, and these criteria could include interest in specific kinds of learning, or perhaps certain pre-requisite achievements that are necessary for the level of learning envisaged.
5. Sharing living arrangements can naturally lead to more wide and diverse learning than normally happens in the context of a nuclear family, specially around personal and interpersonal issues.
6. Learning through playing is considered normal for young children, and what has been called “gamification” has been much talked about in education at all levels for some years.

Most business to business transactions are generally constrained by the rules of operation of the respective businesses and the markets in which they participate. As with most business-to-consumer operations, there are great pressures to squeeze ethics out of the system, and to base transactions solely on profitability.

If an ethical business-to-consumer market place were to develop, the thinking (above) about applying RegenCHOICE to business to consumer relationships could be developed to apply here as well. Existing investment and banking could develop towards targeted lending to, and sharing between, those with spare resources, and those who could fruitfully use those resources.

Most current investment is done through investment or banking intermediaries who exclude most ethics from investment decisions. Even the current “ethical investment” funds do little more than bias towards, or more usually away from, particular business areas – and ethical investors are likely to prefer something more finely tuned to their own ethics.

Applying RegenCHOICE to investment would mean investors being able to choose businesses and chains with particular ethics. Borrowers could decide on ethical or other considerations about who they borrowed from, and lenders could be more highly targeted, more easily, than at present. Return on investment would be considered as one of several “bottom lines”.

• Explanation of enquiry types on the HTML site
• the term enquiry type