2023-05-17

I'm so excited to be moving forward with the RegenCHOICE initiative, ultimately towards the future. Starting a little group of potential team members, I asked people to share answers to these questions. Here are mine, so far.

• What projects involved with finding, matching, offers, wants, etc. are you (or have you been) involved with, or know about?
• what would be valuable and realistic for those projects to achieve?
• what has been, is, or will be your role in those projects?
• how would you feel if a project was successful, and what if anything might still be missing?

(naturally!) as I cannot escape being the source visionary for RegenCHOICE.

It still feels like vaporware until we have some toy trials produced, at least.

Being totally biassed, I believe that it is realistic to imagine this covering a vast range of many symmetric and asymmetric finding / fitting / matching / brokering markets. But hey, this is way too big to do by myself!

This relates in all ways to everything I'd like to find, and if this project was successful I would die happy with the sense that I had fulfilled my calling in life.

What RegenCHOICE is not designed to do at all is: manage any partnership or collaboration that emerges; be a communication platform or social medium; help people learn the skills needed for collaboration and co-living; provide the information base for learning about whatever is important.

as interested observer only: https://murmurations.network/

If Murm can entice other related projects into collaboration, I see this as realistically giving people the ability to map and find things and people close to them. What it's not going to do is to help find other people who share interests or qualities that are sensitive or private for any reason.

as source visionary: https://www.simongrant.org/seesaw/index.html

This was my attempt at a focused asymmetric (slow)speed-dating process between individual abilities and project ideas. I see it as a way of developing people and ideas together — a combined approach to personal and business development. I tried it out once and the outcomes were very promising. This could be an element in helping people to develop collaborative projects.

as an occasional user

Services like https://www.ilovefreegle.org/browse may work for things that are commonly passed on between people, but for less common items the effort to scan for things seems increasingly unrealistic. Second-hand shops and services also often work for common items. There has long been a knowledge-rich market in antiques and collectibles.

Ultimately I don't believe a system quite like this can work well for passing on things that are unusual, because the whole thing is knowledge intensive. Instead I look for a local network of specialists who store and pass on things that they are particularly interested in and knowledgeable about. This could be both online and in-person.

not even as a serious user yet, but as an interested bystander

Some examples:

• the IC.org search, just for an individual to look for communities
• Diggers and Dreamers allow search and also advertise openings, a little like job offers.
• Cynthia Tina is working on Community Finders and I went to one of her sessions. This was a really useful confirmation of a valuable insight, that for small numbers, there is no great difference in effectiveness between random matching and attempting to fit people together. We could work together to build something at a scale where it does make a difference.
• Regeneration Pollination isn't trying to match people up, but rather giving a random opportunity to talk with someone else who is likely to share some significant values or interests in common.

While it would be great if these services succeeded in matching people with communities, as I see it the catalogues are missing any kind of characterisation of individuals, which creates the same kind of inefficiency as with current recruitment systems. People looking for communities (compare: jobs) have to look through very many places (cf. job offers) with only a scanty, self-rated idea of how well they will fit into the community (job). And there is no facility at all for individuals to find each other with the aim of coming together to start a founding group.

On the other hand, the small event based introductions, while being of great value in themselves, as they introduce strangers and cross-pollinate, are not yet working at the scale where you can start to expect finely tuned resonance between people. People may by accident find other interesting people, but still the chances of finding someone else so well matched that you want to start a new community with them are clearly low.

I don't have any significant recent experience with these.

There are many problems with many current dating sites, which I have partly experienced and partly read or talked about. However I don't feel qualified to set out these problems here, as I may well have missed some new developments.

One thing that is very clear: all of these sites are businesses. So it may not be in their interests to deliver excellent matches quickly.

I have only very limited and old experience of these as a user.

Ideally, these should be designed to get the best possible fit of a prospective employee into a job opening. Across most of the recruitment industry, with the exception of the “head-hunting” sector, the model is highly conservative and created to serve the client who pays: the employer; not the employee. So the prospective employee ends up searching through an unlimited number of job postings, able to see what the employer requires, but unable to see more than a bare minimum of facts about the post. Detailed investigation takes a long time, therefore job-seekers are likely (and most often do) settle for jobs that are not ideal, or not a good match for their values, leading to low commitment and job satisfaction.

This was my last question.

My own sense is that even in personal relationships I tend to look for a quite rare set of characteristics in the other person. And I don't know what kind of other person is looking for me. I want to be able to adjust the characteristics I am looking for in response to discovering who is both available and interested in people like me. This isn't done at present.

My personal search for a co-living, co-working situation in Belgium looks very unlikely to be satisfied by anything that currently is working. So my attention goes towards finding others with enough common ground to set up something like this, and as I've mentioned above, this isn't being supported at present.