EDGE

 ♾ Extensible Decentralized Gift Economy

Main Article: EDGE/Introduction

The EDGE project aims to establish a technology to facilitate an online Gift Economy which has no central point of failure/control.
 * A proposal for a fundamentally different set of economic arrangements

Philosophy
Main Article: EDGE/Philosophy

As a reader of this website, you may already be persuaded of the utility of a Gift Economy as a tool to promote abundance. The aim is to design a technology which is as simple as possible while still being flexible enough to allow people to express all sorts of gifts to one another, and to do so in a decentralised fashion.

User Experience
Main Article: EDGE/Experience

Many people check their Email daily. How would life be different if together with messages, they could send and receive offers or requests for assistance? In a machine readable format... that they could pass on in turn to their friends? If money was not an issue, people could feel free to concentrate on things that they actually wanted to work on, and with people they wanted to be with.

Use Cases
Main Article: EDGE/Use Cases

Maybe the simplest case is the tip jar. Instead of having a "Donate by PayPal" button, users have a "Donate by EDGE" button, which may be as simple as a mailto: link to their Email address. Any users with the addin can click on this to bring up a donation pane in their Email client. More complex use cases would allow for asking or offering for specific help, passing help offers on to friends etc.

Evaluations
Main Article: EDGE/Evaluations

The core of the technology is the idea of an evaluation, i.e. expression of an opinion. This is an extensible format, basically a to, a from, an about and a set of simple numerical scores. Simple though these scores are, the units of account are open to unrestricted interpretation, so this design may prove a flexible enough base to support multiple higher levels of programming.

How To Help
Main Article: EDGE/How To Help

Currently, the project is still at the design stage. A is being built for the Thunderbird Email client. If you write computer software, you are welcome to contribute to that, if you have other skills you'd like to give, see.