The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.
William Gibson
Principle
- cheapest way to temporarily let try the newest high tech items for the largest number of people
Motivation
A lot of new high tech items are tempting gadgets and only few will be actually used on a daily basis (creating significant Wikipedia:Electronic waste
). Unfortunately most items are expensive (between $200 and $2000) so the price per usage is high and shops do not allow like clothes to try and bring back.
Ideally it would allow to spark conversations while keeping a critical eye on ucpoming technologies.
Examples
- 10 persons put 50e for 1 year of access
- the 500e is used to
- buy a 300e item
- run a website (pay for domain name) to
- facilitate the exchange of items
- facilitate the acquisition of new items
- have a 150e starting fund for the next item and gather more members
Goals
- having registration and registry website going with at least one registered item and member;
- get item A, B, C;
- get hosting space;
- ...
Rules
- items can be used for a limited period of 1 week to maximize circulation
- but can be kept until a request is made if there is no local to store it
- items have to given back just as they were
- maximum 2 months in the traditional commercial circuit
- items are not to buy, after 6 months of availability they will be given away to a non-profit association or local school
- FIFO : first in, first to get the item (to give an incentive to put money on the table faster)
- the lending period increases over time to maximize early rotation
- e.g. 3 days per person for the first month then 2 weeks per person for the remaining 5 months
- cost of entry should be proportional to the total amount paid by other members with depreciation
Difficulties
- minimize broken and lost items
- global fund or per item fund, the global fund might be slow and rely on new members to come in, per item fund will not let member stagnate
- balance money and time within the group
- what happens if membership is on a yearly basis and somebody joins 6 months after others?
- what happens is somebody join 1 month after the new item was bought?
Suggestions
- No need to store, p2p hosting system from members with maximum duration, request from the system to the next member
- Member card as QRcode
- Insurance? Caution?
- Ability to have items proportional to price and time spent in the group
- Looking for subvention from the city, incubator, etc
- Look for hardware items for free from producers and kickstarter projects
- Find most looked for items currently
- augmented reality
- virtual reality
- brain-computer interface
- high resolution personal display
- wearable computing
- 3D printer
- Personal robotics a la Nao (but more recent)
- Personal cleaning robots a la Roomba (but more recent)
- priority to new class of object, i.e. is there is au augmented reality pair of glass available, the next item should try to be something else, not just another brand or model
- consider embedding directly the accounting and banking in the platform
Contacts
To do
- Gather answer from the survey
Fabien Benetou's PIM
