24 concepts for changing the web and the world
Everybody buys certain goods on a regular basis, such as food.
So instead of repeatedly making orders for the same goods over and over again, you should be able to subscribe to them in the same way that you can subscribe to services.
If you buy the same stuff from your retailer of choice every week, why can't they just offer the same order to you again?
Basically, they can prompt you in advance if you want your standard order or do you want to make changes, that way they always have your permission and knowledge before they ship the goods.
This makes shopping for essentials more of a pleasure than a chore. espra enables this form of smarter shopping from vendors who are members of the espra network, so you can spend more time doing what really matters.
Why do you need a keyboard or a PC to interact with the internet?
espra provides various interfaces that enable you to interact with it in a suitable manner regardless of location and what device you are using to connect with the network.
If you are connected by cellphone, you can use voice to interact with the network. If using a PC, you can use the traditional keyboard and mouse if you wish.
One key aspect of the ubiquitous interfaces enabled by espra is a software agent that can act on your behalf.
It has knowledge of your needs, wants, todo list, address book and diary. As such, you can delegate certain tasks to it and it will carry them out.
It can also automatically take care of various arrangements such as scheduling meetings based on your availability and location, referring back to you when it needs a decision or permission from you.
The agent can take care of trivial details for you, allowing to you to focus on the important things in your life.
Over time the agent will become better at serving you, based on its interaction with you and your usage of espra making life easier giving you your own personal assistant /secretary online.
espra allows you to avoid the use of expensive and inflexible delivery companies by using your trustmap to arrange for delivery via members of the espra network.
For example, if someone is making a car journey from Manchester to London on business or pleasure, there is no reason they can't carry something extra in the boot to a drop off point on their way from which it can be routed to its destination.
In fact, if they do a good job of it, they will be rewarded by a boost in their reputation as well as receiving pecus for rendering the service.
For premium delivery services, where the goods in question are of a certain value or fragility or must be delivered within a tight timeframe, there will be specialist service providers who can take responsibility for doing so.
This will no doubt include the traditional delivery companies who have chosen to become members of the espra network with all that entails.
Trust-routed transportation isn't just for the delivery of goods, it can also form the basis of a next-generation of car pooling enabling personal travel, without increasing reliance on badly run overcrowded public transport or expensive commercial travel services.
Given the increased quantity of information that living in the 21st century requires us to deal with, espra provides the facilities to enable the creation and maintenance of high-quality summaries that provide various points of view and are available in whatever form we might prefer e.g. text, audio etc..
Society is changing, people are exploring new ways of living and working in the quest for personal fulfilment and development. The age of the network expands the possibilities for working and living.
By using the collective intelligence of the espra network, we can create live/work spaces that enable a better way of living, one with a higher quality of life, more sustainable and more rich in relationships and community and therefore... richer in meaning.
Imagine walking in to a place where espra knows that there are people who share your interests and/or contacts and facilitates a meeting by texting your phone to alert you to this.
This is just one of the ways that espra can augment the places we live and work. Another is that these places can also be dropoff/pickup points or destinations for trust-based transportation.
Nicknames nom de guerres, screen names, pen names and pseudonyms are the predecessors for mesh identities.
In literature, for example the writer Iain Menzies Banks writes science fiction as Iain M. Banks whereas he writes literary fiction as Iain Banks. This allows him to maintain separate identities as a science fiction writer and as a "serious" writer.
Another well-known example for literature is Stephen King's use of the Richard Bachman pen name in order to publish more than one book a year. There is a tradition for Hollywood film actors to adopt a screen name, e.g. Archibald Leach became Cary Grant and Norma Jean Baker became Marilyn Monroe.
espra allows you to have multiple identities each with its own reputation and trustmap.
There are many useful applications of this, particularly in a celebrity-obsessed culture where someone's fame can hinder their ability to interact and transact in a normal manner.
It also facilitates the handling of certain sensitive matters in a secure and pseudonymous manner. It can also be a way of safely expressing your multiple personas as you participate in various communities of practice or interest.
People enjoy being in cafes, galleries and social spaces due to the relaxed surroundings and the good company.
espra can augment these spaces in a similar way to what it does for live/work spaces making them better places for leisure and business.
Such a space can add to its revenue-generating activities by incorporating displays of appropriate and tasteful selected goods available via the espra network.
The very taste that makes the spaces such good places to be, can make them more financially successful and viable without tying up capital in goods of uncertain saleability.
There are many modes of communication available to us in this age depending on our location and ability to connect to the internet and cellphone networks.
espra ensures that no matter where you are, you can get all your messages no matter what form the message originated in and what communications medium you are reachable by.
So if you need to, you can get your email messages as voicemails and vice-versa. Instant messages can be sent to you via SMS and you can respond in the same manner.
espra will transparently convert messages to a suitable form depending on how you are currently connected to the network by using espra's ubiquitous interfaces.
Education for the 21st century is evolving.
Wikipedia shows us some of the possibilities.
Self-directed lifelong learning means that each of us will become capable of both learning and teaching and in far more creative and collaborative ways than traditional educational institutions currently allow and in ways that foster social and communication skills.
Within espra, members can receive PECUs for facilitating the learning of others. It provides an alternative avenue for expertise to be recognised and rewarded.
With espra, the value is in the network.
It is therefore in the interest of espra and its members for as many people to be able to access the network as possible, thus growing the network.
espra will therefore sponsor the deployment of free wireless networks as widely as possible, benefiting from the resultant activity on the network.
We have conversations of various kinds in various places. Some of the most important being those related to the common interest, traditionally regarded as politics.
espra will enable enriched democratic conversations in public spaces and new forms of conferences, augmented by contextual summaries and voting systems amongst other things.
As with many things enabled by espra, the physical world will be reflected in the virtual and vice-versa.
One form of augmented dialogue that will be enabled is collective journalism.
Everybody has a cameraphone these days and everyone has an point of view. espra enables people to report events that they have witnessed personally without being filtered out by the traditional media establishment and publish those reports globally in various formats in order to help to improve democracy and accountablity.
Likewise, collaborative film making and music production/composition will also be enabled by leveraging espra's Collaborative Media Platform.
espra provides trust maps as a mechanism for improving the quality of search results based on who you know and how much you trust them on particular subjects.
An example: A person (Peter) trusts another person (Mary) on a subject (cars), so Mary enters Peter's trust map for any car-related subjects.
When another person (Rudolph) does a search for something related to cars, if Peter is in his trust map the search will include results from those people who are in Peter's trust map on the subject of cars such as Mary.
Hiring professionals to carry out work such as plumbing and building is a difficult matter.
espra allows professionals to be rated by their peers as apprentices, journeymen and masters. This makes it easier to hire a professional with an appropriate level of experience at an appropiate rate.
espra also helps to improve the quality of the work by introducing a process of review of the work done by another professional thus raising the standard of work done.
The hirer will be able to contribute his own rating of both the professional and the reviewer, thus providing useful consumer information for future buyers of the services.
espra enables new forms of decentralized organisation.
In the trust-led organisation management model, espra members can participate in projects, select the project tasks that they will work on and receive PECUs for accomplishing the tasks.
The PECUs in turn can be used to purchase goods and services on espra, fund projects and enable them to take part in project-related decision-making.
espra's internal economy is based on PECUs (a form of reputation-based currency) enabling espra members to buy or sell goods and services on the network from each other.
espra provides the mechanisms to enable members to create and exchange their own reputation-based currencies for their own purposes.
Amongst other things, this will enable users of existing local currencies such as LETs and Timebanks to bring their schemes online and into the espra network and provides them with an accounting system.
espra provides a new form of opt-in advertising where you only see adverts relating to things you are interested in by filtering them via your trust map and you actually get paid for viewing the adverts which changes the economics of spam drastically by increasing its costs.
Bartering is a money-free form of exchange.
However, it is usually done in the form of a straight swap between two parties. This is because of the time and complexity involved in doing more complex barter transactions.
espra enables complex, multi-party barter exchanges by exploiting the power of the network.
espra provides a toolkit that allows people to build and make available their own tools on the espra network.
If you have ideas on how to make espra better, this will allow you or someone else to make those ideas a reality.
This ensures that over time, espra will be more useful to you and more effectively serves your needs.
The toolkit enables the user to exploit the queryable structured data on the network and build/reuse composable services.
espra is a huge supporter of the public domain and is intent on a vast expansion of it.
It therefore provides tools and support for creating, storing and searching public domain material.
espra also sets aside a portion of its profits in the form of PECUs to create a Commons Cultivation Fund.
This will be available to support projects that benefit the common welfare of humanity locally and/or globally.
Criteria that projects will have to meet include environmental sustainablity, social justice and contribution to the public domain.
espra ensures that bloggers and others that make recommmendations of value will receive PECUs for doing so. This is done in a simple, easy to use way.
A portion of all transactions is contributed back to those who made the recommendations that led to those transactions.
Imagine a cross between youtube and myspace that's on steroids.
This gives you an idea of the power of espra's collaborative media platform.
It enables people to create, edit and share video/audio content collaboratively. It provides media tools suitable for both professionals and amateurs.
Do you know what your family, friends and colleagues are doing right now?
espra enables you to keep track what the people you care about are doing and their whereabouts in a way that respects privacy, both theirs and yours on the basis of given permissions and mesh identities.
This allows for greater forms of serendipity, so if for example a friend happens to be in the same area at the same time, you are made aware of this and you can arrange to meet for a drink.
By aggregating the knowledge and intelligence of members of the network, espra enables the harnessing of a new form of hive intelligence. This can be used in surprising ways such as prediction markets.
In order to support ethical shopping and sustainable economic development, espra is supporting the creation of the Ecology 1 Million index which will only list companies that meet the criteria regarding ethical trade and environmental sustainablity.
This provides assurance that espra members are buying from companies that are making a positive difference in the world by contributing to the welfare of the Natural Commons we all depend on by conducting their business in an ecologically sound manner.
ESPRA 24 concepts for changing the web and the world