Center for Adventure Economics

We coin the term adventure economy to refer to a gift economy that is pay-forward, in-person, global and among strangers. In any economy, there are challenges in allocating resources effectively and avoiding abuse, but these are of special concern in non-market economies among strangers, where we don't have the information mechanisms of the price system ([1], [2]) nor of social relations, and we are also missing the risk-reduction mechanisms of contracts. In this group we develop the allocation and risk-reduction mechanisms for CouchSurfing, an adventure economy.

Basics

• The Presentation: The Future of Work, Fun, and Being Social. Slides by Joe Edelman
• Backgrounder: Motivations for a non-market, pay-it-forward global system by Joe Edelman
• Getting involved:
  • http://couchsurfing.com/group.html?gid=4350 (on couchsurfing)
  • http://groups.google.com/group/adventure-economics (on google groups)

Initiatives

• The Adventure Economy Portal: building a gateway for those who wish to participate in the adventure economy
• Trust API: providing a standard way for sites featuring trust and references to export those so that a persons trustworthiness can be evaluated in other projects
• Opportunity API: providing standard search and aggregation mechanisms for (person, place, time, activity) tuples
• Adventure econometrics: measuring the health of adventure economies
• Random Action: a proposed companion site to couchsurfing that's all about random acts of kindness, and raokserver, the software that will run the site and provide add'l features for CouchSurfing as well

CouchSurfing-specific Groups

• Trust and reputation: risk-reduction strategies for CouchSurfing
• Efficient allocation of hospitality experiences (i.e. the CouchRank algorithm)
• Free life: extending the systems we develop to other economic activity

Conferences to attend

• http://www.oekonux.org/list-en/index.html
• http://events.ccc.de/camp/2007/Home Chaos Communication Camp 2007, in Germany, August 8th lasting until August 12th 2007

See also

• CAE Dream Team
• "Sharing Nicely": On shareable goods and the emergence of sharing as a modality of economic production by Yochai Benkler
• Why is the Public Sector so Large in Market Societies? (summary)
• Non-market economics (on Wikipedia)
• Commons-based peer production (on Wikipedia)
• Social capital (on Wikipedia)
• Money and the Price System By C.H.Douglas
• Businessweek: The Sharing Economy
• The economics of sharing
• wikipedia:Sharing
• Sharing Nicely blog

Drafts

• Moving from free software to free life by Joe Edelman and Kasper Souren