Month: January 2007

“i say, old bean, have you seen my hat?”

Random IM of the day. I was in a goofy mood so I responded in kind. No response from the other end. Afterwards I googled the name and found this was something more, more on that below. But first, “our chat”;

2:00 PM
johnhatscroft: i say, old bean, have you seen my hat?
Matthew Baya: Sorry old chum, I haven’t. Have you asked Lucy?
Matthew Baya: I dare say she’s been looking dashing lately, per chance she might have seen it about town, if you know what I mean.
Matthew Baya: Sorry to hear that ol’ top is missing, it was quite the cap. Jolly good times you had with that on your head, no? Ah the memories, but I shant say no more of that in public. Nudge nudge
2:10 PM
Matthew Baya: You’re awfully quiet governor, what say you?
2:15 PM
Matthew Baya: Aw well, twas good chatting with you. Lets together and share a pint in a fortnight or so, eh? Jolly good, til then, ta ta.
johnhatscroft has gone offline.

—————–

So I googled ‘johnhatscroft’ and found this URL – http://kalephunk.livejournal.com/2006/06/12/ where the author details what she found out about this IM. Turns out this quote is from the Great Gatsby and this IM is from a ‘relay bot’ that posts the two sides of a chat to two different participants in a chat. So somewhere some random user got my goofy responses. I wonder do these bots archive what is sent? Maybe I’ll be published someday.

Good times. Practice random acts (kindness optional) 🙂

-Matt
PS – Thanks to [info]hopita for pointing out there is a LJ community for this at [info]themissinghat, I’m going to cross post this there.

Time Banking epiphany of the day

Before I get to the heart of this letter let me make a few definitions and updates so people have some idea of what I’m writing about here.

Time Banking – A Time Bank is a alternative to cash, where 1 hour of my time is worth 1 hour of someone elses time. For example I can spent 5 hours making a website for someone and then spend those hours getting someone to do some carpentry in our house or housesitting/dogsitting for us when we’re travelling. You can read more about this at http://www.timebanks.org/

I’ve been a member and a ‘kitchen cabinet’ member (which means I’m one of the advisory board) of my local Time Bank, the Downeast Time Bank (http://www.downeasttimebank.org/). We’ve been trying to figure out why we haven’t gotten more members and why things seem to be rather stagnant. I know personally that I’m not comfortable asking someone I don’t know to do something so thus I really only use the Time Bank with friends that I would have probably asked favors of anyways. So what does it take to get people to use this model? It’s a neat idea but it’s not catching on.

So this morning, while driving into work this morning my geeky mind started merging my current day internet/web social networking experience with the Time Bank model and I came up with this epiphany. Time Banking needs a ‘social’ networking model implementing ‘degrees of trust’ along the lines of what is used on LinkedIn (my LinkedIn profile is at http://www.linkedin.com/in/mattbaya). For example, I want to be able to mark the people I trust/know in the Time Bank as my 1st degree contacts, and their direct contacts would be my 2nd degree. I could mark my requests or offers to only be offered to those I know/trust personally (1st Degree), or to folks they know/trust (2nd degree). I think any further degrees out than that is a bit silly, the next level out would be ‘everyone’.

Along these lines I’ve also been pushing for our Time Bank to implement some ‘neighborhoods’ where you could basically trust a group for your offers/requests, for example I could mark my offer/request so it’s only visible to anyone who is part of my church or other non-profit organization. The same 1st Degree / 2nd Degree trust could be extended there, in that I trust any organization that members of the local Unitarian Church trust etc.

The argument against this idea is it ‘fractures’ the time bank, but if people aren’t using it as is, and they would in the fractured model, then hey.. they are using it, this is a good thing imho. You either swim & grow or you stagnate. Things seem to be stagnant right now, something needs to change.

The question is, will the folks writing the timebank organization software, Community Weaver (http://community.timebanks.org), ‘get this’ idea and actually implement it? All I can do is write this and send it around, the idea will either sink or swim. Here’s hoping this idea is a swimmer, I think this is what needs to happen to get this to catch on more.

-Matt