World Web Trade - open source web trading project
Paul Boddie
paul at boddie.org.uk
Mon Oct 5 16:15:01 UTC 2015
On Monday 5. October 2015 17.26.22 Samuel Caraliu wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm Samuel from Bucharest, Romania. I'm new on this list but i'm a close
> follower of the international news feeds on FOSS and other content alike
> for more than 5 year.
> I'm writing this entry to present something i think is a great idea on how
> to transform the internet into a free and really open market.
>
> The core ideaz of this project are:
>
> - It would be nice to have an worldwide publicly available data on
> products and services request;
> - It would be nicer if worldwide trading would be made in a much
> transparent environment;
> - It would be more interesting to have a general worldwide public data
> on the global market.
When you write "products and services request", are you referring to the
concept known as "tendering" in British English? In other words, where a
(typically) public organisation states an intention to procure or buy a
product or a service and invites bids from potential suppliers.
I did look briefly at this activity in Norway, and there is a site that
publishes these requests (https://doffin.no/), but there were several problems
with it around transparency, in particular that essential documents were often
available only on request, meaning that a corrupt procurement process could
"forget" to supply one or more documents and then disqualify a supplier on
technical grounds. It is unclear whether such faults have been remedied since
I last looked. The above site has been restyled, but it would actually require
continuous auditing to make sure that any tender was conducted fairly.
I see that there is also a European site for tenders
(http://ted.europa.eu/TED/main/HomePage.do), but I imagine that since it
probably just aggregates them from different services, it is not in any
position to improve the situation with regard to the problems I described
above.
> So around these issues the WWT project is oriented.
>
> I'v presented the project in a few words here
> http://mediawrite.eu/world-wide-trade/ and for the moment i'm looking for
> some observations from other people who are familiar with the free software
> movement. I'v talked with a few programmers in Bucharest who find the
> project interesting, and i'm trying to find other opinions on it.
>
> To be honest, I really like this idea but if its something interesting just
> in my opinion, I would leave it and not get involved in development around
> it.
I did have some brief contact with a company that was attempting to establish
price transparency in a particular global market. That kind of exercise is
quite interesting: where suppliers do not publish their prices and make
exclusive contracts, you get customers to share the quoted prices in a way
that protects the anonymity of the customers whilst letting everyone see what
the market rates are. I can imagine that many different markets would benefit
from this.
Of course, private businesses are not necessarily obliged to conduct fair
procurement, or at least not at the same level as public organisations, so an
emphasis on price transparency probably goes a lot further in solving the
problems people have in the private sector.
I think you have to decide what problems you are trying to address before
sketching up a technical architecture that risks not solving any specific
problem at all.
Paul
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