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