introducing ecomodo : a tool for every community

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Comment by Meriel Lenfestey on August 10, 2010 at 13:56

I'm Tracy's co-founder on Ecomodo. I want to respond to Clare's comment.
Your location on the site is shown as sector level postcode (N16) or on a map based on where you placed yourself during registration. We encourage you to place yourself as accurately as you feel comfortable depending on your local area.
Full address information is passed on to the other party once both sides have agreed to lend / borrow. This means that you can control exactly who will see the location.
Hope this answers your question - do ask for more information.

Comment by clarewhite on August 9, 2010 at 14:39

hi Tracey, just one thing stopped me completing the registration form - I don't necessarily want to share my personal address with people I might be willing to lend stuff to. I appreciate you might need it as a security check and backup if something goes wrong, but on what basis do you share people's addresses?

Comment by Tracy Currer on August 5, 2010 at 7:42

Hey Phil .. Good questions and in reply ..

1. Yes. From our site an RSS feed can be taken from any ..
• location - London, Kent, Manchester or Croyden, East Boldre | From homepage explore a location
• lending circle - schools, workplaces etc
• individual - so they can display their own items / wanted ads on their own blog

(BTW The reason for only a few results in Kent is we only have a couple of member there - pls help us get more :-)

2. Local currency.
To encourage people to feel more comfortable about lending we wanted to create a system that facilitated the entire process (including currency handling) to enable us to offer simple dispute resolution.

We did loads of research very early on regarding alternative currency. Around LETS, timebanking, points, barter & exchange systems etc etc. In order to become effective and useful at a very local level we needed to appeal to everyone and found these type of systems appealed only to a niche market. Unfortunately it is a fact of the world we live in that most people will join a scheme only when they can see what they will get out of it. And a lot of these schemes have been around for many, many years and are still very, very niche - In itself this tells us a lot ;-) This is why we created 3 ways people can choose to lend (free, fee, charity). And opted for "real money" as our currency as is universal and it made sense with our deposit and insurance options.

If one alternative currency became prevalent throughout the UK (perhaps with Big Society) then we would definitely look at how to embed it in Ecomodo. Right now to include all types of local currencies around the UK would be impractical for us to deliver. ( We are a v. small social enterprise with minimal resources - And so far not everything that has been borrowed has been local :-)

Comment by Phil Green on August 4, 2010 at 21:46

Hi Tracy, excuse if dumb questions but
1. could a hyperlocal site just (or just as a start) use an rss feed? eg substituted 'kent' for 'guernsey' on rss url which seemed to give a few results.
2 also wondered if you'd considered giving people the option of paying / charging in local currencies?

Comment by clarewhite on August 4, 2010 at 15:23

Look forward to trying out the site Tracey, looks great. Tools like this that can help people facilitate their ideas is just what communities need.

Comment by Tracy Currer on August 4, 2010 at 15:11

mmm .. interesting. Ecomodo a platform for the App store? I think we would have a long way to go to achieve this ;-)

Ecomodo is a service that make visible community based resources for other to use on a temporary basis. I think "the app store/platform" would need to be so much boarder and intelligent in the way it connected and pulled together content from different apps/places (unlike Apple's store ;-)

At one point during our initial research we thought about incorporating a "community of interest" module to enable people to come together + discuss the things they were passionate about but to be honest there are so many of these out there already it seemed silly to reinvent the wheel. So instead of growing one big service that tries to do everything, the approach we have taken (or will be) is to find alternative ways to simply plug our service (+ content) into other people's existing digital communities. Our initial first step has been to simply add RSS feeds to our site. This enables people to add a notice board on their site/blog to display the resources they have or need (either around a location or community). An example of this is on this blog (scroll down on right hand side of the page)

I think the overall issue is how to bring together existing useful tools/services in a smart way that makes it easy for people to use (and identify the those that are missing). This is what social media is starting to do much better job of doing. Another part of the challenge may be to look at what a "developers" tool kit would need to be for the App store.

Comment by David Wilcox on August 4, 2010 at 8:37

Thanks Tracy for giving us the personal story behind such a useful community building tool, gadget, platform, system ...well, over here we are calling them Social Apps and looking at ways to build an App store so people can choose what's appropriate. I should tnink Ecomodo deserves an end of aisle display! Do please drop a cross reference into the Social App Store group so people there pick up on your post.
Further thought - is ecomodo solely locality based or could it work for a community of interest? Maybe even as an Apps Store?