Sharing the load effectively

At the end of my last post I said I was wandering off to think about scalable, low-overhead recommendation systems.

It’s funny how preconceptions work. I know, I think better than most people, how often decentralizing systems to avoid single points of failure is good engineering. Yet I had to really struggle with myself to jettison the habits of thought that said “If you want to use money to help people, you’re going to have to build a centralized, heavyweight structure around the management of that task.”

But struggle I did. Because I’d already tried that, and failed.

I also had to get past the idea that identifying good funding targets can be crowdsourced. Nope. Identifying candidates and digging up information on them can be, but actually evaluating merit and centrality will take knowledge most contributors not only lack but have no strong reason to try to acquire.

Once I got my head clear, this is what came out:

http://www.catb.org/esr/loadsharers

The basic trick here is piggybacking not just on the payment transfer capacity of remittance systems but on their patron/client communications channels as well. That way Loadsharers doesn’t need to manage anything itself other a handful of adviser web pages and a bunch of trust relationships.

Also notice the implications of how I designed the Adviser role. By the time we have a half-dozen or so advisers I won’t be key man anymore. That’s intentional.

I also like the fact that there will, in effect, be a (mildly) competitive market in adviser skill, with loadsharer contributors tending to gravitate to advisers who exhibit activity and diligence. That’s intentional too.