At some point I was searching for an open source car pooling service. I realized there weren't any so I started developing one on my free weekends.
While I haven't made much progress so far, I have been observing how much as a society we have been relying on route planning software. Also, I cannot overlook the effect of such services on the planet (see Amazon, Uber, and many more).
With all this as a context, I have been asking myself the following questions:
- What would be the impact on society (especially inequality) if there were open source alternatives to such services?
- What would a common core look like? (i.e. what is the WordPress equivalent for transportation/route planning, is OpenStreetMaps enough?)
- What domain specific knowledge would it require to build such a software? (while in university I researched about the travelling salesman problem, anything else?)
- What safety protocols would we need to develop when there is no corporation insuring users? (i.e. if I order something from Amazon and it's dead on arrival, I get either a refund or a replacement shipped to me for free)
- What's the proper terminology to describe what I am describing?
Feel free to add any questions of your own. I created this post because I am free this afternoon and I wondered what it would like to discuss this with strangers instead of pondering on my own.
Edit: My free afternoon was taken away by an incident I had to respond to, it's now late o'clock here, but I will do my best to reply to all you magnificent people.
One word: trust.
On a small scale, a bunch of friends can trust each other. On anything larger than that, you need both driver and passenger vetting, and insurance, then you need a third party to decide in each conflict.
You can manage all the technical details as an open source solution, but the issue of decentralized trust among strangers would require:
To keep it decentralized, you could use crypto services to manage deposits, but would still need an external oracle to decide each case.