Latest revision as of 15:28, 20 June 2026

💡 In simple words: This page explains why and how WikiDeal can grow and work for many people around the world. It talks about fair prices, trust, and how everyone can join together to make one big shared marketplace.

Why and How WikiDeal Can Work: Deployment Strategy & Shared Vision

From WikiDeal, the Wikipedia of e-commerce — R&D Research Portal

This page presents the reasons we believe there is strong growth potential for WikiDeal. It complements the founding research hypothesis — "Can users own, run and sustain a global marketplace?" — with a concrete shared vision and deployment strategy rolled out progressively, through organic market expansion.

These are not promises. WikiDeal is a proof of concept and a citizen science project. But there are substantive reasons to believe the model can achieve broad adhesion. They are laid out here as success levers — the possible sources and drivers of success.

Each lever is a conjunction of several sociotechnical innovations working together. This page does not describe the innovations themselves (see the Innovations Index for that); it describes the competitive advantages that emerge when those innovations combine. The levers are open and expected to evolve over time; these are the initial proposed levers, all subject to community review via the Open Call process.

The levers are presented by audience, in order of appearance — the publics that join WikiDeal one after another as it grows:

(A) Early adopters — pioneers, influencers, opinion leaders who launch the platform;
(B) Communities & online marketplaces — long-tail and Social & Solidarity Economy networks that migrate in;
(C) Legal professionals — lawyers and jurists who formalise and adapt contracts;
(D) Users at large — the broad public, whose lower final prices, more flexible services, and built-in dispute prevention make WikiDeal attractive. This last audience (D) is the principal lever for broad deployment: if WikiDeal offers a marketplace with better prices and more flexible services than the competition — bootstrapped by volunteering, as on Wikipedia, and sustained by rewards for contributors — broad adhesion becomes probable rather than merely possible.

A. Early Adopters — Pioneers, Influencers & Opinion Leaders

This first set of levers mobilises the early adopters (pioneers, influencers, opinion leaders): the people who launch User Groups, bring their communities, and contribute both money and ideas to this participative platform. They are drawn by WikiDeal's free culture (open licence and open content) and its purpose as a commons. These levers rest on a body of sociotechnical innovations combined for effect.

1. A Commons They Co-Own: Exit to Community

Early adopters do not merely use WikiDeal — they progressively own and govern it. The Exit to Community lever combines progressive transfer of governance, proportional voting rights tied to participation, and community-elected bodies, so that control increasingly resides with those who use and contribute to the platform. For pioneers, this means their early energy compounds into lasting influence over the platform's direction.

2. Efficient Funding Mechanism

Early supporters who believe in the project receive proportionally greater rewards as it grows. This efficient funding mechanism is a conjunction of innovations — a Bonding Curve (transparent, mathematically fixed issuance of Credits) coupled with a Funding Stabilizer (dynamic recalibration of newly generated Credits between community and individual rewards). Together they give early adopters predictable, adaptive incentives, aligning personal reward with sustainable, community-beneficial growth.

3. Organic Deployment Rewarding Initiative

Markets need not be created from above — they emerge from citizen initiative. Small entrepreneurs, associations and cooperatives launching their own User Groups (babysitting networks, transport cooperatives, tool libraries, artist collectives, tutoring circles) bring both supply and demand simultaneously. This lever combines Community Migrations, Living Labs and a co-opetitive structure: rather than a cold-start marketing campaign, growth is organic, stimulating merit and personal initiative and rewarding those who invest energy in building their community's marketplace. Competition is internal, productive and governed — better service without destructive rivalry.

B. Communities & Online Marketplaces

The second audience is made of existing communities and online marketplaces — from the long tail of niche networks to the broader Social & Solidarity Economy (SSE). These groups already have internal transaction flows and trust relationships; WikiDeal offers them a shared home that multiplies their reach without dissolving their autonomy.

4. Community Migrations & Autonomous User Groups

This lever combines Community Migrations with autonomous User Groups: communities migrate their practices onto WikiDeal's framework while keeping their own governance, their own commission rates, and their own contract adaptations. SSE actors — cooperatives, associations, mutual-aid networks — find a platform whose values (commons, fairness, participation) match their own, and whose tooling lets them scale without surrendering control.

5. One Unified Platform: Rings of Trust

Fragmentation is the enemy of small players. This lever unites them: all the small players ally on a single shared platform and, together, outcompete large incumbents — not through acquisition or aggression, but through structural fairness and network effects. Rings of Trust connect User Groups across domains (a babysitter's Miles Credits become usable for tutoring, transport, or festival services), track records follow users across contexts with consent, and contract models are shared and improved collectively. A single, well-governed commons is more powerful than many small private silos.

C. Legal Professionals — Lawyers & Jurists

A distinctive audience for WikiDeal is the legal profession. Lawyers and jurists are not bystanders here — they have an active, remunerated role that turns legal expertise into a growth lever.

6. Legal Facilitation: Coaching, Contracts & Arbitration

This lever combines collaborative contract editing, peer endorsement, and arbitration into a professional opportunity for jurists:

Coaching & contract formalisation — lawyers help formalise and adapt wiki-edited, versioned, community-validated contract models to specific needs, generating income for them.
Prevention over cure — by building clear, fair contracts up front, jurists help prevent conflicts rather than litigate them, a more sustainable and reputation-building practice.
Peer endorsement — volunteer lawyers endorse models and take named, accountable responsibility (Peer Endorsement), making contracts legally credible across jurisdictions.
Arbitration — jurists can participate in dispute resolution via Arbitration Chambers.

A growing library of ready-to-use contract models in free access (employment, volunteering, bike loan, childcare, tutoring, co-housing, and more) is browsable by anyone; lawyer-endorsed versions add legal credibility. For jurists, WikiDeal is a new field of practice that aligns income with conflict prevention.

D. Users at Large — The Principal Lever for Broad Deployment

The broadest audience — and, as stated in the introduction, the principal lever for large-scale deployment — is the general public who buy and sell services. For them, three advantages combine: lower final prices, more flexible services, and built-in help to prevent and resolve disputes.

7. Fair Commission Fees & Attractive Pricing

What matters most for broad adhesion is attractive pricing — a marketplace with better prices than the competition.

WikiDeal's commission hypothesis ranges from 5–15% (vs. 10–50% for most incumbent platforms; see Revenue Structure). This is not zero — those who deploy and operate services must earn a dignified, decent income. The goal is not to impoverish service providers, but to eliminate extreme profit extraction — the winner-takes-all logic of GAFAM and net-economy IPO culture.

WikiDeal escapes this logic by design. As a commons — governed by Exit to Community and structured around co-opetition — it does not need to conquer. It can grow without buying or destroying competitors, uniting the strength of the small (unir la force des petits) against the large incumbents through structural fairness.

For large portions of the population, a 10–20% saving on everyday services is meaningful — not a luxury, a necessity. When the incumbent extracts 25–35% and WikiDeal charges 5–10%, the difference stays with the service provider and lowers the price for the client:

Service providers earn more per transaction — or can offer lower prices and still earn the same.
Clients access services previously unaffordable, or save meaningfully on regular expenditures.

Bootstrapped by volunteering (as on Wikipedia) and sustained by rewards for contributors, attractive pricing and fair, lower commission fees are what make broad adhesion probable.

8. More Flexible Services

WikiDeal is designed to be more flexible than existing marketplaces. This lever combines several innovations into everyday flexibility:

Many contract models — employment, volunteering, bike loan, childcare, tutoring, co-housing, and more — freely browsable, with lawyer-endorsed versions unlocked via subscription.
User Groups — autonomous local or thematic communities with their own governance and adaptations.
Miles Credits — a complementary currency for exchanging housing, transport, food and services within Rings of Trust, beyond cash.
Open Calls — seasonal invitations to propose improvements, new contract models, or new marketplace types.

Users are not locked into a single offer — they choose the model that fits their community, budget and values. A low subscription barrier reinforces this: anyone can browse freely; the CHF 1/month subscription (CHF 10/year) is due only when a contract is signed, never for browsing.

9. Dispute Prevention & Trust by Design

For users at large, confidence comes from help to prevent and resolve disputes, not from marketing. This lever combines several trust mechanisms:

Corrective & compensatory measures — dispute resolution via Arbitration Chambers and redress options within contracts, resolving problems fairly without external legal systems.
Participative Contracts — open, community-validated agreements (like Wikipedia articles) replace opaque ones, making expectations clear up front and preventing conflict.
1 user = 1 vote — participatory governance gives users genuine decision-making power, so the platform cannot be redirected against their interests.
Track records & decentralized, consent-based data — parties can consult or require the other's track record, shared only by mutual agreement within Rings of Trust, building trust gradually without centralised surveillance.
Community signals — declared interests, User Group membership, volunteering history and Miles Credits use give a richer, more human picture than a star rating.

Preventing the Cold Start Effect

A legitimate question — and WikiDeal's answer through dogfooding.

Arriving at the right moment

Beyond any single mechanism, one lever matters above all: arriving at the right moment. Timing is itself part of why the approach can work.

The cold start effect — and why it is not a dead end

Any platform that depends on its users faces the well-known cold start effect: the service is only valuable once enough people use it, yet people only join once it is valuable.

WikiDeal does not deny this challenge. Its answer is simple: Wikipedia faced exactly the same problem — and overcame it. The same path is possible here, on one condition: dogfooding — using and growing the platform from within, starting with a concrete, well-chosen first use case.

Focusing on a first use case: babysitting

The strategy may evolve together with the steering committee, within the framework of this prototype experiment aimed at raising one million Swiss francs. It is likely that efforts will focus on a single use case to begin with.

Preliminary studies showed that one of the easiest use cases is to enter a lightly occupied market. On both legal and market grounds, babysitting stood out as the most workable starting point, because it:

speaks to every kind of audience and is immediately easy to understand;
is legally straightforward;
can extend naturally to personal services at large — notably the much-under-recognised informal caregivers (“proches aidants”);
can be deployed internationally with equivalent good practices.

Personal services in the broad sense open up many options — for example people on mixed housing-and-life contracts: individuals with limited means who, having lost a partner, still have the physical capacity to care for an older person; people in migrant situations; and many others.

A two-tranche funding plan

The one-million call for support is divided into two tranches:

First tranche — roughly CHF 200,000–250,000 — to deploy a base technology designed to maximise user autonomy.

Inside this base technology sits a dedicated AI (WikiDeal Internal AI). When someone arrives with a babysitting contract template from their own country, the AI automatically analyses it against the rules it has been given, and transforms it — so that a person does not need to be a lawyer to contribute ideas.

A built-in safeguard alert makes the limits clear, for example:

“As long as no lawyer has validated it, this contract template is not necessarily guaranteed — you use it at your own risk.”

The chicken-and-egg problem

The cold start effect takes a concrete form here: a chicken-and-egg problem. To run pilot experiments, WikiDeal needs user communities. But for the delegates and representatives of those communities to trust the platform enough to take part, they need clearer rules of the game and more finished examples — and there is always the fear of who dares to go first.

The counter-example is Wikipedia itself: its user groups started organically, with one, two or three people creating a small structure among themselves, which then grew. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive — WikiDeal deliberately combines them:

a from-scratch approach (building a community from the ground up);
a migration approach (existing communities bringing their practices in).

How the two funding tranches address it

First tranche (~CHF 200,000–250,000) — pure dogfooding. At this stage there is neither from-scratch recruitment of outside groups nor migration. WikiDeal simply builds its own community, using the attraction of the bonding curve and participatory funding as the lever — the mechanism that de-privatises the venture and keeps it from becoming a private company, so that it can theoretically be deployed at large scale. This first tranche is the sole dogfooding experiment.

Second tranche (~CHF 800,000) — opening up through calls. The remaining funds finance open calls, clearly open to any kind of community. Spheres of activity will be defined — and, very probably, WikiDeal will deliberately avoid attacking very mature markets head-on, such as short-term housing (Airbnb-type) or taxi transport (Uber-type). It will not offer immediate alternatives in markets that are already broadly established.

Summary: The Shared Vision

Audience	Lever	Key pages
A. Early adopters	Commons they co-own (Exit to Community)	Exit to Community
A. Early adopters	Efficient Funding Mechanism	Bonding Curve
A. Early adopters	Organic deployment rewarding initiative	Community Migrations
B. Communities & marketplaces	Community Migrations & autonomous User Groups	User Groups
B. Communities & marketplaces	One unified platform (Rings of Trust)	Rings of Trust
C. Legal professionals	Legal facilitation: coaching, contracts, arbitration	Peer Endorsement
D. Users at large	Fair commission fees & attractive pricing	Revenue Structure
D. Users at large	More flexible services	Innovations Index
D. Users at large	Dispute prevention & trust by design	Arbitration Chambers

WikiDeal is not a promise of success. It is a structured hypothesis, pursued as citizen science, with a deployment strategy designed to make broad adhesion probable rather than merely possible. These are the reasons we believe there is strong growth potential.

Gov/en/Portal:R&D/Research:Why-And-How-It-Can-Work: Difference between revisions