Gov/en/Portal:R&D/Innovations:Community-Migration
This page describes a working hypothesis. It is expected to evolve according to the proposals of WikiDeal users.
💡 In simple words: Imagine you are stuck in a club where the grown-ups make all the rules and you can never vote. Community migration lets your whole group move to a fairer club — for the price of a snack — where everyone gets a say.
🎯 In 20 seconds (scientific summary): Community migration is WikiDeal's answer to the cold start effect: instead of buying speculative growth, WikiDeal onboards entire existing communities by buying back their client books at real cost, within a redistributive, non-speculative, commons-oriented framework. It is a powerful lever that turns the chicken-and-egg problem of marketplaces into a structured, opt-in migration.
The idea in one sentence
Community migration lets an entire community — the users, clients, suppliers and leaders of an existing marketplace — move together onto WikiDeal, on solid legal and community foundations, and become co-owners of the platform they use.
A reproducible model, aimed at the Long Tail. Community migration is designed as a reproducible model: what is tested on WikiDeal can be applied again and again to migrate many communities. Its target is the Long Tail (Chris Anderson) — not the "winner-takes-all" leaders of each market, but the many secondary players who together form a large share of the market and are often fragilized by AI and market concentration. These long-tail communities are precisely those for whom migrating together, on fair and democratic foundations, changes everything.
Buying back our freedom: the core concept
Being a member of a community whose rules of the game are not democratic is a form of digital servitude: the platform owners set the prices, change the terms, capture the value, and the users have no say. We accept it because leaving means losing our contacts, our history, our livelihood.
WikiDeal proposes a way out: we buy back our freedom. As a user, you pay a very small sum — around 10 to 20 CHF, never more — and in exchange you gain access to a more ethical environment, governed with and for its members.
This is not a purchase of shares and it brings no control for financial contributors, no jackpot, no shareholders. It is a redistributive mechanism: the sums paid buy back the community's own client book, progressively, and flow back to the people who built it.
A minority who serve and are recognized (the Wikipedia spirit)
As on Wikipedia, a committed minority of users and service providers become the key players of each migrated community. They:
- devote themselves to running and improving the community;
- benefit from equivalent advantages in return (recognition, real-cost conditions, a share in the redistributive flows);
- perform a civic act by contributing to the governance of the specific community that has just migrated.
This is the opposite of a passive user base: migration turns consumers into co-responsible citizens of their own marketplace, durably in charge as long as they are chosen by their peers.
- Special case — companies that paid dividends, or that hold infrastructure
- When the community to be migrated is a company that paid dividends before the buy-back, its running fees are typically lower (part of the value has already been distributed beforehand). A share of that lower-fee margin can then go to the users, and a share to the shareholders. The same logic applies when buying back companies that own infrastructure: part of the arrangement serves to cover the infrastructure costs. In practice these cases remain uncommon — buy-backs are harder when shareholders are involved — and typically arise around a risk of bankruptcy and a take-over at a low price.
How the migration works
A community migrates to WikiDeal through an opt-in, data-respectful process:
- WikiDeal buys back the client book (the base of users and relationships) of the community's leaders — not the goodwill of the business — for a defined sum (typically 10–20 CHF per user), paid progressively, as a small capped percentage of each transaction.
- The leaders keep running their activity, now as a User Group recognized by WikiDeal and the Ynternet.org Foundation, adopting participatory decision-making, arbitration and real-cost pricing.
- Each migrated user receives a WikiDeal subscription (around 1 CHF/month), a lower, real-cost commission, and a voice in governance.
- Growth and community ownership advance together, fully consistent with Exit to Community.
For the full mechanics (cold start effect, long-tail strategy, worked example, why this is not a private roll-up), see Cold Start & Long-Tail Onboarding.
Why it matters
Community migration is the lever that defeats the cold start effect: a new marketplace is empty, but a migrated community arrives full, from day one. And because the legal framework securing WikiDeal's own funding is redistributive and non-speculative, the same framework can serve many communities wishing to migrate on solid legal and community foundations.