World Web Trade - open source web trading project

[Paul Boddie]

On Monday 5. October 2015 17.26.22 Samuel Caraliu wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm Samuel from Bucharest, Romania. I'm new on this list but i'm a close
> follower of the international news feeds on FOSS and other content alike
> for more than 5 year.
> I'm writing this entry to present something i think is a great idea on how
> to transform the internet into a free and really open market.
> 
> The core ideaz of this project are:
> 
>    - It would be nice to have an worldwide publicly available data on
>    products and services request;
>    - It would be nicer if worldwide trading would be made in a much
>    transparent environment;
>    - It would be more interesting to have a general worldwide public data
>    on the global market.

When you write "products and services request", are you referring to the 
concept known as "tendering" in British English? In other words, where a 
(typically) public organisation states an intention to procure or buy a 
product or a service and invites bids from potential suppliers.

I did look briefly at this activity in Norway, and there is a site that 
publishes these requests (https://doffin.no/), but there were several problems 
with it around transparency, in particular that essential documents were often 
available only on request, meaning that a corrupt procurement process could 
"forget" to supply one or more documents and then disqualify a supplier on 
technical grounds. It is unclear whether such faults have been remedied since 
I last looked. The above site has been restyled, but it would actually require 
continuous auditing to make sure that any tender was conducted fairly.

I see that there is also a European site for tenders 
(http://ted.europa.eu/TED/main/HomePage.do), but I imagine that since it 
probably just aggregates them from different services, it is not in any 
position to improve the situation with regard to the problems I described 
above.

> So around these issues the WWT project is oriented.
> 
> I'v presented the project in a few words here
> http://mediawrite.eu/world-wide-trade/ and for the moment i'm looking for
> some observations from other people who are familiar with the free software
> movement. I'v talked with a few programmers in Bucharest who find the
> project interesting, and i'm trying to find other opinions on it.
> 
> To be honest, I really like this idea but if its something interesting just
> in my opinion, I would leave it and not get involved in development around
> it.

I did have some brief contact with a company that was attempting to establish 
price transparency in a particular global market. That kind of exercise is 
quite interesting: where suppliers do not publish their prices and make 
exclusive contracts, you get customers to share the quoted prices in a way 
that protects the anonymity of the customers whilst letting everyone see what 
the market rates are. I can imagine that many different markets would benefit 
from this.

Of course, private businesses are not necessarily obliged to conduct fair 
procurement, or at least not at the same level as public organisations, so an 
emphasis on price transparency probably goes a lot further in solving the 
problems people have in the private sector.

I think you have to decide what problems you are trying to address before 
sketching up a technical architecture that risks not solving any specific 
problem at all.

Paul