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.
It looks like the kind of thing where a protocol is not enough, an actual legal entity is needed.
Something like blablacar, bur run as a cooperative would be a great idea.
Absolutely, I would consider instances that are run by cooperatives, probably with some segregation between drivers and passengers.
Other examples of instances could be:
I’m sorry, maybe it’s my white male cis privilege speaking, but I don’t see how minority-run service can ever be a realistic solution. Well, it could be if you live in London, New York, San Francisco, or a few other global cities large enough that the minority population can provide the services you need. But that could never be a solution for smaller places where there may be at best a few, for instance, LGBTQ taxi drivers (if any).
What you want is a service that will take steps to prevent any mistreatment (e.g. in car cameras) and that has a strong reputation for taking complaints seriously.
And while this may not apply directly to women (definitely not a minority) I still feel that requiring prevention and accountability is a much better solution than segregation.