I'd like to introduce a new community project for allegro.cc, where people put their talents to use and leverage the knowledge of others for the greater benefit of the community.

Let me explain. Imagine three allegro.cc members, Mike, Dave and Brent.

Mike is a pixelation wizard. Mike has just finished a new shareware allegro game, widely acclaimed for its beautiful polished graphics. He would like to get it ported to linux and Mac OS X. The problem is that he doesn't really know Linux, and he doesn't even have access to a Mac. The game is closed-source, but it isn't raking in the dollars just yet so he can't just pay somebody to do it.

Dave is new with allegro. His programming skills are really not great. He's good with web design though. He has started up a few team projects that got nowhere at all. For each of these projects he created a nice website with separate forums and dynamic contect all with php and AJAX. The games themselves got nowhere though. Perhaps if he could get some serious help in the graphics department, he could kick some life in one of these projects.

Brent is a great developer. He's doing work on the Mac OS X port of allegro. Plus he is a debian package maintainer, and he hacks away on a few open source projects. His projects are listed on his website, which has a "designed for netscape 1.0" button on it, next to the eternal "work in progress" line (with blink tag). He'd really like to update his website, but then he has to read up on CSS and with all his other projects he really hasn't got the time.

The ideal solution for these three people, of course, would be that Mike creates graphics for Dave, Dave updates Brents website, and Brent ports Mikes closed-source game. Everybody happy. This kind of deal is not very likely to happen though. Who is in reality going to sit down like this and mix and match needs and opportunities? Besides, would Brent be prepared to port a closed-source game for free, or would Mike be willing to share some of his (probably very low) profits?

Introducing: the Allegro Trading System. Hereby I introduce an imaginary currency unit, which I shall call the "Allegro Rupee" (with a wink to the Zelda Games), and the value of 10 rupees will be roughly equal to one hour of work. Allegro members will be able to post jobs and advertise their talents on these forums, and do some work in exchange for Rupees. The currency is completely virtual, and an impartial and trustable accountant (i.e me, for now) will keep track of balances and transactions.

(Of course this type of thing is often called a Local Exchange Trading System, except that this one is not Local in the literal sense)

How will this work in practice?

- You sign up by sending me a PM. (Only allegro.cc members can sign up). For this you will get a one-time only interest-free loan of 100 Rupees. This is the equivalent of 10 hours work. The initial loans are necessary to bootstrap the system.
- You advertise your talents on the allegro wiki (see link below), and at the same time offer jobs for others.
- If you want to make a deal, you should make agreements by PM or by email. You should approach this like a business deal, putting pay, time schedule and deliverables in writing as well as possible.
- You can charge an hourly rate or a fixed amount. 10 rupees per hour should be the norm, but if your skill is in high demand you may charge a little more. Since there is no actual money involved, you shouldn't be too worried about getting ripped off. The worst that can happen is a few hours of work going to waste. Of course, since this is a small online community freeloaders will be exposed quickly, and stealing is impossible because there is only one place where balances are kept.
- For the moment, I will do bookkeeping by hand. If the system gains popularity, we'll set up an automatic web interface.
- When the work is done and you are ready to pay, send me a PM telling me how much you want to pay to whom, and I'll do the bookkeeping and send PM's with the new balances to both involved.
- You can enquire anybodies current saldo with me by PM.
- I will closely guard the current value of the rupee. As with real money, printing more money leads to inflation. The only time rupees are added to the system is when a new member signs up and takes out a loan of 100 rupees. This I guarantee.

We could set up a more democratic form of government in the future, but for now I want to see how many people are actually interested. Don't be afraid that this will cause you a lot of work. If you want to join but don't want to spend more than say 2 hours per month, that is just fine. It will mean that you won't have many rupees to spend, but that is ok too. Remember that the things you are going to do are those things that you enjoy and are good at, so they should be easy for you.

I've given a few examples of what skills you can offer, here are some more examples
- writing documentation
- writing tutorials
- testing
- testing on different platforms
- translation to your language
- spell checking in your language
- pixelated graphics, sound, music, 3D models, level design
- openGL experience
- network programming experience
- experience with specific algoritms or techniques
- cross-platform makefiles
- scripting
- writing development tools
- optimizing stuff
- etc...

So, who is interested?

edit: I've set up wiki pages to list Jobs and Talents.

• Introduction

• Job listing

• Talent listing

edit: changed initial fund from 50 to 100 as discussed later in this thread

Awesome idea! I'm in! Here are my talents (will probably edit later):

• testing and porting to Linux

• translation to my language (slovenian) and spell checking

• programming nearly everything: gfx rendering (plain Allegro and OpenGL), audio and music programming, AI, etc.

• user interface design and implementation

• writing development tools (editors for all kinds of stuff)

Don't forget it's equally important to list jobs (if you have them).
Oh, and I should post my talents as well.

talents

• GFX: my GFX are perhaps not great, but not that bad either and I like to do it. Check e.g. the screenshots of Mars for stuff I can do. edit: For these medium-quality sprites I'll charge 6 rupees/hour, a bargain!

• trigonometry stuff

• Astar pathfinders

• translating / spell-checking Dutch

• optimization

• PERL data mangling / text parsing, or any PERL related issue

• anything related with Bioinformatics / Biology

• java GUI's in SWT

jobs

• I want to create an OpenGL extension of my tilemapping library. I've been putting this off because I don't know OpenGL well enough. OpenGL in 2D skills needed.

  
  

• I'd like some help redesigning my website. Php + xml skills needed.

Now back to the discussion:

The point is, that not everybody does everything in the same amount of time. I can do some things faster than you, and you can do some things faster than me. Also, what is boring for you may not be boring for me and vice versa.

I don't propose this as a solution to anything. I just propose this as a cool idea that we might try out and see if it works. I'm not giving guarantees of fitness or suitability to any particular purpose. If it doesn't work then well... no harm done, right?

You see this too much in terms of "team projects". It is everybodies experience that team projects don't work, and this system won't make it work all of a sudden either. The point is simply to get some external help with things that you aren't good at, nothing more nothing less.

Having said that, pixelation skills will surely be in great demand. Somebody with good pixelation skills may be able to charge twice the normal rate.

Of course. The only way to get currency is to do some work first. Nothing for nothing.

Again, you think of "team projects". I agree with you that especially well managed teams won't have a need for Rupees. The problem here is, that there are hardly any well managed teams here.

-decent CSS and PHP skills
-translation to Italian
-decent C\C++ programming with 2d Allegro, but i'm sure there are dozens of better programmers on these boards
-can port to Windows
-i'm studying Computer Engineering so i guess i could learn a few useful things with time

Hmm, this sounds like an intrigueing idea....

Edit; ooh, you could make a web page with our a.rupee balances that we could link to in our sigs, then we could keep track of each other, maybe do a rating system too.

Not a bad idea. It is like the eBay for Animal Crossing, where people offer items for bells to be used by the game. I can do anything that has to do with programming in C, C++, design, UML diagrams, documentation, etc. I can make scripts in Perl if someone needs to do a lot of stuff in text files, write regexps, HTML, CSS, etc. Note that I am terribly busy as of now, we are trying to achieve the CCHIT certification for our software product and will likely have to work overtime until the exam, in mid July.

How do you deal with inflation? How many rupees are minted? And, if, for example, you pay some arbitrary sum for a website, doesn't that devalue the currency? Or do you have to take out a loan to pay that, as well? Can people apply for bigger loans?

Marcello

50 rupees per person joining.

Yup, so I'm not going to do that. I'd have to make 500 first before I could order that site from BAF (assuming that nobody is going to undercut his bid). So I'd have to do about 50 hours of work... It might take a while before I can afford that. Then again, others might e.g. voluntarily donate to help me afford it, if they think the cause is worthy.

No, for now. If the need rises in the future, we'll have a thorough discussion about the pros and cons. Right now that is all academical.

Possibly, but AR only has real value if you have jobs for others to do. See what I mean?

Well, the value of money depends largely on trust. The value of the american dollar is stable because most people trust the government of the USA not to do crazy things with it like print tons of extra money. They also trust that others recognize the value of the dollar as well, so it's a solid basis for fair exchange.

So the question really is, do you trust me? And do you trust the other allegroids to recognize the same value for AR as you do?

I will sign up once there's a nice website for it

Sounds like fun, so count me in.

Just one little thing. I'm no expert in economy, but shouldn't there be a way to generate new money? As I see it, there are now just 50 AR per person in the whole system. The only way to keep it going is if everyone would immediately spend everything they have. That's not going to happen so pretty soon there will be some people with a lot of virtual money (and no way to spend it for whatevar reason) and some with none. You have to put more and more virtual money out into the system, which decreases its value (inflation) and consequently encourages spending. Also 50 AR at the start when 1 hour of work costs 10 AR seems like not very much. This virtual economy will need a much stronger kickstart before it gets enough momentum to keep itself running without too much external intervention...

Also there will inevitably be some people who will earn more and others who will spend more. This will lead to a lot of instability without some sort of corrective mechanism. One possible solution would be a possibility for those who have mone to put it in the virtual bank, and those who need more than they have, to loan it from the bank...

Could we act as a bank? People can lend up rupees with interest while we invest it in feasible projects and get more rupees in return.

We could have our own global economy that is presented on the news channels.