links for 2007-05-04

• CouchSurfing
  An interesting example of the internet’s geography of passion. A hybrid physical/virtual community where people track down likeminded individuals across the world, creating greater common understanding through cultural exchange in the process.
  (tags: community collaboration)

• Who is Sick?
  This kind of social monitoring system for important information like disease and disasters is most useful in combination with more rigorous information analysis, like Larry Brilliant’s INSTEDD project.
  (tags: community Organisation collaboration participation)
• DoMyStuff.com - Outsource Your Life...
  Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is an example of farming out a large number of micro “Human Intelligence Tasks” to a network of knowledge workers for money. DoMyStuff brings this into the physical world with a marketplace for daily chores.
  (tags: community collaboration Organisation participation commerce Individuals)
• WorldChanging: Tools, Models and Ideas for Building a Bright Green Future: seedPOD: A "Wikiseedia" for the Future of Food and Farming
  Online systems improving the efficiency of physical distribution are essential for a low carbon economy - for instance creating local networks which make and distribute everything from power to food as close as possible to the end user.
  (tags: knowledge collaboration opensource participation decentralisation aggregation network)