How it works
One sentence in. One settled exchange out.
The loop
01 · Ask. One sentence, in your own words. No form, no category to pick, no budget to set. Or post an Offer, which is the same thing pointed the other way, and a Standing Offer if it is something you would do again and again.
02 · Connected. One to three people who could answer, each with a reason you can read. The one who says yes becomes Connected, and from that moment the two of you are talking and we are not in it.
03 · Exchange. The help happens between two humans. [Gigets holds the amount until it is done.]
04 · Settled. The exchange is priced, it enters both records, and it passes the challenge window. Only a settlement writes back to the map. An introduction is never an outcome.
Then somebody hears about it, and that starts the next one.
Watch it run on a made-up circle →
The three engines
Social Mapping Engine™ holds what a circle knows about itself. [Three strands per member: where they stand, what they can give as proven by exchanges they settled rather than by anything they claimed, and what moves them, across six dimensions. Sixty seconds at entry, and more accurate every time somebody settles something.] A circle is not a list of people. It is who stands near whom, and who stands between.
Social Routing Engine™ rules people out before it ranks anyone. Eleven hard rules run before scoring begins, because a rule checked after ranking is a rule that can be traded away. What is left is scored on capability, access, reliability, proximity, availability and balance, and the engine picks the cheapest person who clears the bar rather than the best person available. One name when one is clearly right. More only when we cannot separate them, because a list padded to three teaches you that the third name is noise.
QCS Engine™, Quantified Common Sense™, prices exchanges and never people. It measures how hard this was to arrange, given who was around. Not what the work is worth, and not what it cost the person who gave it. Eight inputs in three families: supply, effort and stakes. [Every price is set by comparison against exchanges that already happened, never by a number anybody declared.] A settlement sums to zero, and nothing exists outside issuance.
The words we use
Nine words mean exactly one thing here, and they stay in English in every language.
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Ask | One sentence saying what you need |
| Offer | One sentence saying what you would give |
| Standing Offer | An Offer you are happy to repeat |
| Connected | Two humans in contact. A human event |
| Exchange | The help itself, from agreement to delivery |
| Settled | Delivered, priced, in both records, past the challenge window. An accounting fact |
| Expiring | An Ask running out of time |
| Circle | A group of people who can reach each other |
| Grow | The feed, which ranks what is unanswered rather than what is popular |
Connected and Settled are never interchangeable. One is two people meeting. The other is the record of what they did.
The unit
One Giget is the smallest thing worth recording. Everything above it is learned by comparison and there is no ceiling.
A Giget cannot be bought, cannot be cashed out, and has no monetary value. It moves only as the settlement of an exchange that actually happened. Giving pays slightly more than receiving, which is what makes somebody go first.
Published in full: The Gigets Rules and The Gigets Schedule.