nep.work in a nutshell
We are a community that develops omnichannel platforms for sales and delivery of services through work contract exchanges and pre-purchases.
Think of us as an e-commerce platform for trading service agreements and insurances (eg for event organization and logistics) instead of products. And as a hospitality platform operational at every accessible venue instead of a particular location (eg hotel, stadium, hospital, website, app, etc).
Omni-channel
A single channel, physical or digital, is not always enough for modern e-commerce and high-frequency transactions. Neither is a basic multichannel strategy. For every nep.work trading agreement related interactions between providers and consumers, we strive to bring together all available digital and physical real estate, payment gateways and logistical solutions. As we will have a singular (but distributed) functional core, these various interaction points for the market will always be in synchrony and harmony with each other. That said we will still have service providers with brick and mortar shops and traditional online catalog-sales style webshops and apps.
Our sole product and exclusive service is the work exchange platform and its customer support program respectively. We have a foundational infrastructure for a contractualist service exchange, with or without money, backed by immutable, reliable and publicly verifiable structures such as blockchain and in-memory Merkle DAGs. The platform also has formal and socio-technical mechanisms to verify proof of work (PoW) for a given fulfilled contract. A verified PoW can be used for adding a new block of data to our blockchain and related persistence systems.
Sales and Delivery
Our services can be sold as contracts, insurances and barter agreements. When money is involved, the transactions can be made using local payment channels or our on-delivery cash service. Payments in kind or barter may be included before, during and after the delivery as per the specific Trading Agreement (TAg). We also have logistics partners and will soon announce a unified access API and SDK for our TAg management, payments, and delivery.
Work Exchange
Our work exchange platform goes beyond a freelancer network for posting and grabbing project offers. After a service request or offer is posted, there is either an open or closed negotiation between the provider and consumer parties. Optionally, an auction of the type chosen by the author of the post may be created to bypass negotiations and find optimum pricing options without involving senile Walrasians.
Work exchange also enables us to remain self-organizing and self-preserving. We have learned from similar communities on the web and throughout history and created a public reputation-based trust system.
Providing such services in itself is also a part of our work exchange program. For every project, the project's team may have various developers, artists, sponsors, volunteers, reviewers and even the audience itself due to our democratized innovation and feedback mechanisms. Membership in certain negative income tax service provider communities can help offset your monthly income in case it dips below a predefined baseline. Similar 'buffer financing' or insurance services also exist for the projects in the nep.work community. Finally, most communities and workgroups have a meta group that is responsible for critical reviews and future roadmaps of the group.
