Case: Buddhist Foundation

[erlend-sh]

While Weird is innately online, we also want to ground ourselves in the local and predominantly non-digital.

To that end, I've been in touch with the General Secretary (the bossman, if I'm understanding the non-profit lingo correctly) of the Buddhist foundation of Norway. He leads a center here in Oslo which I've gone to a couple times to meditate and socialize.

They'd like to connect local Buddhists who want to practice ‘right livelihood’ as ethical entrepreneurs. It’s part of the Noble Eightfold Path in Buddhism, somewhat similar to the Ten Commandments and other such holy texts. Right Livelihood is essentially about aligning ones profession (source of income) with ones spiritual code of ethics.

They wanna create a very basic network that can play the role of matchmaker for Buddhists in Oslo/Norway/Scandinavia who are interested in creating pro-social businesses together with likeminded practitioners.

The v1 of what they need is basically just an excel sheet, so I've recommend that they keep it as simple as that to begin with. But we're immensely excited about the prospect of this organizing being facilitated by Weird; it’s exactly this kind of local, grassroots networking that we want to emulate in the digital realm! 🌱

They'll divulge some personal information along these lines:

• name
• contact info
• interests
• skills
• location
• capacity (full/part-time)
• compensation (salaried or volunteer)

Based on that they can match people together and get them talking about possible alignments in their mutual ventures.

Eventually our network will be able to make all sorts of smartly automated connections between these people, but for a start just collecting them in a database is enough to let basic filters ("within 5-50km") and manual curators do the rest. It's a closed network, but their data will be available to everyone else on the network (we'll build in public/private toggles for data sharing later).

If this (Buddhist foundation in Oslo committing to a net-of-purpose trial) moves forward, which seems likely, they’re gonna do a bigger sendout to their members around 15. June 2024 🗓️

That gives us a soft deadline to work with. We're gonna try to have something minimally workable for them by that time.

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Requirements for this use case:

• #36
• #2 (MVP)
• Personal data information entry
• User directories
• Tags (optional)
• #35 (optional)

For future iterations we'll need need some notion of organisations and special signup links, like weird.one/org/buddhismnorway. That way their signup process would include certain defaults, like a pre-entered buddhism interest-tag, and default-private accounts, as set by the owners of that org.

But for now we'll just set them up on a dedicated instance like oslolivelihood.no. They'll be forewarned that their data is not guaranteed to persist during our pre-alpha, so they may have to re-enter their information at later stages for any number of reasons, like data loss or space migrations.