Potluck -
Exchange resources without money or barter

If you have a community of people looking to offer gifts, how do we coordinate that going to the right people? This question came to mind as I was working with a mutual aid in San Diego.

We put out a form asking what gifts people would want to contribute and received over 500 responses with offerings ranging from a drum set, a kid's bicycle, a remote therapy session, and so much more. There were so many latent resources and generosity in our community that we didn't have a way to coordinate.

This inspired me to start building Potluck, a coordination tool that allows someone to add an offering, select what they would want in return (if anything), and then automatically be told who to give an item to and who to receive something from.

This website currently works with just a single community and a single pot. It is a teaching tool for how to understand this process.

This is an MVP (minimum viable product) for running Math Trades. The hope is that it can facilitate a math trade for things other than boardgames, which was the intention of the original TradeMaximizer.

Innovation

To create the wantlists instead of using a grid like the OLWLG and Abecorn, or setting individual values, instead we simply sort a list. This means that the process of evaluating trades for the user decreases from O(n^2) to O(n) complexity.

Source Code

Credits and Prior Art