References to other projects which came up as inspirations to the yunity platform.

foodsharing.de

This section explains a summary of the current functionality of foodsharing.de.

The purpose is to allow people to share food that would otherwise go to waste. There are 2 sources of food:

• excess food from participating stores (a store), e.g. Bio Company
• extra food that people have themselves, e.g. a bag of flour they won't use

foodsharing.de provides the structure for people to organise all of the tasks involved in this process:

• getting new stores onto the platform
• arranging good times to pick up food
• picking up food from stores
• mentoring new people on how to do food pickups from stores
• handling complaints / abuse / conflicts
• communicating with press / PR / social media

Perhaps it's helpful to think about the tasks into two types:

• those things that are directly about sharing food
• the administration layer needed to co-ordinate these people

Types of users

There are a few different levels of user, depending on their involvement with this process:

foodsharer

The basic user type, can take food, and can share their own food.

unverified foodsaver

When a foodsharer wants to become a foodsaver they read some information and do a short quiz and if they pass they get to this stage. it allows you to apply to join a store but not collect a pickup.

verified foodsaver

To get to this level they have to have done 3 store pickups with a mentor.

They are able to:

• search for stores that need help with pickups, and request (to the store manager to do those pickups)

BIEB (store manager)

Responsible for:

• contact between a store and foodsharing.de
  • make initial contact
  • arrange time/dates for collections
• decide whether to accept request from verified foodsaver to do pickup
• managing the group related to store

ambassador

A regional manager.

Responsible for:

• allocating newly applied unverified foodsavers to a mentor to do their 3 pickups
• doing press work (local media, PR, etc)
  • being the person a newspaper can contact
  • some also do social media aspects

They probably have too much to do right now.

store chain manager

Managing interaction with the parent entity for a chain of stores (e.g. Bio Company). This is because the staff in each store in the chain cannot decide on policy themselves.

Types of things

Store

A store can be active or inactive. Inactive means it has no pickups.

A pickup is when the store has some food available to collect, mostly these are prescheduled (?) but could be more spontaneous (?).

A store has members that are part of that store (anyone that is unverified foodsaver or higher can apply to the store).

Group

A group is a collection of people and a communications channel for those people.

They are all private, to get access a user can request access (?).

There are two types of users:

Groups are quite simple and people get no special permissions on the site by being in a group.

They can be geographically based, but do not have to be. They come in a big heirarchy, the top part has country-level groups for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, above this is a kind of super admin level (but it would be good to make this level go away and instead split up by Community).

Freedge / fairshare point

This is a physical location that you can share/give food. Anybody can set one up and register it with the site, providing they either own the property it is on, or get permission from the owner. This person becomes the administrator.

It has a team (group?) associated with it that handle things like cleaning.

It has information about it including things like opening times.

Sometimes people have events that are sort of associated with them, there might be a kitchen that people can meet in and cook together.

Notifications

If something changes that you might be interested in you will get a notification about it, they are viewed:

• as email notifications (if you were not online)
• inside the web interface (red dot in corner)
• in a list form (to see all of them)

Complaints / abuse / conflict resolution

At the moment this is handled by a central team, and this is one of the main motivations for creating the concept of a Community.

Communities

At the moment foodsharing has a deep heirarchy of groups, some of them are geographical, some of them are not.

They all descend from some top level things, so the top level has control over everything. The idea of Community is to avoid having anything at the top level in this way. A Community is more autonomous and does not need centralized management (global/top-level aspect like abuse reports, and super admin type tasks would still be available).

Stack Exchange

In the beginning there was stackoverflow.com. I place where programmers can ask questions, and get answers from other people.

They realised this kind of website would work well for questions about anything: bicycles, beer, gardening, martial arts...

So, they created stackexchange, a place where people can create a question and answer community around a particular topic.

It works like this:

There is a black stack exchange header at the top of every community:

A menu on the header lets your see the communities:

Your account for one community works for all the others, when you join a new community you see:

On the main stackexchange.com site, you can actually see content from all communities:

And a nice patchwork of the communities:

Your inbox is shared across all communities: