In the long term however, a mailing list is too limited to promote effective time trading. A more natural forum will need to be constructed, which provides for the following key activities:
Profiles communicate a developer's background and skills to the community, allowing help seekers to find help providers based on area of expertise. Profiles could be augmented by community members based on completed time trades.
A bid is an offer of an amount of labor by an initiator (the person starting the bid) in return for another amount by a responder (the person who responds to the bid). The forum's bidding system should be able to express bids like "I offer at least 5 hours and up to 10 by twice your hours for satisfying task Lyn-1120," and should relay counteroffers back and forth until an agreement is reached. More generally, bids could be seen as tuples of (min hours, max hours, labor function), where labor function takes the amount of hours spent by the responder and returns the amount of hours to be spent by the initiator. A typical labor function might look like this:
def labor_funtion(responder_hours):
return responder_hours + 15
combined with a min hours of 15 and max of 25, this could be an extremely enticing grovel for the right expert resonder, since a 3 hour time investment by the expert could yield 18 hours of labor for his own project. Even if the expert miscalculates and spends 20 hours on the problem, he has still acquired 25 hours of the initiator's labor.
Even bids (where inititiator and responder spend the same amount of time) can be accomplished with the identity labor function, and sufficiently fringe min and max bids. Even bids would be common in the case that both participants are experts in different areas and novices in different areas. For example, a Smalltalk ace learning Lisp could make an even trade with a Lisp guru just learning Smalltalk.