Any taken-for-granted public infrastructure has detailed intellectual underpinning. This page shares evolving thinking about under-the-hood details required for POEMs (Public Official E-Markets).
“Like water out of a tap” suggests something effortless. But chemists, physicists, meteorologists, geologists, geographers, and engineers running public water supply draw on a huge body of knowledge. Any platform for economic activity operating as a public utility will likewise be complex behind-the-scenes. But if the thinking is solid, users should be as uninterested in the minutiae as most water consumers.
The briefings
- Definition: The 10 points that distinguish POEMs from other e-markets.
Requirements of legislation to enable POEMs:
- Legislation Checklist: Some prompts on points to be covered.
- Legislation Primer: More detailed analysis of likely content for any legislation.
- Maximum Average Transaction Size (MATS) rules: Why/how small purchases should be favored.
- Ensuring Decentralization: Federated operators, franchisees, the role of external apps.
- POEMs’ Role in Democratic Checks and Balances: Transparency, bulwark, failover rules.
- Ten Point Checklist: Standards for POEMs’ implementations.
Possibilities for POEMs:
- Technology Schema: A starting point for an “everything store” for the micro-economy.
- Public Assistance and Support: How POEMs could modernize the social safety net.
- POEMs for a Transition Economy: How POEMs might be initiated for troubled nations.
What we mean by “POEMs”
These briefings explore broad possibilities for a policy that creates a set of online marketplaces for local people and businesses in any jurisdiction. We call the system of online markets to be initiated POEMs (Public Official E-Markets). It is described at ModernMarketsforAll.org. But, specifically, by that term we mean a comprehensive platform for online transactions that is:
- Funded, designed, built and run by an independent consortium of operators, decentralized with local entrepreneurs having a vital role. Diverse organizations operating POEMs are united only in a need to recoup their investment by growing activity in those markets.
- Granted unique access to official facilities without being beholden to any official agency.
- Constrained by public service obligations including a Maximum Transaction Size, transparency, robustness of service, accountability and the right of any user to take their identity and trading data to any other system at any time.
- The result of an independently scrutinized, competitive, open, selection process to find the winning consortium.
Superficially similar services are possible. However, we are emphatically not describing any system of markets that is:
- Under the day-to-day control, tangentially or directly, of any part of government.
- Unfettered in operators’ freedom to; charge as they wish, limit functionality, take a position in markets they enable, or select the sectors they serve.
- Favoring – in any way – specific users defined by ethnicity, political stance, economic power, gender, geography within the service area, language, or educational level.