Sharing platforms and Sharing Economy are the main representations of the third pillar of the Circular Economy and that theme was the one we used to carry on the Congress.

Sharing Economy is something that has been created any years ago, within the philosophical line of the Happy Degrowth.

The first time I saw a Happy Degrowth example was back in 2006 when I was in Boston for a Study-vacation. The washing machine was shared among all the people living in the building, meanng that we had to book our slot to wash our clothes.

That’s a nice thing, as in this way, the building had just to purchase some washing machines to make enough turns for everybody to wash clothes.

The same scenario happened to me in the Netherlands when I was in a dorm, with 50 individual slots. 50 people regularly living there and we had 3 washing machines. There, we had literally to fight to get a slot as there was not booking agenda.

Think of it for a moment: if we had a washing machine per single slot, the dorm would have had to purchase 50 washing machines. That would have been quite an investment to purchase devices that would have stayed off for the most part of the time. With less washing machines, the time that they are used it’s necessarily higher a more efficient usage and a far lower initial investment.

Source: https://studyinsweden.se/blogs/2022/05/22/how-does-a-shared-laundry-facility-work/

And that’s exactly from where Sergio de Prisco, our speaker for this pillar, started from, bringing up some examples from 2002.

What is the set-back here?

How do we know, if there are people misusing them, who is really misusing and causing damages to the machine?

That’s when the “reputation system” came up, forms of evaluations and reliability of the suppliers could be established.

A 5 out of 5 stars supplier will be considered much more reliable than a 2 stars supplier. Then also reviews came in and fixed parameters to evaluate more deeply the supplier and make sure what the next customers could expect from it.

Anyway, like we say in Italy…

*When the law is made, the way to bypass it is also created.*

A new business line was then created called the “trading of qualified reviews”. Trustworthy accounts were created to make reviews of products/services to make them more attractive from the customer.

It has been done a lot (at is currently done as well) on major marketplace, the ones where your probably buy books getting them within hours or a few days.

SO, the topic of digital reputation and of the value of the vote became of major relevance.

In the third pillar of the congress, Sergio de Prisco, had a speech called

“The role of trust: decentralized identity and reputation”.

Source: Presentation of Sergio de Prisco at the Congress

The idea was continuing the narration from the second pillar, where the decentralized manufacturing has been introduced by Giovanni Padula, giving a lot of insights about what are the opportunities but also the threats of decentralized markeplaces and why the reputation is so important.

Source: Presentation of Sergio de Prisco at the Congress

Relevance of decentralization gets bigger when there are

• Multiple involved parties
• Different organizations
• Divergent interests
• That has to share data
• Without a single entity guaranteeing data reliability

Reputation gets more and more relevant, important and reliable the more parties are taking part into its validations, with different observers evaluating the same scenario.

How to do that?

There are some basic forms, that I use as well when designing tokenomics and incentive systems and it’s that a customer has to be real, needs to really experience the product/service, is on the platform eventually since some time and will be asked about specific aspects of the product to check if the answers it gives are matching with the use of the product/service it has really done.

For example, if I am selling a huge variety of ice-creams and icicles and a real customer wants to review my service I can cross-check what kind of product he has bought. If he bought ice-creams and he is going to review icicles, I will not accept its review.

On another hand, if he is trying to review my service, I will try to punctually track the expedition AND the delivery to see what and how he can really review it.