It is starting from the other end, by making it easy for people to deal with little tasks and plans to work up to what you have in mind with Project Fosbury. You can read more about the idea at:

http://www.asix.org.au/idea/2-bobs-worth

The prototype site is live at http://www.2bobsworth.org.au and the code is on github (RoR).

Hopefully we can find some synergies!

Andrew
Director
Two Bob’s Worth Limited
(A non-profit social enterprise)

On http://www.wheredidmytaxgo.co.uk, you enter your gross annual income for each year from 2003-2010, your age and sex.

It will calculate the amount of tax and ni you would be liable to pay for each of those years. It then uses data from the PESA (public expenditure statistical analysis) to get the percentage of central government public spending in each spending area. It divides your payments up into these areas and shows you the total spent from your tax payments as well as an annual breakdown of your contributions.

Our tax calculator at http://www.uktaxcalculators.co.uk will give you more insight into your tax payments too!

Best of luck – and if and when the code is open sourced, I’ll see if I can’t contribute.

Yes I can add those to the list in the wiki, but probably not soon.

AFAIK if you lend a tool to a neighbour and they get hurt, you can be held liable if it contributed to their injury. Even if it’s not your fault, the hassle and cost of defending a claim is expensive. Generally a homeowner’s insurance will protect you from the cost of defending yourself but because of that, I’m happy to lend my neighbour my spade but not my chainsaw.

Now if I set up a scheme linking people willing to lend with people wanting to borrow, I am trying to find out if I will – as the broker – incur liability?

I’m afraid that the informal advice I have is that I would be. Certainly, if someone was hurt, someone would someday try to sue me and thus I would incur the cost of defending that.

The cost of getting a reliable answer is already too expensive. My intended scheme is for simple stuff like lending someone a high chair or a folding cot when their grandchildren visit or a ladder but those kind of items are notorious for accidents and hence liability claims. Under HSE rules, I would have a responsibility to regularly inspect the items loaned and keep the records and so on. Hence, this is why very few of these schemes exist.

Very sad.

PHP/MySQL applications are very hard for people to configure and get going. e.g. No standard way for database migrations etc.

Yes, I could have used Cake or Django – but 2.5 years ago they weren’t as obvious a choice as trying Rails. I think it was a good choice. I’ve learnt a lot about frameworks from using Rails. I don’t think it is especially good, but then again I haven’t found anything I think is better (Django is in some ways, not in others).

In practice, it hasn’t created more code contributions. Partly the Rails app is still hard to install (getting example data, setting up Xapian and various other bits). Partly it is just had to get code contributions to web applications.