At some point I was searching for an open source car pooling service. I realized there weren't any so I started developing one on my free weekends.
While I haven't made much progress so far, I have been observing how much as a society we have been relying on route planning software. Also, I cannot overlook the effect of such services on the planet (see Amazon, Uber, and many more).
With all this as a context, I have been asking myself the following questions:
- What would be the impact on society (especially inequality) if there were open source alternatives to such services?
- What would a common core look like? (i.e. what is the WordPress equivalent for transportation/route planning, is OpenStreetMaps enough?)
- What domain specific knowledge would it require to build such a software? (while in university I researched about the travelling salesman problem, anything else?)
- What safety protocols would we need to develop when there is no corporation insuring users? (i.e. if I order something from Amazon and it's dead on arrival, I get either a refund or a replacement shipped to me for free)
- What's the proper terminology to describe what I am describing?
Feel free to add any questions of your own. I created this post because I am free this afternoon and I wondered what it would like to discuss this with strangers instead of pondering on my own.
Edit: My free afternoon was taken away by an incident I had to respond to, it's now late o'clock here, but I will do my best to reply to all you magnificent people.
Disclaimer: I am not trying to make any money out of this. I just hate big corps and like coding.
Interesting take! So far, my carpooling MVP has been about bringing people in contact, assuming they can handle money transactions on their own. As you mention, jurisdictions are going to be a huge problem, which I wouldn't dream of handling on my own.
Here in Greece, the most popular media for carpooling is a Facebook group, where people can post either offers or requests for trips. So I tried to think of an MVP that could provide help those people while (a) not having to use Facebook and (b) have an improved user experience.
Under those circumstances your idea is awesome.
I would add a Feature where you can add recurring trips. For instance every Wednesday I will get groceries and if somebody also need a ride there he/she can join the ride.