WikiDeal is an applied research programme that designs, tests, and publishes models for commercial platforms that are owned and governed by their users. The project draws its name from two sources: the wiki model of collaborative, open knowledge production (as pioneered by Wikipedia), and the concept of a deal — a fair agreement between parties that is transparent, auditable, and mutually beneficial.

1. The Fundamental Question

At its core, WikiDeal investigates one question: Can a commercially viable platform be structured so that its surplus benefits users rather than private shareholders? This is not a new question — cooperatives, credit unions, and mutual associations have attempted versions of it for centuries. What is new about WikiDeal is the combination of tools it brings to bear: free-licensed software, algorithmic bonding curves, decentralised governance tokens, and the legal architecture of a Swiss public-interest foundation.

The project does not assume that traditional commercial platforms are evil, but that their incentive structures systematically favour capital over labour and use over contribution. When Uber, Airbnb, or Amazon take 15–30% of every Transaction, they are extracting value that, in a well-designed system, would remain within the community that generates it. WikiDeal asks: what is the minimum Commission needed to sustain the Infrastructure? The answer, it turns out, is 1–2% — not 30%.

The R&D programme is iterative by design. Prototype 1 is an explicit first draft — a carefully argued but avowedly improvable model. Its purpose is to establish a baseline, attract community critique, and fund the Open Call competitions that will generate Prototypes 2A, 2B, and beyond. WikiDeal is not a startup racing to scale; it is a research programme building knowledge that can be freely copied and adapted.

2. The Macrocapitalism Problem

The macrocapitalist model concentrates platform ownership in the hands of a small number of investors and founders, who are then incentivised to extract maximum value from users. This creates a structural misalignment: the people who do the work (babysitters, tutors, drivers, craftspeople) receive as little as the platform can get away with paying them, while the people who own the equity receive compounding returns. WikiDeal calls this the extraction gradient — the distance between what a Transaction is worth and what the transacting parties actually receive.

Over time, this gradient widens as platforms gain market power. Network effects lock users in, making it progressively harder to leave even as terms worsen. WikiDeal's counter-proposal is not regulation (though regulation may help) but architecture: a platform designed so that its governance, its economics, and its code all work against extraction and toward circulation of value.

3. social entrepreneurship as a Response

WikiDeal uses the term social entrepreneurship to describe a model where thousands of micro-s transact with each other on Infrastructure they collectively own and govern. Each Transaction generates a small surplus that, instead of flowing to distant shareholders, is distributed according to rules the community itself sets. The Commission (1–2%) covers real costs. The remainder stays in circulation among contributors, funders, and beneficiaries.

social entrepreneurship is not anti-profit; it is anti-extraction. A babysitter who uses WikiDeal earns the same hourly rate they negotiate with the family. The platform's cut is transparent, minimal, and auditable. When the system generates more than it needs to operate, that surplus flows back — to fund new features, to subsidise Credits for users who cannot afford them, or to reward early funders who took the financial risk of funding the project before it had proven itself.

4. History and Context

WikiDeal is rooted in a decade of digital rights activism and platform governance research at Ynternet.org Foundation. The foundation has been exploring internet governance, digital commons, and participatory technology since the early 2000s, and WikiDeal represents its most concrete commercial application to date. The living laboratory context is provided by Ecopol, a sustainable community project that serves as a real-world testing environment for WikiDeal's economic models.

The conceptual lineage includes Elinor Ostrom's work on commons governance, the Exit to Community movement, the Fairbnb cooperative model, and the token engineering research community. WikiDeal is, in a sense, a synthesis of these strands — an attempt to operationalise decades of theory into a platform that actual babysitters and families can use tomorrow.

5. The Ynternet.org Connection

Ynternet.org Foundation is a Swiss public-interest foundation (). It hosts WikiDeal as a research programme and holds the intellectual property under free licenses. This structure ensures that no private entity can appropriate the model: the foundation's mandate requires it to act in the public interest, and its assets cannot be distributed to private beneficiaries.