Surplus exchange protocol
A small protocol for surplus exchange between organisations, borrowing from gift economies and applying it to organisational slack.
- Status
- still going
- Since
- 2026
- Topics
- Design Fiction · Systems Thinking
- Live at
- sep.willosborn.xyz
Organisations carry slack: underused capacity, spare expertise, idle infrastructure. The market for this slack is thin. It’s hard to price, hard to discover, and awkward to contract for.
Gift economies handle surplus differently. The obligation is diffuse, the accounting is social not financial, and the relationships it builds are durable. This exploration asks whether a lightweight protocol could make organisational surplus exchange work like a gift economy rather than a market.
Early stage. Currently mapping what kinds of surplus are most exchangeable, what trust mechanisms are needed, and whether there are precedents in cooperative and commons-based organisation design.
