WeSharity [PHP|Symfony]

I remember seeing a billboard in the German elections from the Communist Party "Die LINKE" saying: "Millionaires should pay more". Why should they? I wondered, being a German tax payer.

So I thought about the main problem that was addressed: there are poor people and there are richer people. Richer people (call them "scrooges") mostly want to do good but not by paying taxes. Poor people (call them "tiny tims") need or wish for something special they could never afford. I want to bring those together.

Now, there's an obvious problem: on a platform where Scrooges can connect Tiny Tims directly, no one can tell if both parties are what they pretend to be - leading to potentially dangerous conflicts.

With WeSharity we want to create a proof-of-concept platform where Scrooges ("want to give") and Tiny Tims ("need to have") can connect each other via a trustful profile in the middle (call them "Bob"s). WeSharity brings the parties together. Here's a real life example.

Tiny Tim is a small boy living in Northern Moabit. His parents got a divorce and his mother has to work all day, without earning enough money for special wishes. Tiny Tim badly wants to learn playing the guitar. He writes his wish on WeSharity and asks Bob in person to acknowledge the post and. Bob gets in contact with Tim and verifies he's a little child wishing for a guitar. Scrooge has a heart for music and finds Tiny Tim's post which has been anonymised. He's spending 500$ for the guitar and gives it to Bob. Bob buys the guitar and gives it to Tiny Tim.

There are two big common social donation issues solved: 1) "millionaires" should never be able to connect "little girls" directly. 2) the man in the middle is acquired by a "web of trust". Every man in the middle must be verified by two others.

For the Hackathon we're going to condense the idea and start implementing a role based profiling site for scrooges and Tiny Tims.

We're setting it up on PHP/Symfony2 since we're most comfortable with it (even though the idea is apparently a classical RoR candidate ;) ). So if you're interested in joining us you should a have a firm knowledge in PHP (or good reasons to make us install and learn Ruby over night). But we're absolutely looking for developers! Get in touch with @stadolf if you want to join.