FEP-0837: Federated Marketplace

[silverpill]

Wanted items should also be Proposals, and the directionality can be specified using provider and receiver properties of the intents.

@lynnfoster and I talked about this in another thread:

@lynnfoster

We think of it that the money side would always be the reciprocal side, and that would follow through, not be based on the stage of the conversation. So primary always means “this is why we are doing this”. So even a “request for a service” exists because you want the service. The directionality is determined by the provider vs receiver.

One practical aspect of that way of thinking about it is that in a marketplace, if you are searching for what you are interested in, you shouldn’t have to see the reciprocal intents in your results. Or if there is matching logic between offers and requests, then reciprocal intents wouldn’t be part of that. I suspect our doc needs to be improved there.

Also noting that the reciprocal side won’t always be money, but in any case it will be “not the reason” that the proposal was made.

So, for example, if you have an Offer, the intents would look like this:

{
  "type": "Proposal",
  "attributedTo": "https://market.example/users/alice",
  "publishes": {
    "provider": "https://market.example/users/alice"
  },
  "reciprocal": {
    "receiver": "https://market.example/users/alice"
  }
}

And if you have a Request:

{
  "type": "Proposal",
  "attributedTo": "https://market.example/users/alice",
  "publishes": {
    "receiver": "https://market.example/users/alice"
  },
  "reciprocal": {
    "provider": "https://market.example/users/alice"
  }
}

It would be easier to use a single boolean property, but if I understood correctly Valueflows vocabulary doesn’t have it at the moment.