This is what happens to what you type into the registration form.
What you put in the registration form, including your WhatsApp number and the shop's address. If you tap “Use my location”, your phone's position is sent once to this site to find the village or town it falls in, and is not kept; nothing goes to any map company. Then, as you take part: what you propose, back, vote for and approve; what you write to the Commons number or to the group; and what you say to any assistant we run, human or AI.
To run the Commons: to send you your business's join link, to group similar needs into proposals, to count one vote per business, and to call you if we need to confirm a business is real. We do not sell it or use it for advertising.
The Commons runs on WhatsApp. Everyone in the group can see everyone else's number, as in any WhatsApp group, and we may use your number to put you in touch with other businesses, for example the businesses backing the same proposal. Nothing more than that: we never hand numbers to anyone outside the Commons.
The live board and the export show business names, proposals, votes as totals, and the ledger of what was bought. Once we have verified a business, its name is also marked on the map in the village panchayat or town it sits in. They never show a person's name, a phone number, a street address, or a payment id.
The Commons is an experiment in public goods, and we study it: the form answers, the votes and decisions, messages in the group and to the Commons number, and conversations with our assistants, including AI ones, may be read, analysed and summarised, by people and by software. We may publish what we learn about funding shared goods this way. In any research publication we remove names of people and businesses. In a small group someone who knows the businesses may still guess, so if there is something you would rather we did not use at all, tell a group admin and we won't. You may revoke your consent to be included in future research and publications at any time; what is already published stays published.
We keep it while the Commons runs, and delete names and numbers when it ends. You can leave at any time: message an admin of the WhatsApp group and we will delete what we hold about you and your business and stop using it. Decisions already made stay in the public record, without your name, because the other businesses' votes and the ledger depend on them.
Run by The Cybernetic Society. This is a private, independent pilot, not a bank or a government scheme.