Skill Swapping Section

asea

I was just wondering if there could be a section for people to swap their skills for free? It would be a very 'MSE' thing to do I imagine...

Right! We all know the UK & London and so on is notorious for having a bad sense of community... but here we are - an online community

Could we have a skill exchange to build community ethos, get things done, save money and tighten our skills! What do you think?

If you have something you really need doing and either dont have time or dont have the skills and/or cant afford to pay for it, why not post it in here and see what exchanges of skills you can get?

Example - Person A really needs some shelving putting up but has no tools and no DIY skills

Person B is great at putting up shelves but can't cook and wanted to make a cake for their mother for mothers day. Person A can cook so they exchange skills!

C'est Simple!!!

note: no sexual favours are permitted

carol_a_3

I remember reading a few years ago in article in a magazine about a similar scheme where you "bought" and "sold" skills by exchanging coupon type things but I didn't follow it up. I don't know how it could work logistically though. My outside tap and garden fence need repairing. I'm good on babysitting, easy computing stuff, cooking, driving, shopping but not so good on plumbing and building stuff.

Snaggles

It would be great if you could join a scheme like this, I've often wondered if there would be a way to make it work.

You could offer your skills free to others, and receive credits for each hour of work you do, and then use these credits to 'buy' other peoples skills - there could be a set table of how many credits an hours worth of each job would cost (so for example, an hour of babysitting could be 1 credit, but an hour of hard physical or skilled labour like digging/bricklaying/plumbing could be, say, 3credits), and a rule about how far into credit/debit you could go, plus it could be like Freecycle where you have to do a job for someone else first before you can get someone to do a job for you.

(I'm not making judgements about who has the most valuable skills by the way, just thinking of a way to make it more attractive to people who could otherwise get paid for their skills, so that they would still want to join).

I think the difficulty would be in policing it, because what if you spend hours doing work for others, and then someone comes and does 2 hours worth of plastering for you but actually spends half the time chatting to their mates on their mobile - how would you prove they hadn't done a full 2 hours work etc.

I'm sure someone with a good business brain could make it work though!