Karmawish, The First Global Community Based On Mutual Help And Exchange.

Nov. 10, 2009 - PRLog -- Paris 11/10/09 – Karmawish, a community website based on mutual help, has gone public.  Created in the same spirit as sites such as Couchsurfing, members of Karmawish are able help each other for free from virtually anywhere with an internet connection. Based on the Karmic law where one’s good deed triggers a positive reaction, Karmawish makes it possible for each member who helps another to receive help back from a third member of the community.

Karmawish was created by two young Frenchmen: Guillaume Besson, a computer engineer, traveler, multilinguist and singer, and Lucien Letellier, a technical director in a web agency who is passionate about photography and Africa. Tapping into the bonds that can be created between strangers via the internet, they realized they could create a unique exchange platform based on the oldest economic system: bartering. In this case, the bartered “goods” are favors.

How does Karmawish work?

By becoming a member and by helping someone who posted a wish on the site, each user earns a karma-credit.  Karma-credits enable the user to post his or her own wish in return and get helped by a third member of the community.  Contrary to existing systems, it’s the third person who gives help in return, not necessarily the one who got helped in the first place – a new type of “pay it forward” model.

Members can ask for local help (learn how to swim, cat-sit over a weekend, assist with a move) and also for favors through the web (information needed to plan a trip abroad, finding a Skype language partner, etc.). As such, it’s possible to be helped not only within one’s physical community but also from the entire internet community – which may be someone on the other side of the world.

A promising project

After six months of beta testing, Karmawish launched its official multilingual public version on September 29, 2009.  Within a span of three weeks more than 1,000 members from 25 different countries had started exchanging favors.  
The website hopes to quickly reach a size where it will be fast and easy to respond to every member’s wishes. To help facilitate growth, the originally English site has been translated into French, German, and Spanish; languages such as Chinese and Arabic are soon to follow.
As crises force the world to rethink the economic model, Karmawish has the potential to fulfill big wishes for a very small price: free.

Contacts:
Guillaume Besson
guillaume@karmawish.com