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Potluck: A hypersonic gift-giving game for mutual aid

Oren Robinson

Let’s Collab!

http://calend.ly/oren/1-on-1

Class project

YunoHost here & via Max’s SSH tunnel

A diagram with various hand-drawn shapes and arrows connecting elements such as "Potluck web game," "WAUG mutual aid," "Dweb Camp," "SFPC," "Svelte," "ECMAScript HTML CSS," "Graph Theory Math Stuff," and more.

Potluck: A hypersonic gift-giving game for mutual aid

Many people have met up to share their games with each other using virtual gaming networks like BoardGameGeek/BGG (https://boardgamegeek.com/).

Around 2007, Chris Okasaki implemented an unlicensed 700-line graph theory ‘Trade Maximizer’ for gift giving in the Java language, and it was shared to a message board on BoardGameGeek, where it’s been used periodically ever since to maximize the number of trades based on what games/items people want to give away & receive (known at BGG forums as ‘math trades’). Gifts are sent in the mail, or in person at “no-ship math trade” events.

Around 2018, Jeff Michaud translated that Java library into a 1600-line Javascript version.

Kev Nguyen is my neighbor & IRL friend who I met in a whatsapp thread in 2020 thru us both doing tech support in our local mutual aid collective, We All We Got SD, where we have also both gotten involved in other ways and gotten our material & immaterial needs met.

Around 2022, Kev created a nextjs-mongodb web app implementation of the 2018 Javascript trademax tool. We geeked out about it together and since a few months ago we are making it look/work nicer (and refactor to sveltekit) to start hosting monthly games at distribution days, and eventually we want to add in reparations logic weighting exchanges and one-way gifts towards those whose needs are most important to center (see our collective principles), while still prioritizing for “give-get” mutual aid pairs & rings.

Potluck: Implementation

A static-export sveltekit app with offline (browser local storage) single-player flavor (pass the phone around among players twice: once to add gifts, once to pick out gifts, then pass phone around to each gift-giver in sequence), and multiplayer yunohost server app flavor (anyone with the link can add gifts they want to give away & pick items from others & once everyone is done picking the trades instructions are displayed for each player).

Class collabs???

Recent past projects

Maatt’aam Kumeyaay: A Kumeyaay Calendar Web App

Lifecalendar.info: A perpetual leap week calendar based on a gregorian reform and 中国大学常用的学期日历格式

A gift for you

Some phone-size subtle nature texture backgrounds (<-- google photos album link)
(good for signal/whatsapp to customize your fave chat threads)

A collage of fifteen images depicting various outdoor scenes including cracked ground, water, clear sky, clouds, trees, grass, and sand.

A bit about me

I was raised on Haudenosaunee land (so-called syracuse, ny) 以及在上海、四川和北京都工作了几年 (worked some years in Shanghai, Sichuan and Beijing), now based on Kumeyaay land (so-called san diego, ca) since gregorian 2014. I love puns, etymology, growing plants, moon journaling, anti-imperialism, pic abolition, mutual aid, and Indigenous language revitalization.


More on the web: https://orenrobinson.com/

Goodreads: http://orenrobinson.com/books