This may be a case of having a hammer and seeing everything as a nail, but I believe that the RADs! app can be used as a tool for assigning dynamic ownership of the commons.

What a Find!

• My family and I move to the wild West in our covered wagon.
• We encounter Native Americans and after some bravado, we share a meal.
• They point to an area that they don’t care for because there’s nothing to hunt or pick and it’s really dry.
• We settled and buy a land drill online.
• The drill is delivered by a drone.
• I drill a well and set up an irrigation system and the land is fertile.
• Another family shows up and wants to work the fertile land.
• We discuss the fact that the well is enough for the fields we’ve worked.
• The new family orders a drill online, as I recommended.
• They have to drill a couple of holes before they find water.
• Life is good.
• Then four families show up.

But… Who Owns the Land?

• The Native Americans choose not have title to it, but they did exclude others from their lands.
• Violence happened and then the settlers possessed some of it, but did not own it, either.
• Then came US legal corpus, and force, and the Native Americans were disposed of their land.
• The Europeans settlers were given title to the land they now posses.
• The US Army protected the titles.
• The Native American got screwed out their livelihood.
• The US Governments levied taxes on the titles to the land.

RADs! Mobile App

This is where the RADs! app comes in,

• As each family shows up in their covered wagon, we instruct them to download the RADs! app (i.e., if they can order industrial drills online, they can do this).
• The app is straightforward and they learn to use it right away with a bit of our help (i.e., we wrote the app).
• Whenever they see others doing something that they recognize as a contribution to their survival, they press the recognition button next to the picture of the benevolent person. They press it as many times as they feel like it. The more significant the contribution, the more button pushing it instigates.
• At the end of the month, the app calculates how many RADs each person gets (i.e., each person gets one RAD per-day to give to others).
• The amount of RADs represent ownership of what they’ve built together (e.g., the well, the irrigation, the fields, the advice and help others may have given them).
• Eventually, one family leaves.
• They continue to be co-owners of the land and continue to receive any money that accrues from it.
• As every day goes by, the people actively contributing to the land and its fruitfulness continue to receive RADs.
• Those who left do not receive any more RADs, so every day their percentage goes down, and down, and down, and … .

It all happens without shoot-them-ups or anything like that. Nothing but people helping each other out, creating a community, and learning from each other.

Maybe in a small community, but all good things must come to an end. Right?