DnD I totally understand your goal: centralizing postage while facilitating people finding enough "good enough" one-on-one trades to motivate them to send out one box for many trades in return.
That's a noble goal, especially for those with rare seeds or specific, exotic desires. A swap like that might draw out people who gave up on trading seeds years ago "because you can't find any one person with enough interesting seeds to be worth spending $12 on round-trip postage (or $7-8 with bubble mailers).
For a moment I was excited that you or Dave might jump on the 3-way idea ... three way seed trades, that is.
Where :
- A wants what B has
- B wants what C has and
- C wants what A has
In principle one might be able to write software to:
1. scan N Want lists and N Have lists, then find all 2-way, 3-way or 4-way potential trades.
2. Propose the trades via automatic group TreeMails.
3. If they agree, then they can all join the same swap and swap those seeds (and others) via centralized postage.
Of course, each possible link in a chain of 3-4 trades could fail if:
- the Want or Have list was out-of-date or
- the member dropped out of contact or
- any of the people doesn't consider the Counter-Offer worth as much as the Offer
- any of the people are too busy to join a swap
Best to run such a search on Have and Wish lists that are up-to-date. Maybe the Swap Offer and Wish Lists will be more up-to-date than the Plant Database Have and Want lists.
