Starter Kit. Idea 451 of 500. Cluster 24
A verified-review platform for Sri Lankan businesses where the reviewer is real and the review cannot be bought
The mechanism, from the book
The one thing. A country where people do not expect the rules to hold cannot build anything else, and proof can be manufactured by private people, one published record at a time.
The first step
Pick the restaurants in one town and write 10 honest reviews yourself, each with a dated receipt photographed as proof of the visit. Show the set to the owners and ask whether they would pay a monthly fee to be listed on a platform where every review is tied to a receipt and payment can never change or remove one. The proof is owners who sign up on those terms.
- Who pays first
- A good restaurant or guesthouse drowned out by fake reviews, which pays for a listing because honest reviews finally work in its favour.
- What leaves today
- Visitors cannot tell honest businesses from the rest, so the honest ones cannot charge for being honest; a review that cannot be bought is that proof.
Ask first
- Data Protection Authority. Ask what you must do before publishing reviews and the receipts that prove them.
- Department of the Registrar of Companies. Ask how to register a review business that charges the businesses it lists.
Check before you spend
Confirm how reviewers' personal details and receipts are stored, that businesses can reply but never pay to change a review, and your own registration.
Find out these three numbers
- Would restaurant owners pay a monthly fee to be listed?
- How many diners would post a review with a receipt?
- What does it cost to check that one review is genuine?
A comparison from the book
Switzerland. Chapter Six
"It is not character. It is accumulated proof."
Trust is a record built one honest visit at a time. A review nobody can buy adds to it.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.