Starter Kit. Idea 455 of 500. Cluster 24
Contractor registries with completed jobs photographed and clients named
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
Ask three builders or electricians who do good work whether you can photograph their last five finished jobs and call the clients who paid for them. Publish the photographs with the clients' names and their own words, with their consent, on one simple page. The proof is a new enquiry that came from the page, and a contractor willing to pay for the next listing.
- Who pays first
- A good contractor who loses jobs to cheaper ones with no record, and pays to be listed because a named client beats any claim.
- What leaves today
- Sri Lankan families abroad send money home to build and cannot check whom to hire; a record of finished jobs is the proof that makes them commission.
Ask first
- Department of the Registrar of Companies. Ask how to check that a contractor's business is registered before you list it.
- Data Protection Authority. Ask what consent you need before naming clients beside photographs of their homes.
Check before you spend
Confirm every client agrees in writing to be named and photographed, that each job you list really was done by that contractor, and that complaints are published too.
Find out these three numbers
- Would contractors pay to be listed with their proof?
- How many families look for a builder in one town each month?
- How many past clients will agree to be named?
A comparison from the book
Sri Lanka House. Chapter Seventeen
"Proof moves people. Argument mostly does not."
Photographs of finished jobs and named clients win work that promises never do.
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.