What can ExoState do that cannot be done elsewhere?

ExoState is a highly technical community of self-employed people who work from home and in small offices. It runs various projects which ease the challenge of working and living independently. One of these is the Aggregator shopping system. There are many such shopping cart systems including many that are open source. There are, however, a number of different differences between Aggregator and other similar systems.

The first main difference is that Aggregator is BSD/ MIT licensed software. This means that nobody controls the actual product and as a result any member of ExoState who wishes to develop the software separately can simply take the software as a whole and use it. There are not the restrictions that you would get within a GPL licensed system, where any changes to the software need to be given back to the community. This is done to avoid potential litigation between ExoState members.

The second issue is that Aggregator has a live community that is possible to join and meet in person. Of course other software products do have this but not typically the BSD licensed ones. Additionally the network itself is supportive of those looking to get the system to work in terms of actually producing revenues. Software of this type may not necessarily be effective at generating income. So the community itself has an ethos of helping other members to be successful in their businesses and the software itself is only a part of that.

The ExoState community is not simply about software, there are many aspects of community support and products that the community has developed which make it easier for those in the network to create profitable businesses. It also has capabilities which help members to educate themselves and their families in areas that are critical to their success, keeping them outside of the government system.

Additionally because there is a strong community It is hoped that over time it will be possible to negotiate down the cost of the banking transactions within the system. Currently PayPal is used however there are other operators and other ways to transfer money and the costs of transactions may be able to be reduced.

There are, of course, many network state groups and some of them have similar capabilities or can easily put these capabilities together using open source software. One of the issues faced in this case is that there may be trademark issues that arise from using this software and from the term ‘Network State’ itself. The term 'ExoState Chapter' is designed to be an open source brand that anyone can use rather than a trademark of a particular organisation. The ExoState group in London, which was the first, is the London ExoState Chapter and technically no different from any other chapter that someone may desire to form, with or without the agreement of any other individual or organisation.

There are many network state projects around the world however very few allow people to simply turn up at a public meeting and apply their efforts to building a network state community. So ExoState does offer some very rare if not unique capabilities and is a good place to start for those interested either in network states or simply establishing their own independent business.