To make it easier for both providers to specify and consumers to find specific services, the Community Vines platform leverages a standard, hierarchical, skills taxonomy that is easy to navigate and continues to evolve as new services emerge. Top-level skill categories (such as “Arts ,” “Education,” “Home Improvements,” and “Personal Services”) help one navigate to more specific services (such as “Music Lessons,” “Tutoring,” “Carpentry,” and “Housecleaning/Housekeeping,” respectively). After all, sharing your skills within the community, and making it easy for others to find them, is what Community Vines is all about!

The Community Vines platform not only makes it easy for providers and consumers to find each other, and in particular for consumers to select the best fit for them among multiple providers of a specific service, but it also provides a straightforward interface for defining a “statement of work,” negotiating the “rate,” signing a mutually binding contract, scheduling the work, making payments, and rating the transaction from both perspectives.

Community Vines has its own currency – “Civitas” (Latin for “Benefits of Community”). The idea behind this platform-specific currency is to provide a means of earning “credits,” and exchanging skill for skill, indirectly, in the community. This acts as an accelerant, in terms of both the number of transactions being facilitated by the platform and the growth of the community of consumers and providers. Of course, in addition to earning Civitas, one can purchase Civitas with dollars, and both earned and purchased Civitas can always be “cashed out” for dollars (for a small currency exchange fee).

Trust is at the core of our values and is a vital component of the Community Vines ecosystem. We achieve that in multiple ways, from sharing volunteerism to providing reviews of both providers and consumers. Trust “ratings” are provided in a graphical form, using stars, colors, and other visual cues.  Because, at the end of the day, we want both consumers and providers to feel totally confident in the community members with whom they’re doing business. With *local* trust ratings of people in your own community, the value of these ratings is greater than ever before.