Smart vs Centralised

It very rarely happens but every now and then you get a direct, on-the-day, possible match on local freecycle-ish sites like this. Someone's made an offer ad for something that someone's made a want ad for. What happens next? All the people who read the mail or look at the site, who are not the people advertising, go "oh that's funny" and get on with their day. With a bit of luck the advertisers at least get in touch with each other to celebrate their synchronicity and talk about whether there's a match or not.

Nerds who like programming things and optimising for efficiency start thinking about how you could just automate the fulfilment of this kind of exchange more quickly, how could you programme a bot to sit on the list and check for things, alert people to opportunities and facilitate the exchange (and perhaps generate a little fee for the benefit).

Nerds who like working with people and optimising for community start thinking about how to facilitate more conversations about the stuff we own and whether it's useful to us or could be better used by someone else, someone we know or live near to - to them this exchange could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

I'm both kind of nerd but I'm not thinking about it like that, I'm thinking more meta. What's the difference between creating a bot and creating a full-time community organiser? At the moment, it feels like adding a bot is adding a bit of smart(ish), while adding a person is adding more smart but also some centralisation, it's the seed of a team of organisers, who need a manager, who need to generate customers to keep them busy and so on and so on.

Right now, I think it's all doing fine and we should just leave them alone, so it's just something bubbling in my head about bots vs people.