“A Neighbour Has Paid Your Bills”

We’ve listened to the story from Aykut Hocaoğlu, one of the founders of Bi'Komşu Platform (A Neighbour Platform) which brings the needers who have a hard time paying for their fixed expenses and bills together with the benefactors who want to meet their needs, and the platform’s contribution to solidarity during the pandemic process. 

What is Bi’Komşu? Could you please introduce yourself?

Bi’Komşu is a platform which brings the needers who have a hard time paying for their fixed expenses and bills together with the benefactors who want to meet their needs. In other words, it is a platform that brings together people who have difficulty in paying their bills and philanthropists who have the ability to pay these bills, it is an intermediary platform.

We are a group of friends graduated from the same university in Izmir. We are people who believe that the world would be a more livable place with solidarity, trust and goodness and we strive for this in our own ways. Each of us actually has their own private businesses; we are entrepreneurs, designers, engineers and communicators. We came together for Bi’Komşu and started this movement of goodness.

What motivation did you come up with? We would love to hear your set off story.

We have seen that the number of needy people who had lost their jobs or the nuımber of people with decerased incomes has increased dramatically with the global epidemic crisis. While Covid-19 threatens the health of everyone without exception, the burden of the economic crisis has been enhanced and keeps on getting bigger. Covid-19, which threatens everyone equally in terms of health without any exceptions on the rich or on the poor, did not affect everyone equally with the economic crisis. In this sense, non-governmental organizations, local administrations, central administrations and corporate firms had launched aid campaigns, but despite all this effort, we realized that there are still large masses that are waiting for help, and we are talking about a size that cannot be dealt with easily. For this reason, we started to talk about how we can contribute to this process. After arguing about whether if it was possible or not, the platform got online in 15 days before we know it.

Is the name “neighbor” a reference to tradition and culture? The one getting the help doesn’t know where it comes from… Is this an emphasis? Have you designed a campaign based on values?

Definitely, as you mentioned we wanted to emphasize the neighborhood culture, we even thought that we might contribute to the revival of this tradition that is now forgotten especially in big cities. We believe that changing the world starts from the person and from the closest ones.

When we manage to change the ones closest to us and our own environment, we can begin to transform the world.

Therefore, you can choose your neighbors in your neighborhood or in your hometown to pay their bills on the platform. In our culture, the kindness done is not emphasized, it would be a shame. Thus, we call the supporters and ask them if they would like to help a neighbor in need. And when they help them, we send a message to the phones of the supported ones as: “A neighbor from the province …… has paid your  bill of ……. TL.”. Thus, if one does not want his/her identity to be disclosed, he/she pays as “a neighbor”.

This application actually covers both in-kind aids or financial aids. In fact, a practice always becomes ambiguous when money is involved. How do you ensure the reliability of the website and the guaranee of the supporters? What kind of mechanism do you have so that the ones can help others with their mind at peace? How do you identify those in need or confirm whether they really need it?

Actually, we are not a part of the money exchange here. For this reason, we have never had problem of trust with the system itself, and we even see it as one of the most important reasons why people approach us with such interest and sympathy.

There are of course some control mechanisms with regard to those who request support, but they are not to determine if the people are actually in need (we cannot control it as we cannot obtain certifications because of laws such as KVKK). We are working to prevent potential abuse.

As I’ve mentioned above, we do not have a claim to determine the need one hundred percent, yet it is impossible to do this legally and technically. Our goal is to strengthen the relationship between individuals in this platform which was established to do good, as the whole world and our country go through this challenging process, because we have seen that it is very important to be ‘us’ in this process. We have seen that has been progressing like that since April the 13th. We receive emails and messages from those in need, such as ‘I have paid my bill somehow, please remove my bill from the system, I do not want to be unfair to others.

One of the issues we attach importance to as a platform is: “Goodness should reach the ones who really need it”.

The section that we had spent the most time creating and working on was the correct determination of the urgency situation of the needers. For this reason, first of all, we verify the real person at the first stage and then we get the maximum information we can get from the needer to the extent permitted by law. With this information, we provide a semi-autonomous control and screening with the algorithms we create within the system. However, our main goal with this semi-autonomous system is to minimize malicious approaches. That’s why we also added a manual control. Philanthropists can see the message left by the owner of the invoice he/she is interested in and can reach the needer from the needer’s phone number. In addition, we added invoice limits and monthly support limits, both to help people reach more people and to prevent fraud. Besides all these, we constantly verify the system within with user feedbacks. When a wrong information is provided, the supporting person informs us on the system and we prevent the people trying to abuse the system from accessing the system if necessary.

In this system we try to build on trust, we see that we were able to achieve this. I have stated that we have set some limits to prevent possible abuse for people who request support. For example, a person can enter a maximum of 5 invoices and the maximum amount of support one can receive is 1.000 TL. But we keep track of the numbers and we see that people do not have such attempts of abuse. According to the current data, we have granted 5 invoice entries to those who request support, while 2 bills have been entered. Total sum of bills is not even 200 TL while an upper limit of 1000 TL is defined. Thanks to the feedback system we have established, we can prevent possible abuse attempts. For this reason, we can say that those who want to support can support with a peace of mind. The simplest measure for philanthropists who are not comfortable can take is to pay the old bills. We see that there are unpaid bills from 2019. Isn’t this the simplest indicator of necessity already?

Do you plan to continue the project after the epidemic?

Of course we want to continue. We predict that after the epidemic, we will feel the economic effects of this crisis much more deeply and that there will be an economic crisis all over the world. Now everyone is trying to survive and protect their health. Economic concerns and expectations are far behind among the priority ranking, but with the normalization of our lives after the epidemic, we will be forced to handle the economic wreckage all together. For this reason, even though our ultimate goal and desire is to live in a world order where such platforms won’t be not needed, we want to continue to be in an effort to provide support as long as these needs continue.