Summary
As faith in the banks and the conventional economy is waning, we are seeing an increase in interest in complementary currencies, but the large scale adoption of these systems is hampered by lack of software.
New kid on the block
After one year's voluntary development, and a handful of implementations, the Complementary Currencies project for Drupal is now attracting significant attention. See Appendix A for a list of some sites using or in the process of implementing the module.
Tom Greco, in his recent book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, observed that a complete web-based trading platform was needed for the new economy, which required these four basic components.
- A marketplace
- A social network
- A means of payment
- A measure of value or pricing unit
The existing competing complementary currency software neither has genuine social networking or content management components, nor do they have the flexibility to be used as a custom built application for a particular purpose.
- Cyclos
- which is several years old, it is very solid community banking software. Many groups have tried to lever cyclos for their own ends but only the German Taushrings, by vigourous cooperation, have succeeded. This project has a small full time team developing the application and related digital materials.
- GETS
- is commercial barter software. It is highly specialised for business and closed source meaning many communities find the price a barrier to entry. This software is several years old and has a few far eastern programmers.
- CES
- is community developed software in South Africa. It currently hosts 147 identical communities intertrading on one web server. The project wants to decentralise and become open source (currently asp) and extensible but doesn't have resources for total re-engineering and rewriting.
By contrast, Drupal is very popular platform and its modular architecture allows much more flexible web applications to be built more cheaply. This is why New Zealand is considering the software for a national level LETS platform, and Belgium and France are also showing an interest in mass adoption, despite no resources yet having been invested in marketing.
Sustainable funding model
In order to foster support and derive revenue for the software, a non-profit organisation has been set up. Community Forge exists to provide an pre-designed hosted web service for community groups. That means groups such as LETS could buy a standardised web service without going through the pain and drain of designing and building a web application, as many have tried and failed to do. Other packages could be provided for other types of groups.
For a number of reasons, the LETS groups targeted so far have balked at the suggested costs of the hosted service, and the revenue they offered hardly covers costs, and would mean development resources would be going to subsidise the users, rather than the users providing an income!
Aspirations and Limitations
At the moment the project consists mainly of the initial programmer, an intern, and a part time business manager who are supporting themselves, working on the code, helping current users, and making Community Forge a more viable project. However as the crisis of capitalism deepens and the call for alternatives grows, the project needs to be scaled up, in order to seize the moment.
- professional level hosting of Drupal sites, at a price communities are willing to pay, and to work on making them ever easier to set up.
- work with groups of communities to explore the technical and political possibilities of trading between separate mutual credit systems
- SMS integration would increase access to the software using ordinary cell phones, also in places where computers and internet are not so abundant
- work with communities of communities to better analyse there requirements, and support them in making good decisions for their currency designs and governance structures
- explore other ways of using the software, so as to derive an income from business
- develop many new tools and options; also improving the ways which other software can interface with it; the code already written needs continuous maintenance and testing
- a new campaign aimed at the Corporate Social Responsibility movement, making the case that mutual credit money systems are more important and more impactful than sexy greenwash projects.
Appeal
The main protagonists of the project do not wish to build a business empire from something so essential as a monetary tool, nor to stifle the adoption of a new technology by privatising the code. That is why we are now appealing for EUR 5,000 to take three specific people to a developing country for six months to continue the work.
The most responsible way to give is to fund one of the projects from this shopping list at the nominal rate of 200 Euros per day. Commercial rate for an ordinary programmer is at least 300 Euros per day.
/shopping-list
We think this represents phenomenal value for cutting edge software.
APPENDIX A: KNOWN EARLY ADOPTORS/TESTERS
(N.B. 2022: Most of these orgs no longer exist)
https://seldulac.ch
marden.villagebarter.co.uk
localcurrency.ca
thesharehood.org
madisonlets.org
http://roct.org.uk
lausanne.communityforge.net
https://www.auroville.org.in
interlets.nl
atlantatimebank.org
ecozoicdetroit.net
localcollective.com
manchesterpermaculturenetwork.org.uk
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