Adventures in mutual credit

Intent/Audience

It is a mostly platform-agnostic description of the architecture and API for the Mutual Credit module for Drupal. It is of interest to drupal site builders and developers, as well as prospective users wondering how powerful this module is.

Although Jean-Francois Noubel has lived in US and is fluent in English, his energies are directed towards his home country France, where he lives and works. He occupies an ideological niche far outside the realm of conventional economics or monetary theory, working closely with Art Brock and Eric Harris-Braun of 'Metacurrency' fame. The thrust of his teaching is that if society is to organise itself appropriately we need to better understand collective intelligence.

Users have been asking for more and better statistical aggregation of transactions, but have been unable to articulate what that would look like, so I decided to concentrate on exposing everything to views, so that use can be made of exposed filters, the new GROUP BY utility, and the theme layer.

I set out to ensure that the following analysis was available to user 1, preferably in views.

One of the barriers to local money adoption is the limited number of things you can buy with it. A typical community of 100 middle class people, generally only provide each nonessential services and a few second hand goods. A community that small hardly constitutes a local economy.

Various things need to be done to address this problem.