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.
Annie from Adelaide Exchange went on holiday and agreed that the accommodation should be paid in local money to Brian from Brisbane exchange.
Ben logs on and goes to the external payment form, where he chooses Adelaide from a list of participating exchanges in the network. He knows Annie's id already and enters
Complementary currencies in Drupal is here to stay. It is still the only open source 'module' which manages mutual credit transactions. It now does all a community really needs, but it can never do all a community wants!
Alone I can no longer develop the software, set up a business, maintain existing users and support one intern. This post explains how much needs to be done, and how quickly it can be done, and with how little resources.
My Drupal package was designed with local LETS groups in mind: a few hundred people, no more than one order of separation, trading a few times a month. I realised that an integral zero balance system would use transactions at its base - not user balances. If balances are re-calculated after every transaction by adding up all the previous transactions, then theft is impossible, all errors can be logged and reversed and the data cannot contradict itself.
Tim (from Seldulac and Community Forge) is this week showing off http://french.communityforge.net at a mini festival of the SEL groups in France. The response, he reports, is pretty good, but like the English before them, they are balking at our proposed price of 5 Euros per person per year. Some are asking if they can have the first year free.
More and more groups are choosing Marketplace for Drupal not only because this is exactly the product for communities doing mutual credit, but because there is nothing else available that can help them. Well, the nearest 2 products are:
Do you want to live more simply and with socially conscious people? Are you reluctant to leave the city because the nice places seem like social deserts with alien languages? Do you want to spend less time paying your overheads and more time doing whatever you want?
We are a small group of tele-working professionals planning to spend the coming winter working in a warmer, cheaper, and more relaxed setting.
I always hoped, but never really believed, that engineering alone was enough bring a product to the attention of the masses, so I planned to spend this year travelling round Europe, coaxing some more early adopter communities into making the right software choice. But some thing is going right. I hardly even got an interview in the cities I visited, but past learning experiences must be paying off.
John Rogers is best known for having run the Institute for Community currencies in Wales.
John's message to the world, based on his 15 years experience with Communities and Currencies is that the high failure rate of LETS schemes is down to poor governance. his consulting facade, Value for People, supports nascent projects through the laborious process of setting up sustainable governance and management mechanisms.
I just got off the phone with Richard Logie managing director of The Business Exchange (TBEx) www.tbex.com, who is also chairman of IRTA’s Community Currency Committee and I have to say that I never realised that complementary currencies were thriving in the way that he experiences.
I always hoped, but never really believed, that engineering alone was enough bring a product to the attention of the masses, so I planned to spend this year travelling round Europe, coaxing some more early adopter communities into making the right software choice. But some thing is going right. I hardly even got an interview in the cities I visited, but past learning experiences must be paying off.
John Rogers is best known for having run the Institute for Community currencies in Wales.
