Dane County Time Bank has been run by Stephanie Rearick for several years and is now up to 2500 members. Madison Hours has been less successful, but Stephanie believes that together they offer a valuable combination. Stephanie plans to bring them together into a dual currency marketplace where businesses, nonprofits and ordinary folk can exchange without money - the new system will be greater than the sum of its parts.
The difference is (to her) that time banking brings with it a strict ethic of everyone's time being worth the same. I call this 'price-fixing! But in Madison hours, which is not a timebank but more like an Ithaca hours clone, vendors set their own prices. Stephanie calls this a 'price-based' system.
So we'll need to convert Madison hours to using dollars as its unit of value, and then it will run as a conventional soft Business / personal barter currency. It will have a proper policy for setting credit limits and cost recovery. Not much to discuss about that.
Like a lot of activists from the time banking tradition, Staphanie Rearick doesn't really regard hours worked in the community as money, and she doesn't feel comfortable working with an accounting system that tries to get back to zero in order to prove the redeemability of its units. No-one should ever be in wont of hours, no-one should ever be obliged to spend them, which means the hours are neither redeemable nor scarce. So it doesn't seem necessary to rebalance the system using tax/demurrage either. In fact for timebanking activities, where people are helping each other and doing what needs to be done, accounting can only get in the way; what's important is logging the work so that everyone can see, and to a lesser extent showing the community to what extent someone is a giver or a getter.
So both currencies would be available to all users, but the user metrics will show differently. While the dollar currency would display, conventionally, the balance between the balance limits, the hours will show a comparison of two positive numbers, hours given and hours received, but the actual number of hours will be de-emphasised.
Well that's as far as we got in our first meeting, but we need to be in testing by the end of the month, so if you'll excuxse me....
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