Perhaps you have heard of LETS, timebanks, or other community projects in which arbitrary currencies are created? Well, there is now a suite of modules to support communities trading in local money?
Currently the suite consists of three modules, a directory of members' offers and wants, an optional autocategorisation module, to help with consistent use of categories, and a transaction module. Later it will be possible to define multiple currencies, do taxation, and much more?
I haven't promoted this project widely within the drupal community because my target users are the hundreds of communities already trading, many of them set up as long ago as the 80s. But how to reach these groups and explain to them that they can now operate online using a module for a CMS called drupal? All they need is to get a good hosting, install Drupal, overcome the usability issues, install some modules, import their members and previous transactions, choose and tweak a theme.
Needless to say, many of these communities have little real money for Drupal experts, little idea about open source, no idea about project management, they are usually riddled with strong personalities and political obstacles, and can only reach decisions at annual meetings. So how do we sell Drupal and local money to them?
I think the answer is through personal contact. In life as well as in sales, I have found most things happen through people I already know. And this is consistent with the responses I've had to my first mass mailing - the people I already knew were the ones who responded.
So if you have any personal contact with a LETS or similar community, you can tell them that at last there is a way for them to move their accounting online where members can do their own transactions and manage their own directory entries. And they can have an editable web site at the same time! Better still, the first community that approaches me coherently, will get all this for free!
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