Brief overview of your proposal: Explain how your proposal furthers the Foundation’s mission to standardize, protect, and promote bitcoin.
This project gives the blockchain a new use and a new constituency. We are the three largest nonprofit online complementary currency credit clearing networks in the world. CES with 30K members, hOurworld with 20K members and Community Forge with 5K members. Our members all belong to local communities such as Time banks or LETS, called exchanges which have their own mutual-credit or fiat currencies, in around 80 countries. Bitcoin cannot replace those credit-currencies, but the blockchain is perfect for keeping accounts between exchanges. We will provide a unique new purpose for bitcoin, and we can ask our members whether to give them all bitcoin wallets.
Needs assessment: Objectively address the specific situation, opportunity, problem, issue, or need that your proposal addresses.
Over the last twenty years hundreds of grassroots communities have installed accounting systems without money often under LETS or timebanks umbrellas. In the last ten years they have started coalescing in order to share software, but remain strictly autonomous. he largest two networks have built proprietary systems allowing their member exchanges to 'intertrade'. Last year, however we published a REST API for a clearing server and a beta implementation but we don't have the skills and resources to implement this alone. We are fully committed to the massive task of bringing CES and Community Forge into Drupal 8.
Goals/objectives: Provide a succinct description of the proposed project outcome and accomplishments, including your overall goal(s) and specific objectives or ways in which you will meet the goal(s).
Local credit systems are very marginal in this era of globalised finance, but there is no good economic reason why they shouldn't become the building blocks of the next economy.
With our bitcoin grant we would use the blockchain to keep accounts between our several hundred communities, while each communities internal accounts would remain unaffected. We would build clients for the two most used platforms, Drupal and hOurworld. We would also publish not only the API, but standards and guidelines for similar groups who want to join or start their own inter-community credit clearing exchanges. These networks provide an ever more viable alternative to banks as a source of liquidity for community development. Connecting these local networks together will strengthen them and make them more useful.
Methodology: Describe the process to be used to achieve the outcome and accomplishments, the impact of your proposed activities, how they will benefit the community and who will carry out the activities. Provide a time frame for your project and long-term strategies for ongoing maintenance of the project.
This work is a natural next step in the development of the nonprofit community clearing networks involved and their conglomeration into a uniform payment lattice. We would seek advice, starting at the Bitcoin Foundation, about the best technical strategy, e.g. whether to work with coloured coins or a metacoin such as Mastercoin. Experienced & qualified alternative economists (see below) would approve the designs before programming started, especially concerning the exchange rate mechanisms. The lion's share of the grant would be used to incentivise one or more developers with experience of accounting and web APIs, while we would build the Drupal and hOurworld clients ourselves.
We would begin as soon as CES had migrated to Drupal 8, probably September 2014. Once implemented, the code would be maintained by volunteers of the same calibre who have built the current systems over the last decade with only very occasional financial help. N.B. We aim to spend 80% of the grant straight back into the bitcoin economy.
Estimated costs/budget: Clearly delineate costs to be met by the Foundation (Note: grants will be awarded in BTC.)
We would like 100 bitcoin to do the job to a high standard.
10BTC to Jnana consulting for managing the project
5BTC to a well known consultant to ensure we make the right technology decision
35BTC to an experienced developer to build and publish the application with an API with more or less features.
10BTC x 2 to the Drupal and hOurworld developers to build the clients (see Matthew and Stephen), below.
5BTC to Tim Jenkin for migration of the CES transaction history
10BTC to Jem Bendell for developing and publishing governance standards and for ongoing PR with the WEF, the business community and the UN.
15BTC to support key people, (none of whom struck it rich through speculation) to attend the next complementary currencies conference in Brazil, and to ensure that blockchain technologies are much better represented than at the last conference.
Qualifications: Describe applicant qualifications for funding including credentials of the applying company and/or key individuals involved.
Karel Boele, founder of Jnana Consulting, and consultant to the government of New South Wales, which is managing the migration of CES to Drupal as part of a Timebanks implementation.
Tim Jenkin, set up and ran the 'Vula' underground communications network which was instrumental in uniting the ANC before Mandela was released. Building CES network for the past ten years. Now retired.
Matthew Slater, co-founded Community Forge, pushing for open standards and closer cooperation; author of this document; lives mostly without money. For the last six years has been developing the open source Drupal 'community Accounting' module, and Hamlets distribution.
Stephen Beckett, co-founded nonprofit consultancy hOurworld, and coder of their php application, 'Time & Talents' for the last five years.
Susana BelMonte, economist and author of Nada es Perdido, and co-founder of Instituto de la Moneda Social, Spain.
Prof. Dr. Franz Hörmann, professor for tax management at the University of Economics in Vienna and lectures in knowledge management and accounting at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz. He is corresponding member of the senate for IT of the Austrian Chamber of Auditors and investigator of the financial auditor education program.
Professor Jem Bendell, is Founding Director of the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) at the University of Cumbria in the United Kingdom, which runs the world's largest specialist sustainability MBA programme. In 2012 the World Economic Forum recognised him as a Young Global Leader. Professor Bendell serves in the WEF working group on the Sharing Economy. Bendell serves on a number of boards, including one that is the leading provider of open source software for community currencies. He led the initiative for his University to become world’s first public University to accept bitcoin for the payment of fees. Bendell is a strategist and educator on social and organizational change, with some 20 years of experience in responsible business development, sustainable development, transformative philanthropy and sustainable currencies. With over 100 publications, including UN reports and four books, he is an award-winning authority on innovation for sustainable development and has helped create a number of leading multistakeholder alliances.
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