The Complementary Currency magazine, an attractive monthly offering featuring from all over the web, including a monthly 'new currency roundup', is no more. Mark Herpel, who has been single handedly producing the magazine for over a year, announcedon his blog that he has to reduce his workload because of health reasons.
This will be a blow to the movement, which is dogged with problems of incoherence and poor use of technology. For the me the magazine indicated that the movement was capable of internal communication, that there was proper discussion, and that a realm almost entirely populated by enthusiasts an amateurs was moving towards professionalism.
However this turned out to be something of a delusion on my part. The CC Mag was hardly a community initiative and communities were not falling over each other to communicate their activities to the wider movement. Mark identified the content with help of Google tools, then spent many hours a month presenting them in magazine format. Like 90% of the projects in the complementary currency movement, this was a one person project, with no built in resilience, no resources, and little community support.
I think there is an opportunity here to pick up the baton. The brand, the readership, the content sourcing, the publishing workflow, and the web site are still in place. The technical skills needed are common enough. Producing a magazine does not even require an in depth knowledge of the subject! It should be possible to find someone, perhaps someone early in their professional lives - or late, who would relish the opportunity to take over a magazine with readership. Failing full magazine production, even a definitive blog would be useful, simply providing a day by record of realworld community money projects. Minimally, the job would require:
- basic DTP skills to layout a mag once a month
- basic computer skills
- building relationships and increasing participation
Anyone interested in this task is invited to write a paragraph to editor, at ccmag.net saying what experience, connections and skills they would bring.
Please circulate this in your networks!
Comments