Adventures in mutual credit

It's three years since I decided that the end of this civilization was upon us and I started to write Christmas roundrobins warning about global financial meltdown and urging my friends to build lifeboats. For three years I've been working (almost) every hour to develop open source community accounting software and grow a community of users, and inform the public. I put my cash into metals, and invested all my energy to build social capital, which some people think will be more useful than money in the future.

It has been too long.
Today alpha2 is ready.

As a monetary activist, I shun state-sanctioned-commercial-debt money (like the US dollar or Euro) as much as possible. Generally, individual actors making economic protests against state-sanctioned money are little more effective than fish protesting the water. That's because money and the economy are functions of community, and it is only in partnership with their communities that the politically disenfranchised ninety nine per cent can claim back their lives from wage slavery and the permanent shortage of employment.

Intent/Audience

It is a mostly platform-agnostic description of the architecture and API for the Mutual Credit module for Drupal. It is of interest to drupal site builders and developers, as well as prospective users wondering how powerful this module is.

Alpha is ready
https://drupal.org/node/1186506
Next I'm putting some time into Community Forge

Although Jean-Francois Noubel has lived in US and is fluent in English, his energies are directed towards his home country France, where he lives and works. He occupies an ideological niche far outside the realm of conventional economics or monetary theory, working closely with Art Brock and Eric Harris-Braun of 'Metacurrency' fame. The thrust of his teaching is that if society is to organise itself appropriately we need to better understand collective intelligence.

NESTA is working with the Cabinet Office to explore how social services can be provided out of community resources, rather than from central government funds which have been appropriated by the financial industry. NESTA is interested in supporting timebanking, complementary currencies and various newer ideas around the sharing economy, seeing them as platforms for civic engagement and reciprocity in civil society.

Users have been asking for more and better statistical aggregation of transactions, but have been unable to articulate what that would look like, so I decided to concentrate on exposing everything to views, so that use can be made of exposed filters, the new GROUP BY utility, and the theme layer.

I set out to ensure that the following analysis was available to user 1, preferably in views.

Sea change radio introduces new ideas to switched on urbanites. Gets interesting at 12 minutes!

Agorist radio is much more technical and premised on a better understanding of money, markets and software. This interview is fully 70 mins and we managed to cover a lot of ground.

One of the barriers to local money adoption is the limited number of things you can buy with it. A typical community of 100 middle class people, generally only provide each nonessential services and a few second hand goods. A community that small hardly constitutes a local economy.

Various things need to be done to address this problem.