Adventures in mutual credit

With the merest whiff of an invitation, picked up from February's Solidarity Economy conference in Vienna, I landed myself this Sunday in a conference with reps from all the major Tauschrings in Austria. My stated intent was to promote the work of Community Forge in the face of widespread Cyclos adoption, but I was right to be flexible about that. The meeting was conducted in Teutonic fashion with everyone having a say (though I understood nothing of the proceedings).

The full team (Tim, Shawn, Nick and I) made it to this conference in Vienna, which focused on all kinds of alternative economic mechanisms and grass roots community organisation. Of particular interest to us is the Tauschring movement, which is the German equivalent of LETS. With an ad hoc 'Tauschring Toolkit' brand we wowed the right people by showing them the software they have been envisaging for years.

I'd like to introduce you to a new member of the team, jake (not his real name).

For reasons buried deep in my psyche, I am attempting to maximise my personal effect on the world. This could be seen as a show of arrogance, insecurity or whatever you please. In any case, I think of this as an enlightened, noble, global morality. It looks at world as a complex system, and attempts to identify and work on the critical points, so as to nudge the world into a healthier state.

As more and more attention is gradually turned to alternative currencies, a little more clarification would be helpful about the choice of mechanisms around, and how they vary.

As a theologian, I learned how moral and ethical language are necessarily relative to the society or speaker, and I quickly stopped using the terms 'good' and 'evil' which, it seemed to me, are usually used with an objective intent. In fact Nietzsche agreed with me when he wrote 'Beyond Good and Evil', so the matter was actually sorted out a hundred years ago, in my view.

As a seasoned budget traveller I hold it as a principle that if you are unprepared, under resourced, lost, unfamiliar, over burdened, or gullible you are at your most vulnerable in transport hubs and city streets.

With the possible exception of the Kennedy assassination, a lot of sensible people give no credence to conspiracy theories. Once you go down that road, you start to mix with anarchists, holocaust deniers, UFOlogists and all sorts of undesirable types.

Many months of work culminated this week in a new module release, Complementary Currencies. This module is aimed at thousands of communities throughout the world who have been exchanging goods and services without money, sometimes for many years.