Adventures in mutual credit

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.

At last, my three year ambition is realised to build a web site for a community trading in complementary currencies. I parked myself in a cafe in Zadar, Croatia for December 2005 and coded matsLETS in php/mySQL.

I have been saying that I know of no complementary currency system based on a social networking platform apart from my own, marketplace, but all that changed this week.

Congratulations to Austin Time Exchange, who launched their site days before my first site. (watch this space).

The LETS world seems to attract idealists who start projects which are bigger than their ability to pursue them. Focusing on software, I only know of one project with more than one person working on it - Cyclos. There seem to be several one man initiatives which aren't going anywhere. And it's not like everyone is trying to achieve the same thing either, which explains in part why these people aren't working together. Here is a list of people and projects I have direct experience of: