This post follows on from Global groupware requirements, which describes the software a lot of people seem to be looking for. The distinction between a website with content and a web application is becoming sharper, and its clear that systems in the paradigm of content management (like Wordpress and Drupal) are not optimal for social organising.
I've been convinced for a couple of years by another approach proposed by David Bovill, namely that REST microservices are the way forward.
Web 2.0 involved building large back-end systems like Drupal, which generated and sent full web pages to the...
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Adventures in mutual credit
The radical experiment in community cryptocurrency, Faircoin, reached a milestone this week when the Faircoop assembly declared that it would sell and buy back coins from its members at parity with the Euro. This means that the cooperative maintains a pool of cash available for redeeming coins from active members who accepted them but cannot spend them. This gives confidence to traders and the coop also offers a much more stable (and easy to mentally calculate) rate than the free market.
I explain this strategy in more detail in my previous blog post.
This public attempt...
When an idea grows far beyond its original conception, develops its own culture, factions...
Given my enthusiasm for the launch of the IMA, I regret not being able to conference with you in Glasgow. Its a field I've dedicated my life to for almost a decade. I started a nonprofit, Community Forge in 2009, in partnership with the Local Exchange Trading System (LETS) in Geneva, to build and host web sites for LETS. Back then I didn't know any theory, but exchanging without money felt to me like kindling a revolution! Soon we were hosting sites for a cluster of SEL in Belgium and now for over 300 active groups, all for free.
I've seen the aging LETS membership advance by another...
The new Credit Commons Collective (CCC) is looking for 4 volunteers to work for a minimum of 3 days a week for a minimum of 2 months each. The CCC is a non-profit federation of organisations that host over 300 local currencies worldwide. This Federation currently works entirely with volunteers, serving over 20,000 users. But now we want to scale up massively...
The opportunity is for those who can work in Athens in October and November and/or Bali (Ubud) in January and February, for a minimum of 2 months. Additional months can be done remotely. In either locations, the volunteers will work...
As a complementary currency engineer, I come across basic income ideas of social justice all the time, but I don't see them as my territory. It is a way of sharing wealth which we collectively own or create. Ideally it would be enough money to reduce or eliminate the imperative on people to sell their labour, say, a few hundred Euros per month.
That means basic income is very difficult for grass roots organisation or NGOs to practice, because it necessitates finding enough money to do something meaningful, giving it away to the people least qualified to handle money (for some reason the '...
Despite being repetitive, and often dense, Bookchin writing in the 60s, 70s and 80s makes arguments I've never heard before, and manages to be more convincing and more optimistic than many of his contemporaries, many of whom, he argues are shallow, woolly, misanthropic, or totalitarian!
Introduction: the future of the ecology movement
Covers most of the themes of the book, but in less detail (1993)
Download (59 mins).
Will ecology become "The Dismal Science"?
Bookchin lays into spiritual ecologistsl, accusing them of mistaking industrialism for capitalism and of Neo-...
This lucid and readable book traverses monetary history and philosophy to explain why money is no longer a tool for social justice, and indicates the kinds of solutions that could set it straight.
Download zip file (140MB).
Buy the paper book here.
Two years ago I posted a bemused article on Faircoin, which was trading between some members of Faircoop at five times the price it was available on the free market. This was a social experiment being run by Enric Duran as part of his attempts to build a new financial system. It seemed to me a risky venture which depended not only on Duran's integrity, but on everyone's confidence in him. Our language abilities didn't overlap sufficiently for me to be confident that he understood the market he was manipulating.
This year however, the project is in a different league. Instead of Enric's...
As readers of my blog you'll be aware of a new initiative, the Credit Commons Collective, to connect three of the larger complementary currency networks, and invite others also to connect.
I invite you to sign up to a new mailing list, on which news of that initiative will be broadcast.
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/creditcommonscollective
Thanks for being there...
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