Adventures in mutual credit

The activists currently demonstrating on Wall Street (and other financial hotspots) are bringing necessary media attention to the abuses of the banking system. They understand that the activities of banks, or banksters are responsible for a global misery and environmental degradation. Indeed the public at large is becoming aware of the role of 'banks' and 'banksters' in an unprecedented, continuous, and immoral (but not illegal) transfer of wealth from the middle classes to the richest one percent.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

We've all had the experience of skipping some routine expense to save a bit of cash, and then everything being ruined - at a much greater cost. The poverty trap could be defined as not being able to scrape together a penny in order to save a pound. And this is a dilemma I grapple with all the time.

Picked this image from a slide in a talk by Dyndy

Jaromil from Dyndy also says:
"Designing the way wealth is circulated is the most rational and honest way to empower margins and redistribute wealth"

Here's' the talk
https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/imagine-the-future-of-money-by-jaromil/2…

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.