Adventures in mutual credit

I just spent rather longer than I care to admit completely revamping the wikipedia article on mutual credit.

This seemed valuable to me because that idea has been the focal point of my work, and source of much inspiration, since starting this blog in 2008, and I feel it is a simple yet profound idea which is appreciated only by a few money geeks.

I've just discovered that the mailing list on my website hasn't been working, so if you receive this by mail, do have a look back at my blog!

In particular I'd like to draw your attention though to two things.

Firstly in considering how to build on my career so far, how to reduce technical dependence on me, and how the whole complementary currency movement can move forward, I wrote this analysis:
Community forge must move on from Drupal!

Readers less interested in the story of Community Forge may wish to skip the text in grey.

In 2008 grassroots social organisations were (and still are) behind the curve both in uptake and in appreciating the importance of open source. Most local community currency groups were unaware of the software options available and still using paper although migration to online packages was underway.

This week I was honoured to be part of the Money & Society Summit, organised by Jem Bendell. It was a chance to bring some unusual monetary thinking to newcomers and especially some Bitcoin enthusiasts who have a stronghold here in Bali! During the final Panel, Gary Dykstra, host of the Bitcoin Filter, asked the panelists, me included, what the Bitcoin movement could learn from its elder sibling the complementary currency movement.

Five of us met at Ynternet headquarters near Lausanne, Switzerland on 4th and 5th to discuss development of the credit commons idea. I reported many positive experiences this year as he talked about the white paper with different people. I also reaffirmed that I didn’t know what leadership meant, but did understand the role of ‘holding the vision’. We agreed that in practice and for this kind of project, leadership is distributed.

We caught on the gossip about some exchange projects, most notably the forthcoming 'Leman' currency in Geneva.

As part of a sustainable leadership course i've been given at IFLAS, I'm required to thing about my theory of change. A theory of change is a specific methodological approach to social activism, involving mapping out how you think the world works and how your actions are intended to improve it.

Here are some of the ideas that recur to me, in conversations, reading and thinking about how change happens.

Dear Community Forge,

Lucas Huber suggests that the Interledger Protocol would be a suitable technology for implementing the credit commons. This post is a space to explore that more fully.
Credit commons was originally conceived as a ledger between the all the ledgers on all the separate platforms of the complementary currency movement, and the actual function of the interledger protocol is the same, to ensure that one transaction in one ledger is equivalent to another transaction in another ledger, thus that money/credit are not created/lost by mismatches in ledgers.

For a long time I have marvelled at the elegance of the Ripple protocol, which allows members of a network to extend trust to one another and for payments, or at least virtual payments, to ripple through the resulting mesh along pathways it finds.