Reaching for consensus: Proposal for a Standard Protocol for Mutual Recognition Agreements

Many activists that I know recognise that small town currencies are simply not very useful in a globalised economy. One current response response in UK is Bristol which is soon to launch a regional currency. It's very conscious that most celebrated project in Germany, Cheimgauer is regional, and perhaps less conscious of the role of regional banks in that endeavour. Otherwise the strategy sounds to me like a host of other projects which aren't thriving. Insanity has been defined as repeating the same action and expecting different results.

Yet there are many reasons economic justice could prevail. Human society is reinventing itself. The Internet is still in its infancy and still essentially 'free'. The peer to peer organisational model shows great promise while top down nation states and central banks are losing their moral authority. But until we can take advantage of this, we are as gnats to a troll.

I (and many others) believe that the movement would receive a tremendous boost if local currencies could have some freedom of movement (while remaining strictly under local governance). It would allow the option for value to flow outside of a single geographical area. This would require simply that a standard be established which the software developers could all work to. I am talking to most of the software developers and have been for three years, and I say the time to define that standard is now.

Here is my 4 stage plan to create a Framework for "Mutual Recognition Agreements".

1. Consensus building. We get as many people as possible to agree that a set of requirements is necessary. We communicate with the whole movement and particularly seek to engage all the CC software projects.
2. Identifying resources and peer review. The proposal will be honed by software and economic experts while we approach donors. I do not believe that infrastructure projects should have to produce a return on investment, however new business models will be made possible.
3. Building the first implementation. We hunker down and build some new software and work on existing software together, to make the first expression of the new protocol
4. Hand-holding early adopters, producing variations and installer packages, templates, thinking more about scaling up.

The work is inevitable, CES is is already working on 'Clearing Central', an open API enabling transactions between compatible mutual credit clearing. Xchange Stewards are designing APIs now to operate between parts of a modular trading system. Metacurrency initiative is just starting work on coding its version. The Tauschring network is already doing this, but by hand. Transition Towns UK is gearing up to a large software project. All of them doing different things, but each of them concerned with moving value around a peer to peer trade exchange network. We are not talking about creating a single network any more than the internet is a single network, but simply creating a language for exchange networks to interoperate.

This standard can be planned and done sooner and better, or we can wait for some years for the softwares to compete on arbitrary criteria until an adequate de facto standard is reached. So this posting is stage 1 - to canvass the support of as many people as possible All of these will be more relevant and more useful if the movement can rally behind them.

I shall be contacting many people individually to solicit their engagement. If you have any skills, money or in-kind resources to offer this project, then please write in public below who you are, and how you would like to help.