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. NESTA realised that software solutions have an important role to play to support this kind of social organising, but the software market in this space would benefit from more coordination and collaboration. So last Wednesday (8 June) NESTA extended an open invitation to complementary currency software developers and organisers to take part in an unconference in London to explore possibilities for collaboration.
It was the first gathering of Complementary currency software developers that I have ever known!
John Waters, a credit-union-centric software activist based in Wales has long lamented the lack of coherence and support in this sector, despite tremendous amounts of energy and good intentions. This emerging field has yet to establish standards and leadership, and John was concerned that many complementary currency projects were hampered by not knowing which software bandwagon to jump on.
A wide range of projects were represented, most notably (for me), and in no particular order, were
- the NEF/Brixton Pound project, which is investing heavily in a software platform so that when the Brixton Pound relaunches in the Autumn, it will be more useful and user-friendly than mere paper notes.
- Spice, which implements social currencies in South Wales
- OpenTransact, a very lightweight API for payments between web sites.
- LETSlink UK which is providing software and umbrella services for several LETS communities
- Timebanks UK, which will soon be looking for a modern software solution
- Cuprium project, which is building software for credit unions, equivalent to the industry standard, curtains
- CC Lite a PERL accounting application capable of running many LETS at the same time.
- Pebble a forthcoming implementation of Ripple, a really neat idea for routing credit around trust networks.
- Community Forge on behalf 150 communities using mutual credit module for the popular social web platform, Drupal
Regrettably, no representative of Cyclos, the most established open source banking software, was present.
Several discussions were tabled, but I wish to focus on one only. 'Intertrading' is the community currency word for trading between communities and between currencies. Intertrading between web servers and between currencies is the first requirement if the movement is to have any kind of coherence and scalability. For CES it is a major selling point, and the old timebank UK software can do it; however in both cases this has only been possible because all the sites have been hosted on the same web server. We very much need a protocol which will allow complementary currency systems to interact securely across the internet, not just on one machine.
Pelle Braendgaard came all the way from US and presented his simple simple payment API, OpenTransact. This API makes attempting a payment as simple as requesting a web page, although I would say the protocol is incomplete, since it does not at all address the double-spend problem
A fuller intertrading setup would also require a either a central or a peer-to-peer registry of participating currencies and exchange rates. Otherwise every community would need to have an account with every other community, which is not practicable.
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