It has been my pleasure to hang out with Collin Ferguson and the Xchange Stewards team in the North West USA. After some changes of direction over the last few years, Collin and the XS team now have a clear idea of what needs doing, a strategy, and two hardcore software engineers on-side.
Collin judges that business barter is where the money is, and where the volume is. To him, the business barter industry has failed. They have got the message, the structure, and the business model all wrong, and it's no surprise that penetration is less than 2% of the potential market.
The industry shoots itself in the foot with onerous membership and transaction costs, and the use of brokers to encourage trade only adds to overheads. But the worst part is that every piece of software is a silo of its own, and the industry is not recognising how the new networked economy functions.
But because Xchange Stewards are not just out to make a buck, they're able to think about restructuring the industry for the benefit of all. The key is in building software infrastructure which properly separates the different functions - the marketplace, the payment systems, and the bank, and a few minor others, and to define the way each component communicates as part of a scalable network. Then anyone can come along and build their own software to slot in.
As I arrived, the XS team is just finishing the first section, the marketplace, and turning its attention to the bank. They were quickly turned on to the idea of using Drupal, and we spent today writing a SOAP wrapper around version 2 of my module.
We're all very happy, I've saved them a ton of work by providing a serious open source mutual credit accounting engine which they can slot in, and I'm proud to be a part of an exciting project in the business barter industry!
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