Stories of actual software collaboration among participants in this discussion

IndieWeb style :)

https://microblog.pierre-o.fr/2015/sharing-2-fails-

Small prototyping effort in progress, don't know yet if success or failure:

Using valueflows (https://github.com/valueflows/valueflows) vocabulary work to link up NRP (or other source of people, groups, and their various relationships) and Holodex (see http://holodex.enspiral.com/). The part of the story that I find useful is that we have collaborated on the model from the beginning, and that has become the vocabulary work which has expanded to include other people coming from other projects. Which incidentally, we needed, because we are LOD newbies, among other reasons.

cc: @ahdinosaur @elfpavlik

@pierreozoux - thank you very much. Failure stories are as important as success stories. What do you think we can learn from those 2 fails?

@pierreozoux I appreciate you have become more than an observer! I do wonder if this (neutral space) effort will have the same results, given the response so far, and am interested to hear about similar past efforts.

@bobhaugen as I was discussing with @clochix he stated that one of the main issue is that our projects (community/capital) are under funded, so it is difficult to allocate resources for a greater good somehow.

Again the prisoner dilemma :)

Mutual Credit systems are among the most important forerunners of the good version of the next economy. (The bad version is already underway.)

I got a lot of the info below from @matthewslater, one of the developers of mutual credit software, who is not responsible for any mistakes I made in translation.

Matthew says,
" I turned my attention to the economy and to building a really useful mutual credit system so that communities could easily start running their own economies when the shit hit the fan."

Several Mutual Credit software systems exist. Some of them have been intertrading with each other using a central clearing system.
Here's the code: https://github.com/clearingcentral/clearingcentral

From Wikipedia: "In 2003 the Community Exchange System (CES) started operating an internet-based LETS in Cape Town, South Africa. This has grown into a global network of over 800 local exchange systems in more than seventy countries (2014), among them Australia, Finland, New Zealand, Poland, South Africa, Spain, USA, UK, Vanuatu etc. Many of these are former LETS groups but others are time banks and hybrids."

Intertrading is beyond just exchanging data, it is performing trades across communities and between different systems using "currencies" which work very differently both from national currencies and also from digital currencies like Bitcoin. The "currencies" are created by the participants in the trades, by granting each other mutual credit. No bank or mint or mining required.

Some of the systems uses hours as a "currency", others use LETS (Local Exchange Trading System) credits, which are often pegged to a national currency. One reason for a central clearing service is to handle conversion rates between those different currencies.

Matthew says,
"There are currently 3 servers connected to clearing central:
The original CES,
Catalonian Integral Co-op using Drupal,
Ozzie LETS, a clone of the original LETS."

The Mutual Aid Network also intends to intertrade between mutual credit and time-bank systems and mutual aid systems, possibly using the same clearing central software.

Matthew is currently writing a connecting module from mutual credit module to CES so that the Dane County Time Bank (part of the Mutual Aid Network) and another 140 groups will soon be connected.

P.S. in case you didn't catch the moral of that story, if the mutual credit networks can do it, the rest of us should be able to follow...

Which does not necessarily mean do it exactly the same way, but maybe with the same spirit.

The founder of LETS, Michael Linton, is now working on a more modular version of the system called openmoney - I think there's some clear communications challenges in what he proposes, but ultimately, I think it is a very good plug & play DIY community currency / mutual credit system that works on premise of anyone can start as many currencies as they want. He also has a suggestion towards implementation, here, you might click into the slideshow.

He's implemented several of these community dollars with limited success; he's hoping for a big movement around it so in that way not a success. The best it's operated, I believe, is through a partnership with a local food rescue effort - Food Not Bombs (FNB). Coincidentally, the best way I've encountered of explaining Timebanking to my community has been through my local FNB chapter.

LETS (and openmoney) are examples of mutual credit. I think several partial-success stories of mutual credit networks can be found using a variety of software.

"LETS (and openmoney) are examples of mutual credit. I think several partial-success stories of mutual credit networks can be found using a variety of software."

Communities currencies seem to have an obvious value fit with free code software and open source development (reciprocity etc). There are a number of examples of this working, not least @matthewslater and his group working on [CommunityForge[(communityforge.net). But there have also been some spectacular fails, like TimeBanks UK adopting the proprietary Time and Talents platform, and TimeBanks USA migrating their CommunityWeaver platform from Drupal-based free code system (based in part on Matt's MutualCredit module to a proprietary "open core" system. I have drafted a blog post on this that I keep meaning to finish.