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Fri 21 Jun 2019 8:28AM

Global Credit Commons track

D dilgreen Public Seen by 165

This track is about building the tools required to make possible the viral growth by federation of the Global Credit Commons. If you haven't yet, you will need to read the Credit Commons whitepaper at www.creditcommons.net

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dilgreen Fri 21 Jun 2019 8:35AM

Vision

To illustrate what an economy of this kind could support, here are a few imaginary examples:

  1. In Wales, UK, a group of ten rural co-operatives decides to set up a trading network. They use an online tool to select a domain name and form a minimal legal organisation with standard governance tools. Answering a few more questions, accepting 'default' settings for most parameters, and committing to one of a provided list of minimal tech providers as 'operations' member (in return for a fixed-term agreement to pay a tiny percentage fee on inter-network trades), they are established. This has cost them nothing more than time. Within an afternoon, each co-op is a member, they have made some trades among themselves, and they have voted to join a regional inter-trade network, where their membership is provisional pending the admissions procedure. Within two weeks they are approved, and already one member has received a delivery of a spare part from a supplier in the local town, a member of the town business network, which is affiliated to the inter-trade network, and another has an enquiry about sheepskin slippers from Finland which has 'hopped' across five network tiers. They have voted to temporarily 'devalue' their exchange rate for inter-trade a little to offset the lack of reputation their network has accrued.
  2. In a favela in Brazil, two younger members of the community propose setting up a local network. People are sceptical - they have never heard of such a thing, and some don't have easy access to technology. The two make an arrangement with the local store, which has a computer and a printer, to act as the provider of one-time tokens. When a member wants to buy something, she can go to the coffee-shop - where she is well-known - and asks for some tokens. The shop owner asks her to authenticate her request on the computer, then prints the tokens for her, which can circulate until they arrive at any member who can redeem them back into the digital system (both printing and redeeming attract a small reward). The favela network connects with a city-wide network, allowing local value creation to pay for education for favela children, and favela people to be paid for work maintaining school grounds.
  3. A world-wide network of film creatives takes the standard bundle of network-formation resources and forks it, adding a sophisticated mechanism that allows for incremental share development in one-off networks for film projects. One aspect of the mechanism is the ability to sell distribution use-credits in return for fiat currency. The capacity to pay for labour from a central project fund in mutual credit and for external costs in fiat, all in accordance with a collaborative budget plan makes it possible to create films faster, with less need for rent-seeking investors. Later, the new tools are forked again and adapted by housing co-operatives for use in buying land and property into commons ownership. ## Technical requirements and raison d'être for this project In order to arrive at such an economy, three technical capacities are considered crucial:
  • straightforward ability for any group, anywhere in the world, with minimal technical or financial means, to set up the technical and practical governance tooling of a functionally viable Mutual Credit network that will have the capacity to federate with others.
  • a sufficiently flexible set of interaction protocols to allow for a wide variety of differentiation between networks, without losing the capacity for federation with other networks for the purposes of inter-trade.
  • for the technical implementations of these mechanisms to be licensed appropriately for community improvement, elaboration and differentiation.

In addition to these technical requirements, of course, are some cultural developments. People and businesses need to gain confidence and understanding around the capacities of complementary currencies, need to be able to see how they benefit other people who use them, need to believe that it is worth the additional overheads (of all kinds) that are incurred for taking part.

These cultural developments are already under way [link is required here to another document with links to many examples, statistics, research reports &c], but are severely hampered by the poor quality, lack of availability and inter-operability of the available technical tools.

This project considers that development of well-designed and well-founded technical tools at this time can catalyse an explosion in complementary money system approaches.

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dilgreen Fri 21 Jun 2019 8:44AM

@matthewslater has been developing many aspects of this proposal forward for several years, building on his deep experience. @dilgreengmailcom is beginning to work directly with Matthew to push things forward.

It is worth noting that vision differs in a couple of important points - but that these need not compromise progress, although they need resolution.

I am putting each into a separate post below - please discuss them in threads from those posts - not in the main channel.

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dilgreen Fri 21 Jun 2019 8:46AM

Issue 1. tree or meshed networks?
The whitepaper posits a protocol that allows each member to join only one network, and each network node in turn to join only one higher tier network - presenting a view of a strictly tree-like diagram of an economy. Dil's view is that this is a/ insufficient to provide enough variety for real economic activity and b/ variety will be so desirable that people will subvert the tree-like requirement by setting up alternate identities.

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dilgreen Fri 21 Jun 2019 10:54AM

Issue 2. conversion rates
This is a complex issue. The 'vision' above suggests that a network might choose to 'set' its own exchange rate within the next tier network. But as a multiple of what? If the next tier network is set within a singular nation state, then perhaps all members are using pounds, say, as a pricing equivalent guide. In this case a local network devaluation is one way to address trading imbalances. The whitepaper makes a strong point, imho, about encouraging all networks to adopt an accounting unit which is equivalent to the local 'living wage' hourly rate (these are generally available figures). Free pricing removes any ideological inflexibility about 1 hour here ==1 hour there, but a general cultural signal is promoted. Since these figures are published by external bodies, and only recalculated on a periodic basis, volatility is reduced.

Matthew proposes that trade imbalances (which are still inevitable, even after living wage relationships deliver pricing signals) should be handled as a matter of deliberate policy, through co-ordinated action by the members of higher tier networks (citing US inter-state approaches - I have not been able to find references to this on google - help please). @thomashgrecojr suggests that imbalances are often dealt with by investment of a trade surplus by the holder into capacity-building work in the deficit domain - but this takes us into a wider domain - that of assets and investment.
PROPOSAL: that we proceed on the basis of recommended accounting unit being a living wage hour (giving a local currency equivalent for pricing guides). Accompanying this is a mechanism allowing networks to apply a standard modifier to their pricing to higher tier networks (revaluation by policy), and a note taken that the governance of higher tier networks must address trade imbalances as a matter of course.

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dilgreen Sun 23 Jun 2019 10:23AM

@matthewslater and I will be working next week on software architecture for the GCC.
In preparation, I have had to think things through myself from first principles (auto-didact habit), and have produced this: GCC software architecture thoughts.
Please read in conjunction with Matthew's Credit Commons whitepaper, and with the localpay.techproposal.
Also Matthew has started work on API definitions on swaggerhub.

MS

Matthew Slater Mon 24 Jun 2019 8:08AM

Dil we need to clarify the scope slightly. Inter-group trading requires potentially many functions to operate between the groups. The credit commons describes the accounting function but sol-search, the one at swaggerhub, above is a protocol for listing offers (and wants) in the marketplace. Note that I already have an implementation of this working in Community Forge.

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dilgreen Mon 24 Jun 2019 9:51AM

There are now many comments in the gdoc linked above. Worth a look.

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mike_hales Wed 26 Jun 2019 8:37AM

A commons - really?

The gdoc says up front:

any social/legal agent / legal person (or wider definition if it is desirable to accept unincorporated groups) may join any number of networks - on the assumption that they will accept the agent as a member

This is not a commons, this is an individualist universe, as in standard liberal theology of the market and the State.

Anything built on individuals cannot be a commons - the collectivity of a commons is primary, constitutive: a triad of collective contributing/curating, stewarding and enjoying of privileges. And in C21 commoning - as distinct from the customary commons of small, pre-modern social worlds - the recognition by a commons of multiple other overlapping (non-propertarian, actively curating and stewarding) commons is also primary: commoning in a pluriverse. This is where things get hard! Here’s the C21 challenge of globally and locally commoning, where the modernist-autonomist ideal of federating grows up, and the C19 mutualist-cooperative aspiration comes home?

The intent of the para above must then be restated from the standpoint of the commons as the constitutive entity:

If it decides, a commons may accept any member [perhaps restricted to members that are legally constituted as corporate under liberal law, for pragmatic transitional reasons as we move towards a future of commons], recognising that they may also be accepted by other commons, and thus subject to the governance, privileges and obligations of other commons.

This directly creates a requirement for a commons to have negotiable relationships with other commons - to be met by federating, or maybe by commons-of-commons, which is probably not the same thing - and to recognise their parity and necessity. This may or may not be seen as a requirement to be met in the credit software - it might all be in wetware, in sociality, in politics? Depends on how far the software is seen as part of the commons-governance process, as distinct from the accounting, credit-approval and trading processes. Difficult one, this

Up front, the gdoc invokes the ability to federate. Federating between commons may be the way to go; or perhaps commons-of-commons is what has to be invented (an open and pivotal C21 experiment, this). But federating of individuals is not a valid concept in commoning. Perhaps, after all, what we’re building here is not a new difficult, post-propertarian, post-liberal commons, but a good old-fashioned modernist-autonomist federation? In which case, please, can we change the name at once, to Open Credit Federation? And feel sad that we’ve backed away from this one - the Big One of our times, IMO.

Someone to read on law for commoning, the individual, property and the State (Hisss!) and the literal outlawing of collectives is Ugo Mattei:
- Ugo Mattei & Marco de Morpurgo (2009), Global law and plunder - The dark side of the rule of law
- Ugo Mattei (2011), The State, the market, and some preliminary questions about the commons
- Ugo Mattei (2015), First thoughts for a phenomenology of the commons

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DaveDarby Thu 27 Jun 2019 6:33AM

just rushing off to the open conference, but in the same way that the grass and resources on the common land was owned in common by local farmers, here, the credit is held in common by the members, rather than it having to be provided by banks. will read more later.

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