Matthew Slater - 14.06.2011
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 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
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 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, and we were delighted to discover that it was ideal for our purposes, and that there was the talent and energy and will in the room, especially from Cuprium, to make it possible.
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. So what seemed to me like an intractably large task, which has been stalled for years, is actually two distinct and ordinary tasks, the first of which is now underway.
The way forward is now clear for software developers and currency implementers alike.
Project managers should now be able to make an early software choice confident that their systems will be part of a wider, connected and co-operative community without risking being stuck in a technological cul de sac.
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