UnMoney Convergence: landmark meeting between open money and digital identity advocates
The ‘unMoney Convergence - a conference on money, liberation and systems change’ has just been announced. It takes place April 14-16 in Seattle and will be mostly organised using Open Space Technology methods. You can view the pre-conference wiki here:
URL = http://unmoney.wik.is/
For background, here is Michael Linton, predicting everyone will be using open money systems in about ten years!!
Our own wiki category is still a good place to learn about the various strands of the monetary transformation movement.
Hopefully, it will also give a chance to these people, all working on p2p-based infrastructures for gifting, sharing, and exchange, a chance to meet up and built interoperable open protocols that can be used by different projects.
Question: why do these hard-headed people at Oekonux, who favour a GPL society, not understand that having open money is just as important as open design and free software? Why do they find it acceptable that money is only produced by proprietary banks, and cannot be directly producted by open communities??
In any case, here are some citations to ponder:
“Money is making a fundamental evolutionary step into community currencies. Conventional money as we know it has a built in architecture that leads to scarcity, centralization, concentration, secrecy, proprietarization. This conventional monetary system is not appropriate to dealing with today’s global systemic challenges (harmonizing local and global needs, creating ecological sustainability, enabling the information economy, leveraging the open source paradigm, etc). Just as there are now millions of media outlets today, currencies will follow this same evolution by shifting from centralized authoritative models to distributed ones that allow better sustainability, distribution, transparency, and regulation mechanisms.”
“You treasure what you measure, and you measure what you treasure. Open money provides the tools to implement this maxim. What should we be treasuring in our culture and on our planet that we so far have no way to measure?”
“Poor liquidity and leakage (money flowing from the local economy) are key causes for floundering and/or disappearing regional economies. To overcome these shortfalls local communities should be increasing local liquidity and plugging the leakage through the introduction of complementary community currencies thereby re-building their respective local communities in the coal mining area of Wales. When local residents within their respective communities changed the agreements they had about conventional money, by creating and spending complementary community currencies locally instead of spending only diminishing amounts of federal currency with giant corporations, it commenced re-birth in the local communities. Molly used the term local multiplier when she discussed how local liquidity increased proportionately to the amount of complementary community currency being circulated by those who were choosing to participate.”
- (from a summary of) Molly Scott reporting on complementary currencies in Wales
See also Thomas Greco’s work and proposal on the Credit Commons.