From Shareable.net
By Jeremy Adam Smith
10.11.10
The results of The New Sharing Economy study, released last week by Latitude Research and Shareable magazine, point to a possible solution to one of America’s most troubling trends: the decline in social trust.
This trend is documented in a variety of national surveys. The General Social Survey, a periodic assessment of Americans’ moods and values, shows a 10-point decline from 1976 to 2008 in the number of Americans who believe other people can generally be trusted. The General Social Survey also shows trust in all US institutions declining (with the exception of the military, which, after a post-Vietnam stumble, saw a 10-point jump in confidence from 2000 to 2008).
Why are these declines bad for all of us? Largely because trust is very highly correlated with quality of life. Numerous studies show that where social trust is high, crime is low. Trust is also very good for democracy—why bother to vote if you don’t trust politicians or the results? Not to mention the economy: Studies by Stephen Knack, Philip Keefer, Armin Falk, and Michael Kosfeld, among others, have found strong links between trust and economic performance.
Why has trust been declining? In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam drew on a vast data set to argue that people were simply participating less and less in the community activities and civic organization that create the kind of reciprocal relationships that allow social trust to flourish—largely because television was consuming leisure time. When the Harvard University GoodWork Project ran a series of surveys in 2004, researchers “found that individuals typically blame the media for loss of trust.” Right or wrong, the effect appeared to be generational. “Most of the young people we interviewed have a default stance of distrust towards the media,” says Carrie James, research director of GoodWork.
Of course, the media landscape of 2004 was totally different from the one we have in 2010. The intervening period has seen the emergence and phenomenal growth of new mobile technologies and social media like Twitter, Faceboook, and countless other services. It’s much too early to declare that social media will save our communities, democracy, and economy by rebuilding trust—some believe that it’s doing the opposite—but our New Sharing Economy Study does suggest that social media provide new opportunities for people to re-learn to trust each other.
For starters, 78 percent of the study participants felt that interacting with people online made them more open to the idea of sharing offline resources, even with strangers. This is very consistent with a huge amount of research: Laboratory experiments show that when individuals successfully engage in an exchange that involves trust, it creates more trust and positive emotions. People are more likely to engage in additional exchanges that require trust.
Many of the 537 participants in the New Sharing Economy survey expressed similar ideas. As a 44-year-old woman in Helsinki, Finland, put it: “[If I designed a sharing service], it would work on network based on recommendations: I know you and you know someone, so you build trust—sort of ‘get introduced.’ Based on trust and community relationships, it’s easier to broaden one’s perspective towards sharing almost anything.”
This is why reputation is becoming an important form of currency; communities that offer transparency (such as through open ratings and reviews) encourage good behavior and trust amongst members.
Some participants embraced the notion of that sharing networks might complement or replace social institutions that have declined in power and importance. “What I'd want to set up is free sharing of services and stuff amongst a community of people in the way that a small town might once have functioned,” said one 38-year-old woman in Providence, RI. “I think this kind of interaction is part of community ties and support networks that used to develop naturally and spontaneously and need some encouragement now.”
Kim Gaskins of Latitude Research argues this creates “a huge opportunity for businesses to create the technological and community infrastructure that will help people to share in new ways, locally and across much broader distances, than was ever possible before.” And the really interesting thing is that this business activity may actually build social trust. In fact, as we’ve discovered through our interviews at Shareable.net, many sharing economy entrepreneurs explicitly see building trust as essential to their business models.
“There was a day when it would have seemed like a crazy idea to send your goods to people you had never met,” CouchSurfing founder Casey Fenton told us. “But [businesses like eBay] implemented different trust systems and it worked really well. And when you say it like that, people realize we have overcome the trust barrier through the CouchSurfing system. In fact, we are in the businesses of helping people understand just how trustworthy someone they have never met is. It is not our mission, but it is core to why we exist.”
Will launching new product service systems—whether for-profits like Zipcar or non-profits like Kiva—help us to cut crime, improve democracy, and increase prosperity? Will building a new business model help build a new kind of society? No one knows for sure, but the participants in the New Sharing Economy Study say it’s worth a try.
This piece was partially adapted (and updated) from a 2008 essay I wrote with Ohio State University sociologist Pamela Paxton—worth a read if you’re interested in the issues and research surrounding social trust. Some of the language from this piece was also borrowed directly from The New Sharing Economy study, which will be presented and discussed at the next SXSW.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Friday, October 15, 2010
Community Conversation with Douglas Rushkoff
From Shareable.net
By Paul M. Davis
10.12.10
Following last week's excerpt of Douglas Rushkoff's new book Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for the Digital Age, we follow with a Q&A with the author, featuring questions from Shareable's community of contributors and advisors. On Wednesday, October 13 and Thursday, October 14, we invite our wider community of readers to engage with Rushkoff in the comments, as he responds to your questions and thoughts.
Michel Bauwens: If we indeed take control of our technology, how do you see the balance between individual control, relationships between peers, and the power of any new collectives that may arise in this networked world? Do you see the balance between individuality and collectivity changing?
Rushkoff: Well, if we take control of our tech, as you put it, then we get to decide how that dynamic changes. I don't think we get to fully take charge of it, though. I think we get to partner with it, and with our various biological and evolutionary imperatives. I feel like the best we can hope for is conscious participation in all this.
There is almost certainly an evolutionary drive toward increasing complexity in the face of entropy. That's practically a definition of life. Technology is so powerful and attractive to us because it holds the promise of greater complexity and greater connectedness. Atoms to molecules to cells to organelles to organisms. What's next? No one knows for sure, but it sure ain't Facebook.
I have been saying from the beginning—the early '90s anyway—that we are looking at collective organism. But unlike some kind of fascist Borg, we don't have to lose our individuality. It is actually enhanced as more people become aware of everyone else. Not a hive, but more of a coral reef.
Some of these rather invasive technologies are really just preparation for a world where everyone will know what you are thinking anyway.
Yelizavetta Kofman: On the one hand, being a Gen Y:er I like to think that I'm more on the programming than programmed side of the Digital Age. And I believe in the spontaneous, magical, democratic power of the Internet. On the other hand, as someone who one day hopes to make a living, I wonder if the Internet has to 'go corporate' for my generation to be able to build careers from all the creative 'programming' things we do? Can we really keep providing resources, ideas, writing, and art for free online without devaluing these things?
Rushkoff: Well, I think you have it backwards. The reason you have to work for free is because this stuff IS corporate. The way to make a living in this space for real would be to establish a genuine means for peer to peer exchange. YouTube and Facebook and Google are making plenty of money off your labor.
Making money, or earning a living, is not anathema to freedom and democracy. They are the same thing. That's what democracy came out of:people fighting for the right to make a living instead of having to work for the feudal lords.
Mira Luna: Online media facilitates an abundance of superficial relationships and broad, but again superficial, depth of collective wisdom. If the new economy is one based on closer relationships and deeper knowledge of context and place, instead of abstract numbers in accounts, then how do we get to a deep economy through a primarily superficial form of communication? Is a local economy desirable or possible as the web of consciousness spreads around the world? Is real accountability, transparency, and responsibility still possible while creating a more a sustainable and just global economy?
Rushkoff: Well, I'm not sure that any economy goes deep. Economics may be essentially superficial. After all, what is it really but a way for people to keep track of the value others have created, in order to make sure some people don't exploit the work of a few. (Well, actually, the economic system we know and love today was created explicitly for the purposes of monarchs and their cohorts extracting value from laborers—but that's beside the point.)
If any economy is really just a ledger to prevent freeloading, then we can't expect it to reflect the deeper values and relationships and place. You're talking about an ecology of interactions and transmissions. That ecology—at least right now—is much more complex and multifaceted when it occurs in real life, among people who know each other as creatures and not just usernames. But there are ways in which we need to interact as a species on greater scales, and the net allows for a lot of this. We simply can't forget that such engagements are necessarily simplified. They aren't bad, they're just limited.
I think that transparency and accountability are possible, sure. I'm not as sure that people really care about them as much as they should, though. I feel as if most people would rather be lied to, so long as they don't have to think too much. I don't see new media changing this, yet. It may in many cases be making it worse—especially as people so steadfastly refuse to accept responsibility for what they're doing with these tools.
Rachel Botsman: How do you think the concept of 'money' will have changed by say 2030? How do you think will we trade and exchange?
Rushkoff: The money we use now is basically a thirteenth century operating system trying to serve as a platform for a twenty-first century digital economy. That's why banks are under such stress. Centralized moneylending was invented to keep monarchs wealthy, and it depended on chartered monopolies and other strict topdown control.
I think we will see the emergence of a number of digital alternatives to centralized money. They may look something like time dollars or lets systems, in that people will maintain a balance closer to zero rather than trying to accumulate savings. But they won't have to be local, because identity and history can be verified online.
The next step, of course, will be for us to contend with the fact that we have enough stuff to go around even if people don't work that much. Then, currency will look very different.
Paul M. Davis: As the online world enables many more opportunities for collaboration, how do we ensure that the contributions and benefits are distributed in an equitable way? How do we avoid the inequities between the haves and have-nots that are inherent within the current media labor market? And how do we make sure that the benefits are as freely-accessible to all, as the process and means of production are?
Rushkoff: Well, first we have to make sure that any benefits at all are available to those who actually create value. So far, it looks like the net is being used by the largest of corporations to extract value from creators for no compensation at all. YouTube and blogs and everything else are supposed to serving as publicity for some other aspect of our careers, but what other aspects are there?
So it doesn't look simply inequitable to me; it looks like exploitation.
The way out, and the way to guarantee that the benefits, once generated, are equitably distributed is to develop peer to peer models of value exchange. Disintermediate the corporations, really. That's what I've done with this book. People get my book for close to half of what it would cost through a traditional big publisher, yet I still get more profit per book. They have more money left to buy a book someone other than me. I have more to donate to Wikimedia and archive.org, which is where I'm putting the 20% I don't have to share with Bertelsmann.
Neal Gorenflo: Life, Inc. and Program or Be Programmed seem to be much more strident calls to action than prior work. And while Life, Inc. is about corporate capitalism and your new book is on media, I sense they may have more in common than what’s on the surface. What are the parallels between your last two books, and what kind of change do they mark for you personally and intellectually?
Rushkoff: Both of them are about people coming to recognize the way their world works. In Life Inc, I wanted people to see that the economy isn't just this way because of nature; it was designed by people at a particular moment in history to do a very particular thing. It's not commerce; it's a scheme to prevent peer to peer commerce and extract value from colonies. We still use it today because we forgot that there were many different ways for an economy to be run (or allowed to operate). They were all outlawed by kings in the 1200's, is all.
The new book removes the metaphor. I realized that telling people money was an obsolete operating system made no sense because people don't know what an operating system is. We are painfully illiterate in all things digital. We accept each Steve Jobs device and each Facebook iteration as if they were created to make our lives better. We don't know what this stuff is really for, because we can't even imagine that digital devices have agendas.
Jonah Sachs: We assumed that taking power away from the gatekeepers of information by ushering in the viral age would make us instantly smarter and more authentic. A decade later, is it happening? Or the opposite?
Rushkoff: It's not happening because we didn't take the power away. We gave it away. The only people who cared deeply about the new memetic potentials of this stuff were marketers.
But the technology itself has impacted those gatekeepers. They can't lie without being discovered, they can't hide behind their brands, and whatever they do eventually comes to our attention. The problem is that most of us simply don't care. Along with the increase in our potential to know has come an abhorrence for knowledge. As if using your head means denying your gut.
And those of us who *do* know rarely take action. All the knowledge is paralyzing. That's part of why I am advising people to set more local goals.
Paul M. Davis: If the traditional publishing industry is dead, as you stated in your Arthur Magazine piece, does this not only upend the production and distribution model, but also the entire notion of what the form of the “book” can and should be? How do you see the form evolving in the years to come?
Rushkoff: I don't think I said it's dead. It just doesn't serve all of our needs. It needs to change. It is currently keeping too many people employed at jobs that don't create value or increase the quality of the literature. And those jobs are there to cater to other corporations in the obsolete distribution scheme. As we move to more peer-to-peer models of distribution, we can pass more value directly from the consumer to the writers and editors.
People just have to be willing to buy directly from publishers, rather than to use the current aggregators (Amazon and Barnes & Noble). All we need to do is aggregate on a higher level. Someone (maybe I'll just try to do it, actually) needs to create a big searchable index of all the books for sale. And it just links directly to the publishers, who can use any fulfillment scheme they like. The site can make its money with ads and book reviews, but not take any money from the publishers to connect readers to consumers. Of course, Google Books is more than willing to do this right now. People would simply have to change their habits.
Neal Gorenflo: You've played keyboard with Psychic TV, taught college, produced acclaimed books and TV, made an impassioned critique of corporate capitalism in Life, Inc., and have gone against techno-utopian grain with your new book Program or Be Programed. What connects these projects? What is driving you? And what is the most important thing you've learned in all of this?
Rushkoff: Everything I've done is about helping people differentiate between the map and the territory. What is really here, and what has put here? What are the true given circumstances, and what are arbitrary products of our own creation? I want people to see the programs - social and otherwise - that are running our world. We participate in them as if they were accepted operating principles of reality, when they are just social constructions.
What I've learned in all of this is that—for the most part—people are happier not knowing. They would rather have a guiding mythology and believe it to be the truth, rather than to know the people who came up with that myth, or what those people may have intended to do with it.
Over the next two days, we invite our readers to engage with Rushkoff in the comments below. If you're new to Shareable, please take a look at our community guidelines to learn more about what's expected in comments. In general, be excellent to each other!
By Paul M. Davis
10.12.10
Following last week's excerpt of Douglas Rushkoff's new book Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for the Digital Age, we follow with a Q&A with the author, featuring questions from Shareable's community of contributors and advisors. On Wednesday, October 13 and Thursday, October 14, we invite our wider community of readers to engage with Rushkoff in the comments, as he responds to your questions and thoughts.
Michel Bauwens: If we indeed take control of our technology, how do you see the balance between individual control, relationships between peers, and the power of any new collectives that may arise in this networked world? Do you see the balance between individuality and collectivity changing?
Rushkoff: Well, if we take control of our tech, as you put it, then we get to decide how that dynamic changes. I don't think we get to fully take charge of it, though. I think we get to partner with it, and with our various biological and evolutionary imperatives. I feel like the best we can hope for is conscious participation in all this.
There is almost certainly an evolutionary drive toward increasing complexity in the face of entropy. That's practically a definition of life. Technology is so powerful and attractive to us because it holds the promise of greater complexity and greater connectedness. Atoms to molecules to cells to organelles to organisms. What's next? No one knows for sure, but it sure ain't Facebook.
I have been saying from the beginning—the early '90s anyway—that we are looking at collective organism. But unlike some kind of fascist Borg, we don't have to lose our individuality. It is actually enhanced as more people become aware of everyone else. Not a hive, but more of a coral reef.
Some of these rather invasive technologies are really just preparation for a world where everyone will know what you are thinking anyway.
Yelizavetta Kofman: On the one hand, being a Gen Y:er I like to think that I'm more on the programming than programmed side of the Digital Age. And I believe in the spontaneous, magical, democratic power of the Internet. On the other hand, as someone who one day hopes to make a living, I wonder if the Internet has to 'go corporate' for my generation to be able to build careers from all the creative 'programming' things we do? Can we really keep providing resources, ideas, writing, and art for free online without devaluing these things?
Rushkoff: Well, I think you have it backwards. The reason you have to work for free is because this stuff IS corporate. The way to make a living in this space for real would be to establish a genuine means for peer to peer exchange. YouTube and Facebook and Google are making plenty of money off your labor.
Making money, or earning a living, is not anathema to freedom and democracy. They are the same thing. That's what democracy came out of:people fighting for the right to make a living instead of having to work for the feudal lords.
Mira Luna: Online media facilitates an abundance of superficial relationships and broad, but again superficial, depth of collective wisdom. If the new economy is one based on closer relationships and deeper knowledge of context and place, instead of abstract numbers in accounts, then how do we get to a deep economy through a primarily superficial form of communication? Is a local economy desirable or possible as the web of consciousness spreads around the world? Is real accountability, transparency, and responsibility still possible while creating a more a sustainable and just global economy?
Rushkoff: Well, I'm not sure that any economy goes deep. Economics may be essentially superficial. After all, what is it really but a way for people to keep track of the value others have created, in order to make sure some people don't exploit the work of a few. (Well, actually, the economic system we know and love today was created explicitly for the purposes of monarchs and their cohorts extracting value from laborers—but that's beside the point.)
If any economy is really just a ledger to prevent freeloading, then we can't expect it to reflect the deeper values and relationships and place. You're talking about an ecology of interactions and transmissions. That ecology—at least right now—is much more complex and multifaceted when it occurs in real life, among people who know each other as creatures and not just usernames. But there are ways in which we need to interact as a species on greater scales, and the net allows for a lot of this. We simply can't forget that such engagements are necessarily simplified. They aren't bad, they're just limited.
I think that transparency and accountability are possible, sure. I'm not as sure that people really care about them as much as they should, though. I feel as if most people would rather be lied to, so long as they don't have to think too much. I don't see new media changing this, yet. It may in many cases be making it worse—especially as people so steadfastly refuse to accept responsibility for what they're doing with these tools.
Rachel Botsman: How do you think the concept of 'money' will have changed by say 2030? How do you think will we trade and exchange?
Rushkoff: The money we use now is basically a thirteenth century operating system trying to serve as a platform for a twenty-first century digital economy. That's why banks are under such stress. Centralized moneylending was invented to keep monarchs wealthy, and it depended on chartered monopolies and other strict topdown control.
I think we will see the emergence of a number of digital alternatives to centralized money. They may look something like time dollars or lets systems, in that people will maintain a balance closer to zero rather than trying to accumulate savings. But they won't have to be local, because identity and history can be verified online.
The next step, of course, will be for us to contend with the fact that we have enough stuff to go around even if people don't work that much. Then, currency will look very different.
Paul M. Davis: As the online world enables many more opportunities for collaboration, how do we ensure that the contributions and benefits are distributed in an equitable way? How do we avoid the inequities between the haves and have-nots that are inherent within the current media labor market? And how do we make sure that the benefits are as freely-accessible to all, as the process and means of production are?
Rushkoff: Well, first we have to make sure that any benefits at all are available to those who actually create value. So far, it looks like the net is being used by the largest of corporations to extract value from creators for no compensation at all. YouTube and blogs and everything else are supposed to serving as publicity for some other aspect of our careers, but what other aspects are there?
So it doesn't look simply inequitable to me; it looks like exploitation.
The way out, and the way to guarantee that the benefits, once generated, are equitably distributed is to develop peer to peer models of value exchange. Disintermediate the corporations, really. That's what I've done with this book. People get my book for close to half of what it would cost through a traditional big publisher, yet I still get more profit per book. They have more money left to buy a book someone other than me. I have more to donate to Wikimedia and archive.org, which is where I'm putting the 20% I don't have to share with Bertelsmann.
Neal Gorenflo: Life, Inc. and Program or Be Programmed seem to be much more strident calls to action than prior work. And while Life, Inc. is about corporate capitalism and your new book is on media, I sense they may have more in common than what’s on the surface. What are the parallels between your last two books, and what kind of change do they mark for you personally and intellectually?
Rushkoff: Both of them are about people coming to recognize the way their world works. In Life Inc, I wanted people to see that the economy isn't just this way because of nature; it was designed by people at a particular moment in history to do a very particular thing. It's not commerce; it's a scheme to prevent peer to peer commerce and extract value from colonies. We still use it today because we forgot that there were many different ways for an economy to be run (or allowed to operate). They were all outlawed by kings in the 1200's, is all.
The new book removes the metaphor. I realized that telling people money was an obsolete operating system made no sense because people don't know what an operating system is. We are painfully illiterate in all things digital. We accept each Steve Jobs device and each Facebook iteration as if they were created to make our lives better. We don't know what this stuff is really for, because we can't even imagine that digital devices have agendas.
Jonah Sachs: We assumed that taking power away from the gatekeepers of information by ushering in the viral age would make us instantly smarter and more authentic. A decade later, is it happening? Or the opposite?
Rushkoff: It's not happening because we didn't take the power away. We gave it away. The only people who cared deeply about the new memetic potentials of this stuff were marketers.
But the technology itself has impacted those gatekeepers. They can't lie without being discovered, they can't hide behind their brands, and whatever they do eventually comes to our attention. The problem is that most of us simply don't care. Along with the increase in our potential to know has come an abhorrence for knowledge. As if using your head means denying your gut.
And those of us who *do* know rarely take action. All the knowledge is paralyzing. That's part of why I am advising people to set more local goals.
Paul M. Davis: If the traditional publishing industry is dead, as you stated in your Arthur Magazine piece, does this not only upend the production and distribution model, but also the entire notion of what the form of the “book” can and should be? How do you see the form evolving in the years to come?
Rushkoff: I don't think I said it's dead. It just doesn't serve all of our needs. It needs to change. It is currently keeping too many people employed at jobs that don't create value or increase the quality of the literature. And those jobs are there to cater to other corporations in the obsolete distribution scheme. As we move to more peer-to-peer models of distribution, we can pass more value directly from the consumer to the writers and editors.
People just have to be willing to buy directly from publishers, rather than to use the current aggregators (Amazon and Barnes & Noble). All we need to do is aggregate on a higher level. Someone (maybe I'll just try to do it, actually) needs to create a big searchable index of all the books for sale. And it just links directly to the publishers, who can use any fulfillment scheme they like. The site can make its money with ads and book reviews, but not take any money from the publishers to connect readers to consumers. Of course, Google Books is more than willing to do this right now. People would simply have to change their habits.
Neal Gorenflo: You've played keyboard with Psychic TV, taught college, produced acclaimed books and TV, made an impassioned critique of corporate capitalism in Life, Inc., and have gone against techno-utopian grain with your new book Program or Be Programed. What connects these projects? What is driving you? And what is the most important thing you've learned in all of this?
Rushkoff: Everything I've done is about helping people differentiate between the map and the territory. What is really here, and what has put here? What are the true given circumstances, and what are arbitrary products of our own creation? I want people to see the programs - social and otherwise - that are running our world. We participate in them as if they were accepted operating principles of reality, when they are just social constructions.
What I've learned in all of this is that—for the most part—people are happier not knowing. They would rather have a guiding mythology and believe it to be the truth, rather than to know the people who came up with that myth, or what those people may have intended to do with it.
Over the next two days, we invite our readers to engage with Rushkoff in the comments below. If you're new to Shareable, please take a look at our community guidelines to learn more about what's expected in comments. In general, be excellent to each other!
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Grass for Cash: Update on Common Good Finance
Common Good Finance News
democratic economics for a sustainable world
Grass for Cash
At last! After two years trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole, we finally saw the light and drilled a square hole: financing the Common Good Bank system entirely from the grassroots. That means all of us! (We are the grass...)
We had tried to finance a Common Good financial institution the standard way: through a private offering. That meant accredited investors only and no publicity. That strategy was completely at odds with the democratic nature of the Common Good Bank project. But we did not see any viable alternative.
Finally this summer, one of our organizers (John Root, Jr., in Great Barrington, MA) proposed a simple fast-track membership campaign that combines and simplifies ALL of our fundraising and publicity efforts. Just like the Common Good Bank plan itself, our new funding plan is a unique new combination of well-tested methods. The wonderful thing about this new plan is that once we have enough members, we will have ALL the funding we need, for all three phases of the Common Good Bank project.
For the past month we have been testing this new membership campaign in Great Barrington MA, Salem OR, Eugene OR, Michiana, Inland Empire CA, and Gunnison CO. The results are very encouraging. In response to feedback from those test areas, we will be making small adjustments in software and publicity materials over the next couple weeks before formally launching the campaign nationwide. If you are in one of those six communities, please support your local organizers by joining now as a Founding Member (when they ask). Otherwise you can expect a newsletter announcement in a couple weeks.
Ah! At last we are at one with the grass. Many thanks to all of you for your patience.
Superboard
Our new powerhouse board of directors met for the first time at 7:30 last Friday morning (10/8). With its high level of financial experience and expertise, this board will oversee the membership campaign, chartering process, and preparations to launch the Common Good Bank system late next year. Here's the new board:
William Spademan (President)
Carol Lewis (Treasurer) Former CFO, Institute for Community Economics
Chris Rawlings (Secretary) Owner, Waterhouse Pools
John Waite Executive Director, Franklin County Community Development Corporation
Karen Ribeiro Former Vice President, Bank of Western Massachusetts
David Hurwith Former Chairman, FirstCom Bankcorp
Catherine Ratté Principal Planner, Pioneer Valley Planning Commission
Andrew Baker Former Executive Director, Hilltown Community Development Corporation
Mary Gravel Accountant, Administrator
John White Carpenter, MBA
Java Jobs
Common Good Finance is developing open source banking software, specifically geared to the Common Good Bank project. We are seeking Java EE/SOA software engineers with experience using the Spring Framework. Before we advertise this opportunity more widely, we are looking for candidates who already support the Common Good Bank idea. If you know someone who would be interested, please feel free to forward this email to them.
By the Way
If you are not intimidated by technological complexity and registration forms, please consider voting for the Common Good Bank project on the NetSquared site. Like this:
1. Register
2. look for your password in an email from "net2@techsoup.org"
3. Login
4. Go to the Common Good Bank project page,
5. vote by clicking on the check box just under the project title
6. leave a comment at the bottom of the screen (optional)
7. Browse other projects and vote for at least 2 more (required)
Voting closes Friday, 10/15 at 8pm Eastern US Time.
Thank you for reading and thank you for supporting the Common Good Bank Project.
Wishing you happiness and prosperity throughout the year,
Sincerely,
William
William Spademan
President
Common Good Finance Corporation
democratic economics for a sustainable world
PO Box 21, Ashfield, MA 01330 USA
+1 413-628-3336
Be one of our 4,000 founding depositors
Sign up at www.commongoodbank.com
democratic economics for a sustainable world
Grass for Cash
At last! After two years trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole, we finally saw the light and drilled a square hole: financing the Common Good Bank system entirely from the grassroots. That means all of us! (We are the grass...)
We had tried to finance a Common Good financial institution the standard way: through a private offering. That meant accredited investors only and no publicity. That strategy was completely at odds with the democratic nature of the Common Good Bank project. But we did not see any viable alternative.
Finally this summer, one of our organizers (John Root, Jr., in Great Barrington, MA) proposed a simple fast-track membership campaign that combines and simplifies ALL of our fundraising and publicity efforts. Just like the Common Good Bank plan itself, our new funding plan is a unique new combination of well-tested methods. The wonderful thing about this new plan is that once we have enough members, we will have ALL the funding we need, for all three phases of the Common Good Bank project.
For the past month we have been testing this new membership campaign in Great Barrington MA, Salem OR, Eugene OR, Michiana, Inland Empire CA, and Gunnison CO. The results are very encouraging. In response to feedback from those test areas, we will be making small adjustments in software and publicity materials over the next couple weeks before formally launching the campaign nationwide. If you are in one of those six communities, please support your local organizers by joining now as a Founding Member (when they ask). Otherwise you can expect a newsletter announcement in a couple weeks.
Ah! At last we are at one with the grass. Many thanks to all of you for your patience.
Superboard
Our new powerhouse board of directors met for the first time at 7:30 last Friday morning (10/8). With its high level of financial experience and expertise, this board will oversee the membership campaign, chartering process, and preparations to launch the Common Good Bank system late next year. Here's the new board:
William Spademan (President)
Carol Lewis (Treasurer) Former CFO, Institute for Community Economics
Chris Rawlings (Secretary) Owner, Waterhouse Pools
John Waite Executive Director, Franklin County Community Development Corporation
Karen Ribeiro Former Vice President, Bank of Western Massachusetts
David Hurwith Former Chairman, FirstCom Bankcorp
Catherine Ratté Principal Planner, Pioneer Valley Planning Commission
Andrew Baker Former Executive Director, Hilltown Community Development Corporation
Mary Gravel Accountant, Administrator
John White Carpenter, MBA
Java Jobs
Common Good Finance is developing open source banking software, specifically geared to the Common Good Bank project. We are seeking Java EE/SOA software engineers with experience using the Spring Framework. Before we advertise this opportunity more widely, we are looking for candidates who already support the Common Good Bank idea. If you know someone who would be interested, please feel free to forward this email to them.
By the Way
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Wishing you happiness and prosperity throughout the year,
Sincerely,
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William Spademan
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Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Compensating With Soft Currencies
From Credit Suisse
Hannes Hug, Journalist
28.09.2010
Slum dwellers in Brazil collect trash and exchange it for food, bus tickets or school books. Japanese students look after the elderly and are compensated with credits that can be saved up for their own retirement. Alternative currencies such as time or forms of barter address issues that money – as a hard currency – cannot resolve. This makes “soft currencies” a logical supplement to dollar, yen and franc.
Carefully raked gravel paths encircle an enchanting koi carp pond. A flock of barn swallows sweeps past, twittering melodiously. Surrounded by carefully pruned tea plants and bonsai trees, Ryuichi Kawai is sitting in the middle of his beloved garden, an oasis that is the pride and joy of this 92-year-old Japanese man. Mr. Kawai lives alone and has no children. In Europe, this sprightly pensioner would by now probably be an inmate of a retirement home rather than the proud owner of such a garden paradise. But not so in Japan. Over here, older people can rely on the support of volunteer helpers thanks to the “Fureai Kippu,” which translates as “caring relationship ticket” and allows the elderly to live in their traditional environment for much longer than would otherwise be the case.
23-year-old Tosho Agato is a student. He lives in the same neighborhood as Mr. Kawai, and provides him with several hours of assistance every week. As well as looking after the prized garden, Agato drops off the old man’s evening meal and helps him with his daily bathing ritual. This takes up two hours of the student’s time every day. These hours are credited to him on his own “Fureai Kippu” account. Tosho Agato can now either transfer his saved hourly credits to his own parents one day or use them for his own retirement.
A Third of Japan’s Population Soon Over 65
Even today, 15 percent of all Japanese are already over 65 years old. In just under 40 years this proportion will rise to one in three. As in most European countries, life expectancy is on the rise in the Land of the Rising Sun – the average age is advancing relentlessly. Although the Japanese ideal of a large family spanning several generations is still commonly found, the trend toward the small family is nonetheless irreversible. Just like in Europe, this means a growing number of people who will require part-time care or assistance in leading an independent life, but also a falling number of people capable of providing these services. This may be either because potential helpers are themselves struggling to maintain their standard of living and thereby preserve the overall “cash flow” of society, or because living together in an extended family or clan is no longer an option.
Insurers probably provide the most essential care services, but none of these companies would trot out the concept of time as a key sales argument. It is precisely to this area of tension between wish and reality that retired lawyer Tsutomu Hotta dedicates himself. Fifteen years ago, Hotta founded the Sawayaka Foundation that acted as the driving force behind the “Fureai Kippu” concept. There are now around 100 local agencies in Japan that work with this alternative care currency. They offer what professional carers can only offer to a limited extent: having time, being there, listening.
The idea of an alternative care currency is a smart one, on the one hand because older people age at different rates and do not need to call on the assistance of a care institution at the same time – an important factor from an economic perspective – and on the other because these people can spend the autumn of their lives independently and in the dignity of their habitual environment, even if they do not have the funds for accommodation suited to the elderly. Another additional positive is that the “Fureai Kippu” brings people from different generations together, strengthens the feeling of community, and sensitizes people to the relationship between giving and taking, as well as to the notion of exchange – the heart of all trading relationships between one person and another.
From Shells to Coins
When viewed in the sense of a national currency, money is a relatively new phenomenon. It was only in the late 19th century, as part of the drive to create modern nations, that currencies designed to underpin the character and identity of the nation in question were invented. Money in the sense of a unit of measurement – to express the ratio of value between the giving and receiving of services or goods – has been around much longer, however, and was employed around 3,500 years ago by the Chinese. Here the currencies in question were cowry shells, pearls, or stones.
It was not until 1,000 years later that King Croesus invented money in the form of coins. The one-time ruler of Lydia in Asia Minor, which is broadly where modern Turkey is today, ordered gold obtained from the River Pactolus to be minted into coins and had them embossed with his seal of a bull and a lion. The aim of Croesus was to demonstrate his wealth and make the appropriate impression on other rulers. Since time immemorial, therefore, the power associated with money has resided not only in the quantity of money available, but also in its appearance and design. At the same time as Croesus was minting his coins, the ancient Egyptians were introducing the first dual currency system. Long-distance trading relationships were maintained with gold and other precious metals. Local transactions, by contrast, were effected with wheat. The logic behind the system is clear: Wheat is ultimately perishable and therefore unsuited to long shipping voyages, whereas gold never loses its value. Moreover, local trade was also enhanced with a further innovation. To increase the “shelf life” of wheat it was stored in cool containers. Proof of ownership was demonstrated by clay shards. These shards acted as a proxy for wheat as a local currency. The interrelation between gold and shards (or wheat) illustrates just how appealing the idea of a supplementary currency can be.
As money essentially represents nothing more than the agreement of a society to use a designated object as a means of exchange, it does not necessarily need to take the form of a coin or a note. Money therefore expresses a relationship between people. It has a “normative” character and thereby shapes our culture. Money in the form of paper or metal may be what regulates modern global trade, and the expression “hard currency” further underpins this notion. But how is it possible to regulate phenomena that result from the fact that man – and all his doings – cannot be reduced to supply and demand alone? Bernard A. Lietaer, former consultant to the Belgian central bank and one of the figures responsible for the introduction of the ECU (the forerunner of the euro), is convinced that the future challenges confronting mankind – such as demographic change, increasingly scarce resources and the changeover to a multipolar world – will have to be addressed by a model with a more sustainable basis than one regulated by the traditional flows of funds alone. Lietaer speaks of “yin and yang” currencies in this context. The yang currencies denote the standard national currencies, with the dollar as lead currency. The yin currency represents the concept of exchange, which contains a social component and regulates our coexistence as a “soft” currency. For a good example of how a “yin” currency can help socially disadvantaged people with no prospects participate in an affluent economy, one needs look no further than the experiment of Curitiba.
Curitiba – The Fourth Dimension of Recycling
Curitiba is the seventh largest city in Brazil. This metropolis is located in the south of the country, and today occupies third place in the league table of the 15 greenest cities of the world. The person who should be given most of the credit for this state of affairs is the former mayor of Curitiba, Jaime Lerner. Over the course of three legislative periods, the last coming at the beginning of the 1990s, Lerner tackled the problem of waste disposal in the slums or “favelas” – in addition to pushing through sustainable urban planning programs in architecture, infrastructure, and education. As in all developing countries, much of the rural population of Brazil migrates to the country’s cities in search of work. In this respect, Curitiba and its current population of some 3.5 million residents is no exception. As a consequence of this migration process, “favelas” proliferate on the edges of the metropolis, consisting of ramshackle dwellings thrown up in no apparent order and with no architectural logic.
In these chaotically organized favelas, Jaime Lerner found himself confronted with the problem of garbage mountains building up – waste that posed a serious threat to the health of slum dwellers who were in any case living in desperate poverty. Garbage trucks simply weren’t capable of negotiating the erratic paths of these favelas, and the money required to tear the huts down and build new streets simply wasn’t there. And so Mayor Lerner thought up a simple but ingenious solution: Containers of different colors were set up at the edge of the settlements to help sort out the different types of garbage. Anyone bringing a bag with correctly sorted rubbish was rewarded with a bus ticket. These tickets in turn could be exchanged for schoolbooks or groceries. Soon enough, thousands of children were busy collecting garbage so as to exchange it for bus tickets, thereby keeping their living environment clean.
Complementary Currency Strengthens Self-Confidence
Within the space of one year, 11,000 tons of refuse were exchanged for one million bus tickets and 1,200 tons of food. Today the average income in Curitiba is around three times as high as in the rest of Brazil. The “Curitiba solution” illustrates how people without money can become economically active through the creation of a local currency and thereby improve their living situation. Indeed, many people have for the first time become participants in this urban microeconomy rather than the recipients of alms. Viewed in this light, the creation of a complementary currency means more than just latching on to the regular money regime or establishing a well-meaning charity project – it actually creates genuine prospects and strengthens the self-confidence of the favela residents who stand quite literally at the fringes of society.
Complementary currencies bring new perspectives to regions that are structurally weak and ensure that locally created value does not move away. Alternative currency systems are springing up in any number of different guises. Some of them are characterized by ideology, others have a more pragmatic stamp. But in all cases they act as a supplement to the regular flow of money, attempt to improve troubling social problems, and offer people who cannot participate in the regular money-go-round an alternative currency.
Hannes Hug, Journalist
28.09.2010
Slum dwellers in Brazil collect trash and exchange it for food, bus tickets or school books. Japanese students look after the elderly and are compensated with credits that can be saved up for their own retirement. Alternative currencies such as time or forms of barter address issues that money – as a hard currency – cannot resolve. This makes “soft currencies” a logical supplement to dollar, yen and franc.
Carefully raked gravel paths encircle an enchanting koi carp pond. A flock of barn swallows sweeps past, twittering melodiously. Surrounded by carefully pruned tea plants and bonsai trees, Ryuichi Kawai is sitting in the middle of his beloved garden, an oasis that is the pride and joy of this 92-year-old Japanese man. Mr. Kawai lives alone and has no children. In Europe, this sprightly pensioner would by now probably be an inmate of a retirement home rather than the proud owner of such a garden paradise. But not so in Japan. Over here, older people can rely on the support of volunteer helpers thanks to the “Fureai Kippu,” which translates as “caring relationship ticket” and allows the elderly to live in their traditional environment for much longer than would otherwise be the case.
23-year-old Tosho Agato is a student. He lives in the same neighborhood as Mr. Kawai, and provides him with several hours of assistance every week. As well as looking after the prized garden, Agato drops off the old man’s evening meal and helps him with his daily bathing ritual. This takes up two hours of the student’s time every day. These hours are credited to him on his own “Fureai Kippu” account. Tosho Agato can now either transfer his saved hourly credits to his own parents one day or use them for his own retirement.
A Third of Japan’s Population Soon Over 65
Even today, 15 percent of all Japanese are already over 65 years old. In just under 40 years this proportion will rise to one in three. As in most European countries, life expectancy is on the rise in the Land of the Rising Sun – the average age is advancing relentlessly. Although the Japanese ideal of a large family spanning several generations is still commonly found, the trend toward the small family is nonetheless irreversible. Just like in Europe, this means a growing number of people who will require part-time care or assistance in leading an independent life, but also a falling number of people capable of providing these services. This may be either because potential helpers are themselves struggling to maintain their standard of living and thereby preserve the overall “cash flow” of society, or because living together in an extended family or clan is no longer an option.
Insurers probably provide the most essential care services, but none of these companies would trot out the concept of time as a key sales argument. It is precisely to this area of tension between wish and reality that retired lawyer Tsutomu Hotta dedicates himself. Fifteen years ago, Hotta founded the Sawayaka Foundation that acted as the driving force behind the “Fureai Kippu” concept. There are now around 100 local agencies in Japan that work with this alternative care currency. They offer what professional carers can only offer to a limited extent: having time, being there, listening.
The idea of an alternative care currency is a smart one, on the one hand because older people age at different rates and do not need to call on the assistance of a care institution at the same time – an important factor from an economic perspective – and on the other because these people can spend the autumn of their lives independently and in the dignity of their habitual environment, even if they do not have the funds for accommodation suited to the elderly. Another additional positive is that the “Fureai Kippu” brings people from different generations together, strengthens the feeling of community, and sensitizes people to the relationship between giving and taking, as well as to the notion of exchange – the heart of all trading relationships between one person and another.
From Shells to Coins
When viewed in the sense of a national currency, money is a relatively new phenomenon. It was only in the late 19th century, as part of the drive to create modern nations, that currencies designed to underpin the character and identity of the nation in question were invented. Money in the sense of a unit of measurement – to express the ratio of value between the giving and receiving of services or goods – has been around much longer, however, and was employed around 3,500 years ago by the Chinese. Here the currencies in question were cowry shells, pearls, or stones.
It was not until 1,000 years later that King Croesus invented money in the form of coins. The one-time ruler of Lydia in Asia Minor, which is broadly where modern Turkey is today, ordered gold obtained from the River Pactolus to be minted into coins and had them embossed with his seal of a bull and a lion. The aim of Croesus was to demonstrate his wealth and make the appropriate impression on other rulers. Since time immemorial, therefore, the power associated with money has resided not only in the quantity of money available, but also in its appearance and design. At the same time as Croesus was minting his coins, the ancient Egyptians were introducing the first dual currency system. Long-distance trading relationships were maintained with gold and other precious metals. Local transactions, by contrast, were effected with wheat. The logic behind the system is clear: Wheat is ultimately perishable and therefore unsuited to long shipping voyages, whereas gold never loses its value. Moreover, local trade was also enhanced with a further innovation. To increase the “shelf life” of wheat it was stored in cool containers. Proof of ownership was demonstrated by clay shards. These shards acted as a proxy for wheat as a local currency. The interrelation between gold and shards (or wheat) illustrates just how appealing the idea of a supplementary currency can be.
As money essentially represents nothing more than the agreement of a society to use a designated object as a means of exchange, it does not necessarily need to take the form of a coin or a note. Money therefore expresses a relationship between people. It has a “normative” character and thereby shapes our culture. Money in the form of paper or metal may be what regulates modern global trade, and the expression “hard currency” further underpins this notion. But how is it possible to regulate phenomena that result from the fact that man – and all his doings – cannot be reduced to supply and demand alone? Bernard A. Lietaer, former consultant to the Belgian central bank and one of the figures responsible for the introduction of the ECU (the forerunner of the euro), is convinced that the future challenges confronting mankind – such as demographic change, increasingly scarce resources and the changeover to a multipolar world – will have to be addressed by a model with a more sustainable basis than one regulated by the traditional flows of funds alone. Lietaer speaks of “yin and yang” currencies in this context. The yang currencies denote the standard national currencies, with the dollar as lead currency. The yin currency represents the concept of exchange, which contains a social component and regulates our coexistence as a “soft” currency. For a good example of how a “yin” currency can help socially disadvantaged people with no prospects participate in an affluent economy, one needs look no further than the experiment of Curitiba.
Curitiba – The Fourth Dimension of Recycling
Curitiba is the seventh largest city in Brazil. This metropolis is located in the south of the country, and today occupies third place in the league table of the 15 greenest cities of the world. The person who should be given most of the credit for this state of affairs is the former mayor of Curitiba, Jaime Lerner. Over the course of three legislative periods, the last coming at the beginning of the 1990s, Lerner tackled the problem of waste disposal in the slums or “favelas” – in addition to pushing through sustainable urban planning programs in architecture, infrastructure, and education. As in all developing countries, much of the rural population of Brazil migrates to the country’s cities in search of work. In this respect, Curitiba and its current population of some 3.5 million residents is no exception. As a consequence of this migration process, “favelas” proliferate on the edges of the metropolis, consisting of ramshackle dwellings thrown up in no apparent order and with no architectural logic.
In these chaotically organized favelas, Jaime Lerner found himself confronted with the problem of garbage mountains building up – waste that posed a serious threat to the health of slum dwellers who were in any case living in desperate poverty. Garbage trucks simply weren’t capable of negotiating the erratic paths of these favelas, and the money required to tear the huts down and build new streets simply wasn’t there. And so Mayor Lerner thought up a simple but ingenious solution: Containers of different colors were set up at the edge of the settlements to help sort out the different types of garbage. Anyone bringing a bag with correctly sorted rubbish was rewarded with a bus ticket. These tickets in turn could be exchanged for schoolbooks or groceries. Soon enough, thousands of children were busy collecting garbage so as to exchange it for bus tickets, thereby keeping their living environment clean.
Complementary Currency Strengthens Self-Confidence
Within the space of one year, 11,000 tons of refuse were exchanged for one million bus tickets and 1,200 tons of food. Today the average income in Curitiba is around three times as high as in the rest of Brazil. The “Curitiba solution” illustrates how people without money can become economically active through the creation of a local currency and thereby improve their living situation. Indeed, many people have for the first time become participants in this urban microeconomy rather than the recipients of alms. Viewed in this light, the creation of a complementary currency means more than just latching on to the regular money regime or establishing a well-meaning charity project – it actually creates genuine prospects and strengthens the self-confidence of the favela residents who stand quite literally at the fringes of society.
Complementary currencies bring new perspectives to regions that are structurally weak and ensure that locally created value does not move away. Alternative currency systems are springing up in any number of different guises. Some of them are characterized by ideology, others have a more pragmatic stamp. But in all cases they act as a supplement to the regular flow of money, attempt to improve troubling social problems, and offer people who cannot participate in the regular money-go-round an alternative currency.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Currency Project A Potential Boon for Think Local, Buy Local Movement
From Santa Cruz Patch
By Niko Kyriakou
September 30, 2010
Project A Potential Boon for Think Local, Buy Local Movement
New Earth Exchange could change the way people spend money in Santa Cruz.
A tourist from Reno, Nev., recently told me what an impression his visit to Santa Cruz had made on him.
"So many people are out enjoying their community, down to the street musicians. It felt very nostalgic like an old-fashioned American town, but filled with a very eclectic, modern crowd. In Reno, you kind of get scared and don't want to go downtown anymore."
These comments were a good reminder as I start this first column on Santa Cruz's work to support local, buy local and think local. The fruits of those efforts are all around us – the friendly folk, the heterogeneous storefronts, treelined streets, First Night, Boardwalk summer concerts, Volunteer Centers of Santa Cruz County, Free Skool, homeless services and too many others to name. But people who love this town often don't realize that localism is the secret sauce.
With county unemployment at 11 percent and the Great Recession not far behind, some of the most practical work being done to support local involves extending financial lifelines to homegrown businesses, the under-employed, and the unemployed.
One of the newest phenomena in this arena is New Earth Exchange. Comprised of some 20 volunteers, the organization plans to launch a cash, card, and online currency for Santa Cruz County this February.
The currency will be exchangeable only among county residents and locally owned or controlled businesses – preventing it from draining out of the area. Annual transactions could add one million dollars in to county business, according to organizers, who also envision making grants and loans. Two hundred businesses and residents are already interested in signing up when it's ready, and New Earth aims to persuade more at a public talk about the currency on Oct. 12 at 6:15pm, in Room 301 of the Louden Nelson Community Center.
Julie Kellman, 37, owner of Seascape Foods in Aptos, plans to join the cooperative that will manage Cruz dough. Membership will cost around $10 per person and $150 per small businesses. The money will initially enter the economy when businesses hand it out to customers as discounts – not unlike a rewards system.
"I think it allows the consumer to make easier choices to support local by doing the point system and giving them discounts. The consumer will benefit as well as the small business. It's a two way street," Kellman says of the currency.
The Santa Cruz money is based on a 3-year-old alternative currency running in Sonoma County, called Sonoma Dollars. Both those systems mimic the Wir Bank in Switzerland, founded in 1934. Twenty percent of Swiss businesses use the bank's e-currency for some $1.65 billion worth of transactions a year.
County government is also taking steps to revive the economy. Santa Cruz County will soon provide more low interest loans through the Grow Santa Cruz project, and county planners have put together an 834-page document detailing which of the county's purchases can be made locally.
The County has also made the bold step of joining the Move Your Money Campaign. The movement calls on communities around the country to move their money out of mega-banks and into community banks which received far less bailout money yet do more than their share of lending.
Early this year, local banks and credit unions saw an upsurge in new accounts as a result of the Move Your Money movement. Now the County is shifting $600 million to $800 million worth of liquid assets to local banks and unions.
Storing money locally protects the county's access to loans, says Peter Beckmann, cofounder of Think Local First and owner of Beckmann's Old World Bakery.
"If Wall Street gets into trouble, our little credit union doesn't care because they have member money and they don't speculate in highly volatile financial instruments. They will keep giving loans — Beckmann's Bakery never had a credit crunch."
This may not be in Reno, but as in the casino-filled, 'biggest little city', we still need money. Lucky for us, some forward looking, community-minded Santa Cruzans are working to localize money — to recycle it here, and soon, to create it here as well.
By Niko Kyriakou
September 30, 2010
Project A Potential Boon for Think Local, Buy Local Movement
New Earth Exchange could change the way people spend money in Santa Cruz.
A tourist from Reno, Nev., recently told me what an impression his visit to Santa Cruz had made on him.
"So many people are out enjoying their community, down to the street musicians. It felt very nostalgic like an old-fashioned American town, but filled with a very eclectic, modern crowd. In Reno, you kind of get scared and don't want to go downtown anymore."
These comments were a good reminder as I start this first column on Santa Cruz's work to support local, buy local and think local. The fruits of those efforts are all around us – the friendly folk, the heterogeneous storefronts, treelined streets, First Night, Boardwalk summer concerts, Volunteer Centers of Santa Cruz County, Free Skool, homeless services and too many others to name. But people who love this town often don't realize that localism is the secret sauce.
With county unemployment at 11 percent and the Great Recession not far behind, some of the most practical work being done to support local involves extending financial lifelines to homegrown businesses, the under-employed, and the unemployed.
One of the newest phenomena in this arena is New Earth Exchange. Comprised of some 20 volunteers, the organization plans to launch a cash, card, and online currency for Santa Cruz County this February.
The currency will be exchangeable only among county residents and locally owned or controlled businesses – preventing it from draining out of the area. Annual transactions could add one million dollars in to county business, according to organizers, who also envision making grants and loans. Two hundred businesses and residents are already interested in signing up when it's ready, and New Earth aims to persuade more at a public talk about the currency on Oct. 12 at 6:15pm, in Room 301 of the Louden Nelson Community Center.
Julie Kellman, 37, owner of Seascape Foods in Aptos, plans to join the cooperative that will manage Cruz dough. Membership will cost around $10 per person and $150 per small businesses. The money will initially enter the economy when businesses hand it out to customers as discounts – not unlike a rewards system.
"I think it allows the consumer to make easier choices to support local by doing the point system and giving them discounts. The consumer will benefit as well as the small business. It's a two way street," Kellman says of the currency.
The Santa Cruz money is based on a 3-year-old alternative currency running in Sonoma County, called Sonoma Dollars. Both those systems mimic the Wir Bank in Switzerland, founded in 1934. Twenty percent of Swiss businesses use the bank's e-currency for some $1.65 billion worth of transactions a year.
County government is also taking steps to revive the economy. Santa Cruz County will soon provide more low interest loans through the Grow Santa Cruz project, and county planners have put together an 834-page document detailing which of the county's purchases can be made locally.
The County has also made the bold step of joining the Move Your Money Campaign. The movement calls on communities around the country to move their money out of mega-banks and into community banks which received far less bailout money yet do more than their share of lending.
Early this year, local banks and credit unions saw an upsurge in new accounts as a result of the Move Your Money movement. Now the County is shifting $600 million to $800 million worth of liquid assets to local banks and unions.
Storing money locally protects the county's access to loans, says Peter Beckmann, cofounder of Think Local First and owner of Beckmann's Old World Bakery.
"If Wall Street gets into trouble, our little credit union doesn't care because they have member money and they don't speculate in highly volatile financial instruments. They will keep giving loans — Beckmann's Bakery never had a credit crunch."
This may not be in Reno, but as in the casino-filled, 'biggest little city', we still need money. Lucky for us, some forward looking, community-minded Santa Cruzans are working to localize money — to recycle it here, and soon, to create it here as well.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
California's P2P Carsharing Bill Signed Into Law
Editor's Note: A major breakthrough in affirming a sharing culture. Also, a great use case for alternative currencies. Instead of paying your neighbor with scarce dollars for borrowing a car, why not pay in timebank hours (plus a little gas)?
From Shareable.net
By Neal Gorenflo
09.29.10
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed Assembly Bill 1871 into law today enabling Californians to share cars in carsharing pools without invalidating their insurance policies. The new law goes into effect January 1, 2011.
Currently, Californians can't exchange money for sharing cars without invalidating their car insurance.
The new law could accelerate the growth of an already fast growing carsharing industry, at first in California and later across the US as the legislation is adopted in other states. Existing carsharing services could expand their fleets by allowing car owners to share their cars through their services.
The new law will also remove the biggest barrier to the growth of next generation carsharing services like Spride Share, RelayRides, and Getaround that enable neighbors to rent cars directly to and from each other.
While a significant advance in the carsharing industry, Shareable agrees with Alex Steffen of Worldchanging that we need to think beyond the car in re-patterning society for health and sustainability. Below is Assemblymember Dave Jones' press release about the new law.
--
(SACRAMENTO) – First-in-the-nation legislation allowing Californians to share their personal cars in carsharing pools without risking the loss of their personal auto insurance coverage was signed into law by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s on September 29, 2010.
Assemblymember Dave Jones (D-Sacramento) authored Assembly Bill 1871 to allow personal car sharing by ensuring that individuals who allow their cars to be used in vehicle sharing pools do not risk losing their own automobile insurance coverage. Currently, receiving even a small amount of money for the use of one’s vehicle is treated by insurance companies as a commercial use of the vehicle, thereby invalidating the individual’s personal insurance coverage.
The new law makes clear that personal vehicle sharing does not constitute a commercial use of the vehicle. The law also makes sure that the individual car owner is not held liable for losses that arise when the vehicle is used for personal vehicle sharing.
”Owning a car can be expensive and vehicle sharing programs are a great way to help connect people with cars when they need them,” said Assemblymember Dave Jones. “The new law will help car owners shrink the cost of owing their vehicles, reduce the need for some people to buy cars, improving parking and traffic congestion, and help the environment.”
AB 1871 enjoyed widespread support from environmental groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Sierra Club of California, transit districts like BART, and car sharing and personal vehicle sharing organizations across the nation such as City CarShare, Spride, Gettaround, RelayRides, Go-op Inc. and Divvy.com.
The new law received unanimous support in the legislature, and takes effect Jan. 1, 2011.
From Shareable.net
By Neal Gorenflo
09.29.10
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed Assembly Bill 1871 into law today enabling Californians to share cars in carsharing pools without invalidating their insurance policies. The new law goes into effect January 1, 2011.
Currently, Californians can't exchange money for sharing cars without invalidating their car insurance.
The new law could accelerate the growth of an already fast growing carsharing industry, at first in California and later across the US as the legislation is adopted in other states. Existing carsharing services could expand their fleets by allowing car owners to share their cars through their services.
The new law will also remove the biggest barrier to the growth of next generation carsharing services like Spride Share, RelayRides, and Getaround that enable neighbors to rent cars directly to and from each other.
While a significant advance in the carsharing industry, Shareable agrees with Alex Steffen of Worldchanging that we need to think beyond the car in re-patterning society for health and sustainability. Below is Assemblymember Dave Jones' press release about the new law.
--
(SACRAMENTO) – First-in-the-nation legislation allowing Californians to share their personal cars in carsharing pools without risking the loss of their personal auto insurance coverage was signed into law by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s on September 29, 2010.
Assemblymember Dave Jones (D-Sacramento) authored Assembly Bill 1871 to allow personal car sharing by ensuring that individuals who allow their cars to be used in vehicle sharing pools do not risk losing their own automobile insurance coverage. Currently, receiving even a small amount of money for the use of one’s vehicle is treated by insurance companies as a commercial use of the vehicle, thereby invalidating the individual’s personal insurance coverage.
The new law makes clear that personal vehicle sharing does not constitute a commercial use of the vehicle. The law also makes sure that the individual car owner is not held liable for losses that arise when the vehicle is used for personal vehicle sharing.
”Owning a car can be expensive and vehicle sharing programs are a great way to help connect people with cars when they need them,” said Assemblymember Dave Jones. “The new law will help car owners shrink the cost of owing their vehicles, reduce the need for some people to buy cars, improving parking and traffic congestion, and help the environment.”
AB 1871 enjoyed widespread support from environmental groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Sierra Club of California, transit districts like BART, and car sharing and personal vehicle sharing organizations across the nation such as City CarShare, Spride, Gettaround, RelayRides, Go-op Inc. and Divvy.com.
The new law received unanimous support in the legislature, and takes effect Jan. 1, 2011.
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