Alt Currencies Continue Gaining Credibility (WSJ)
When The Wall St. Journal Online covers the growing complementary currency movement in the same week that The Economist talks about triple-bottom-line values encroaching on traditional investing, it appears that maybe, just maybe, the consciousness around money is finally changing.
In the most recent installment, WSJ’s video report covers a wide range of popular currency initiatives, including reputation- and attention-based incentives. Our long-time partners at the Metacurrency Project and The New Currency Frontier blog were featured in the piece, even though their ground-breaking work does not suit a 101 crowd.
As we wrote in an in-depth review of online and social network currencies this summer, there is a fair bit of refinement needed in many of the systems.
Some simplistic thinking conflates many of the different purposes of complementary currencies, confusing the “hard” asset-backed currencies that more traditional thinkers understand with the “soft” socially-backed currencies like attention, reputation and community participation.
This dispute was on display during a particularly heated Open Space discussion at SoCap 09 last week, where we co-facilitated a session with the brilliant Jean Russell, aka NurtureGirl. Two camps were evident — the more corporate-minded people who insisted that money be backed by something physical, and is only meaningful when it can be traded for the most practical of goods and services, and the more socially-minded folk who were filling the gaps created by the artificial scarcity of national money.
In the next few years, more and more systems will emerge, more stories will be told in traditional media, and even more confusion will emerge. Until now, the evolving discussion and debate has been happening within small groups of people who generally know each other. As this discussion becomes more popular, a wider range of perspectives and misunderstandings will surface. This next step may well be the most important — if sound systems are put in place that serve a community well, a diverse ecology of complementary currencies could evolve in parallel to the global money system. But if some high-profile currencies — like one from Facebook, for example — that are poorly designed, they will be quickly ridiculed, and the baby gets flushed with the bathwater.
Tread carefully all, and remember that it’s important to shift your perception of possibility along with shifting your perception of money and currency.
September 14th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
“When The Wall St. Journal Online covers the growing complementary currency movement…
Jct: And they haven’t even seen the big stuff. Africa trading phone-minutes as currency. Ithaca trading Hours as $10US bills. Timedollars trading Hours as 60 human minutes.
When the local currency is pegged to the Time Standard of Money (how many dollars per hour of volunteer labor, children too) Hours earned locally can be intertraded with other timebanks globally! In 1999, I paid for 39/40 nights in Europe with an IOU for a night back in Canada worth 5 Hours. You can too.
U.N. Millennium Declaration UNILETS Resolution C6 to governments is for a time-based currency to restructure the global financial architecture.
See http://youtube.com/kingofthepaupers on growth of the international time-trading network.
September 14th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
Thanks KotP,
I agree that there are many solid cases where time dollars are making a positive impact on community. Ultimately, I don’t think hours (or anything else) are the silver-bullet solution, but there is an elegant simplicity of valuing each human’s time as equal to another’s.
In a quick search tonight, I couldn’t find much on the web about the UN / UNILETS initiative (other than a few references by you — : ), including no mention in the UN Millennium Declaration, nor any search results on the UN.org site. Could you share the info you have on the program / initiative to which you refer?
September 14th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
[...] a ten-day period of sustainability-inspired thinking pervading economic reporting in the gray-flannel-media, the old gray lady reports (PW req’d) [...]
September 15th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
U.N. Millennium Declaration C6: UNILETS
(Francais) http://www.cyberclass.net/turmel/unc6f.htm
C. The Forum urges The United Nations Governments:
6. To make serious commitments to restructure the global financial architecture based on principles of equity, transparency, accountability, and democracy, and to balance, with the participation of civil society organizations, the monetary means to favor human endeavor and ecology, such as a unilets zero-interest alternative time-based currency. http://www.un.org/millennium/declaration.htm
Globalization Declaration Themes
Facing the Challenges of Globalization: Equity, Justice, Diversity
Section 5: What the UN must do.
h) Another area of study should be the UNILETS (United Nations International Local Employment-Trading System).
i) Local Exchange, Trade and currency practices should be developed further and examined for international application. The abolition of debts and the eradication of interest are essential components in pursuing sustainable human development.
j) The UN should convene a conference similar to the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 to discuss what sort of new financial architecture is needed for our rapidly globalising world. The adoption of the time standard of money and abolition of interest rates are both ideas worthy of consideration.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/ngos/role/globalact/challeng.htm