Collaborative Currency

Mexico conference on Future of Money... from Jean-François Noubel on Vimeo.


The peer 2 peer media and software revolution is offering us a glimpse of the cooperative networked structure of future local and global economies. As an ecosocial entrepreneur and owner of a start up company providing products and services that add net benefit to the ecosocial health index, how can I align myself and my community with this emerging pattern of P2P decentralization of economy via alternative currency?

What does a collaborative currency look like?

One idea is the idea of a parking fee (negative interest) in which hoarding money is de-incentivizes by "taxing" it with a negative interested. This induces an increase of spending because no one wants to get stuck with the money, and boosts overall circulation in a community.

Any other examples of collaborative money design? here is a link to a quick article about free currencies which appear to be one kind of alternative currency geared towards the global information market .

Stigmergy for Self-Organizing Collaboration

Patrick Gibbs of Gaia University just pointed me to this explanation of the fascinating bio-psycho-social process called Stigmergy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy).

Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. It produces complex, apparently intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even communication between the agents. (Source: Wikipedia)

I especially like the part where it says Stigmergy "supports efficient collaboration between extremely simple agents, who lack any memory, intelligence or even awareness of each other." -- Sounds like me sometimes! Especially when personal distress patterns have occluded my free intelligence.

But I think this is an extremely important concept, in a way much of Social Networking and Agile Project Management function similarly. Wow, Swarm Intelligence & Open Source, too! From Wikipedia:

Stigmergy is not restricted to eusocial creatures, or even to physical systems. On the Internet there are many emergent phenomena that arise from users interacting only by modifying local parts of their shared virtual environment. Wikipedia is an example of this. The massive structure of information available in a wiki,[4] or an open source software project such as the Linux kernel[4] could be compared to a termite nest; one initial user leaves a seed of an idea (a mudball) which attracts other users who then build upon and modify this initial concept, eventually constructing an elaborate structure of connected thoughts.[5][6]

economics as collaboration

What if we defined economics as the study of how we coordinate and collaborate on a large scale to share resources to meet needs? 

With this  perspective we can see how things like open-source methodologies ( which are a way of doing mass collaborations ) may be laying down the framework for a new type of economic system.

Collaborative Technologies

This looks awesome:

A list of 'Collaborative Technologies' from the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation's Learning Exchange:
http://www.thataway.org/exchange/meta_categories.php?mcid=12&hot_topic_id=2

10 Tips for Collaboration

Check out this slideshow on www.slideshare.net:

http://www.slideshare.net/jamesr/ten-tips-for-collaboration-audio/

Definitely from a corporate perspecitve, but some useful bits in here.

How to integrate these into the Principles of Collaboration?

Digiphon: A Digital Colophon

Here's a useful new word for the digital web 2.0 age:

Digiphon

A digiphon is

• A digital colophon
• A written piece of metadata
  that describes the digital tools (including computer hardware, computer
  software, and any other digital equipment) used to create a piece of
  digital media.

The word digiphon is a conjunction of the words 'digital' and 'colophon'. A colophon is "a brief description usually located at the end of a book, describing production notes relevant to the edition". Based on this definition, a digiphon is "a brief description, usually located at the end of a piece of digital media, describing production notes relevant to the digital media".

In the quickly-evolving world of digital media, including a digiphon in a piece of work can help other creators of digital media learn from each other's work. The digiphon is a succinct description of the production tools and process.

Examples

We currently see something similar to a digiphon at the bottom of many webpages -- "Powered By MediaWiki" or "Powered By Wordpress".

Here is a digiphon from a multi-media learning object created on Moodle:

Digiphon

• This media was produced on a MacBook Pro running OSX 10.5 (Leopard) with 4GB of RAM.

• I recorded and edited all the video using my computer's built-in camera, QuickTime Pro, and iMovie '06

• Audio was recorded using Audio Hijack Pro, edited with Quicktime and uploaded directly to GEL. Direct embedding was done using the embed tag.

• Survey was constructed, completed, and analyzed using SurveyMonkey.

History

The word digiphon was coined by Ethan C. Roland during his time at Gaia University working on a MSc in Collaborative Eco-Social Design. The program
encourages thorough documentation of work through, shared digitally with the Gaia University community on a Moodle-based Elearning platform.

Farmer's Market Report for the FPC

Here's the link to a Winrock report on Farmers' markets in the mid-atlantic:

http://www.winrock.org/agriculture/files/wallacemktrpt.pdf

Should be useful for the farmer's market folks...

Permaculture Agriculture Search Terms

Here are the most useful search terms I've found for the current phase of Permaculture Agriculture research I'm doing:

"small farm enterprise budget"
"organic enterprise budget"
"organic crop budget"
"small farm crop budget"


Basically I'm developing an excel-based  ecological agriculture design tool to provide, in phases:
1. basic economic information & budgets for new eco-ag projects
2. detailed sensitivity analyses and a decision-making tool for eco-ag elements
3. triple-bottom line accounting for eco-ag projects

anyone else doing this sort of work?

FPC Ethanol Resources

Some great stuff here for the Ethanol team at the Financial Permaculture Course::

http://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/reethanol.html

Processing Kitchen - Product Budgets

Financial Permaculture Course -- Green Business Research --

Here are some budgets for individual products that meet be processed in a Community Kitchen. From the INCREDIBLE British Columbia Ministry of Agriculture and Lands...

Value Added
& Food Processing: (pdf format)

ENTERPRISE	LOCATION	DATE
Apple Juice	Okanagan Valley	Fall 1996
Apple Juice	Fraser Valley	Fall 1996
Salsa	Okanagan Valley	Fall 1996
Fruit Pie Production	Okanagan Valley	Fall 1996
Fruit Pie Production	Fraser Valley	Fall 1996
Fruit Leather	Cottage Industry	Spring 1996
Jam Production	Cottage Industry	Spring 1996

http://www.agf.gov.bc.ca/busmgmt/budgets/value_added.htm

Agile Development

Some fascinating stuff on Agile Development, Agile Project Management, Extreme Programming, and Scrum.

Extreme Programming Explained describes Extreme Programming as being:

• An attempt to reconcile humanity and productivity
• A mechanism for social change
• A path to improvement
• A style of development
• A software development discipline

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_Programming

the Agile Manifesto (as read from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development) includes many elements similar to the Principles of Collaboration that are developing:

Some of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto^[6] are:

• Customer satisfaction by rapid, continuous delivery of useful software
• Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
• Working software is the principal measure of progress
• Even late changes in requirements are welcomed
• Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers
• Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (Co-location)
• Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
• Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
• Simplicity
• Self-organizing teams
• Regular adaptation to changing circumstances

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)