Not long after moving the Austin Time Exchange to Ruby on Rails, we started receiving requests for a groups feature since some local groups were interested in having their own currency but did not want to run their own instance of the software and their members were already on the existing system.

Since we’re a fork of insoshi, merging the groups feature from another fork is easy. Add some code to make simple payments per-group…Boom! Done.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDrMkQFsQTQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

“An alternative grassroots economy already exists in the Bay Area.” - Mira Luna

Comments

Author: rick

Date: 2010-11-07 19:35:20

Thanks for posting this video Tom. We plan on repeating this festival in 2011. Check us out at http://JASecon.org/ and http://timebank.sfbace.org/

The previous screencast may have tried to use too much technology to enable user-centric simple web payments.

After looking around some, it occurred to me that the rel-payment microformat is not sweeping the world wide web. Using the Internet Archives, I found a blog post from July 2005 that announced support for rel-payment on blip.tv. I’m guessing not many people used this before it was abandoned.

An alternative to rel-payment is to simply use a convention. For instance, the path /blog is a convention to quickly find the blog for a site. On Twitter, this would normally represent the person with the Twitter handle “blog” but Twitter follows the convention and redirects to blog.twitter.com.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orEe9dg5gRI&hl=en&fs=1]

Warning: I boosted the microphone amp on this one. :)

A blog is a great place to accept web payments. Livejournal, blogger and wordpress allow bloggers to make their blog url their OpenID. In this screencast, we see that when a blogger on Wordpress.com adds links, she can easily associate the type of link (through microformats). One microformat is rel-payment:

RelPayment is a microformat for making exchanges of support (be it financial or otherwise) possible. By adding rel=“payment” to a hyperlink a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink provides a way to show or give support for the current page. For example to give financial support to the owner of the current page.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2szB-qyWeA&hl=en&fs=1]

This screencast shows how simple web payments can be using OpenTransact. Instead of making a payment to an email address, we can make a payment to a URL, particularly if it is an OpenID.

The person making the payment simply adds a delicious-style bookmarklet and as you can see below, I simply re-used the javascript code for bookmarking a url on delicious and pointed it to a oscurrency financial service provider hosted on heroku.

[blip.tv http://blip.tv/play/AYHa62oA]

The last post was a proof of concept. Proof of concept has matured to a working system on Heroku thanks to our friends at the Bay Area Community Exchange (BACE). These improvements allow a lower cost, easier to deploy system. With these benefits, it was a no-brainer for the Austin Time Exchange to abandon the edge branch and merge changes from the BACE fork in master.

This screencast shows the new 3 step heroku installation:

Click To Play

“Anyone can run their own financial system.” - Bernard Lietaer at the Naropa Intentional Economics workshop.

Thanks to Lee Azzarello, oscurrency can now be deployed to heroku with the master branch. For production use, the edge branch is preferred as previous testing in development and production has been done with edge. Also, two more items need to be worked on for heroku deployment. In edge, search is done with sphinx which heroku does not support. Since a community currency system generally does not need industrial strength search, perhaps this can be replaced with standard database queries. Also, the edge branch uses workling and starling for background processing of newsletter and forum post emails. Heroku uses DJ workers.

Click To Play

The previous two screencasts demonstrated using Opentransact for simple web payments without using OAuth. Now we see how Opentransact web payments can be made with OAuth. Watch the original larger screencast to make reading the typing easier on the eyes.

To get OsCurrency to work with CapCard, I made this checkin.

Welcome back! In the previous entry, the evolution of money was explored to the extent that we could see how its essence changed at every step in the ladder of economic civilization. The essence of modern money is credit. This time, I cover the second half of Thomas Greco’s book where he shares an abundance of wisdom and guidance.

After thinking about The End of Money and the Future of Civilization some more, it occurred to me that the money system is like Windows 95.  In the same way Windows 95 didn’t know whether it was an archaic 16 bit operating system or a modern 32 bit operating system, our current money system doesn’t know whether it is using commodity money or credit money.  Windows 95 tried to reform Windows 3.11.  This effort generated billions of dollars for Microsoft which produced two more commercially successful versions (98 and Me) but this effort was eventually abandoned.  Today, it’s easy to forget what it was like losing all of your work.  Cue Barbara Streisand singing Memory.

To mix things up, I thought it would be fun to share some knowledge gained from Thomas Greco’s The End of Money and the Future of Civilization across two blog posts.  This first post will cover the challenges facing us (ch. 1-10).  The second post will cover how we can navigate into the future (ch. 11-20).  

I apologize in advance for any misinterpretations of the material and look forward to corrections.  I can think of no better executive summary than to quote Greco directly.