Like the last screencast, this one is a result of a feature request. About 9 months ago to the day, I met Johnny & Eva Barnett at Spiderhouse Coffee through Karen Gifford, a board member of ATEN. Johnny suggested a groups feature be added to oscurrency. This happened one week after Rich and I presented the idea of using insoshi for a currency server at One Web Day Austin and first started checking in code. Multiple improvements made to oscurrency have been a direct result of Johnny Barnett’s help.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOBWhVe68os&hl=en&fs=1]

Life Incorporated via BoingBoing

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R71jjP_0NR4&hl=en&fs=1]

The Columbia Exchange Circle was on TV yesterday…

“The idea of the exchange circle is to connect community members and get people to share the skills and resources that they have in a way that does not rely on the current economy,” said Maggy Rhein, another organizer for the C.E.C.

And members say that taking the program online is the easiest way to connect.

“People can post the request and people can see it instantly,” said Vince Foley, another organizer for the group and the Web site manager.

The previous five screencasts have been experimental. Anyone who knows Ruby on Rails can install the code and, since it is open source, anyone can make improvements to it. We have seen how the application programming interface (API) allowed for an independently developed killer app to be built. However, until today, to my knowledge, none of the new features shown in these “Stupid Currency Tricks” screencasts are actually enabled on real systems. Why? Because real people in real communities have not asked for them!

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2u8sSqwkqU&hl=en&fs=1]

In the last screencast, requests were posted to Twitter and members were automatically followed when they associated their Twitter ID with their OSCurrency account. In this episode, we see how minimal changes to the code allow us to do the same with Identi.ca instead of Twitter.

Besides all the advantages of being open source, Identi.ca also accepts OpenID. So does OSCurrency (since it is derived from Insoshi). Wouldn’t it be great if microblogging messages could be routed like email messages?

Staying with the same theme as the previous screencasts, this one again shows how you don’t have to navigate back to the portal site to participate.

Sometimes requests are very time sensitive so it’s important to contact others ASAP about a need. This is a perfect application for Twitter or Identi.ca. When someone creates a request, either through the main website or through another site using the OsCurrency API, the request can immediately be sent out to Twitter.

Brandon Wiley invented an ATM machine this week for complementary currency using QR codes. Writing python code on Google App Engine, he wrote code which can generate a QR code using Google Chart API and an oauth consumer to allow someone to redeem the currency without giving the ATM site the username and password to their account. The transaction was made with the OSCurrency API. Some more API support needs to be done to make the transaction more resistant to counterfeiting, but it already makes a cool demo.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled program with a screencast for software developers.

If you are not a software developer, the screencast may not be useful, but it’s good to understand why OAuth is critical to online complementary currency. When you buy something online, you don’t log into your bank’s website to do the transaction. You may click on a PayPal purchase button or some other one-click button. So, a member may not want to log into a community currency website to make a payment to a peer. The community currency website needs to expose an application programming interface to third party applications (like Facebook) to make payments and execute other functions. How is the third party authorized to make a payment on behalf of the member? The OAuth protocol allows a member to seamlessly grant the third party application authorization to perform specific actions on his accounts, for instance. It’s kind of a big deal.

At One Web Day Austin on September 22, the idea was offered (see video in previous entry) that it would be relatively straightforward to build a complementary currency system on Insoshi. Shortly after that, Rich and I began a new project in github. The latest code can be found in the edge branch of Oscurrency.

Two weeks ago, the Austin Time Exchange made the switch to running this code. Most of the changes you see in github since then are the result of feedback from the members. This site runs on one 256M slice on slicehost.

[blip.tv http://blip.tv/play/Ac+DBY_Iaw]
We had the opportunity to talk about community currency at One Web Day. There is an archive of talks. It was neat to see Cafe Caffeine’s customers stop in for coffee throughout the evening and stay awhile to listen in on the compelling talks about privacy online and the war for peace. A big thanks to Jon Lebkowsky, Maggie Duval, Paul Walhus and Dusty Reagan for organizing a great event.

Comments

Author: mat

Date: 2008-11-08 15:14:00