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.