The Social Wallet: free software to tackle the corona-crisis

As this website and other connected projects document, we have been developing public interest technology that in these critical times can be deployed to promote new practices for the social and common good. The current corona-crisis pushes us to reflect on our relationship with money, privacy, surveillance and freedom of economic interaction much more urgently than ever before. The consequences of the pandemic started at the end of 2019 in China. Yet, the health emergency and... Read More

The Freecoin ToolChain

The experimentation on the Digital Social Currency Pilots in D-CENT can be conceived as an open-source approach to decentralized complementary currency design, which becomes ever more relevant where pilot communities are already actively designing tools for collective engagement and decision making on monetary economic matters affecting their communities. D-CENT is going to prototype the Freecoin Toolchain as a set of features that are apt to advance the state-of-the-art in two... Read More

Towards Money as a Common: the Digital-Coin Rule for a Free Society

The issue around the nature of money is critical in present  economic times. We are in a situation whereby the incapacity to re-define how we deal with money could resolve in an a severe damage to society as we commonly refer to it: contrary to what happens with information systems, there are no backups with money systems. Since the Internet revolution – and also as parts of national communities – we are almost unconsciously as well as coercively using national currencies. “Of... Read More

The Analogy with Process Ecology applied to Monetary Economics

The analogy between process ecology and monetary economics will give those required underpinnings for allowing a smooth monetary shift from a mature industry society to a new post-industrial one through the definition of new kinds of agreement, which will complement the conventional one. Indeed, by the endorsement of newtonian physical determinism, industrial society stood on the assumption that the world is predictable and, therefore, information for its management has to be... Read More

Post-Modern Monetary Economics

A rhizome does not begin or end, it is always in the middle, among the things, inter-esse, intermezzo. The tree is an affiliation, a rhizome is an alliance, just alliance. The tree imposes the verb <<being>>, but the rhizome has as a texture the conjunction <<and… and… and…>>.   Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari – Mille Plateaux Mille Plateaux – Capitalism and Schizophrenie is a masterpiece of Post-Modern thought. It... Read More

Freigeld: the relational ontology of money in practice

Freigeld: FreeMoney for reacting to the Great Depression According to Prof. Thomas Greco, during the years imediately after the Great Crash in 1929, “besides learning how to ‘make do, or do without’, people began to establish mutual support structures, like workers’ cooperatives, many of which would recycle and repair donated or broken items. People learned to share what they had, and to by-pass the market and financial systems” (Greco, 1994). One of the problems... Read More

Natural Savings

Natural Savings are the complementary answer to the narrowed functionality of modern bank money with regards to the micro-financial sector. By virtue of the latter, borrowers automatically face the hurdles of monetary inflation and currency devaluation, whereas micro-finance institutions operate under the constraints of banking regulation and central banking practices, which often contrast the unfolding of financial inclusion or, in other words, the decrease of the ‘financial... Read More

Cultural Credit Circuit – Cultos

C3 concept for the cultural sector In the cultural industry, a Cultural Institution behaves like a business company in the commercial sector: both belong tothe respectve industrial sectors. The difference between the two is that the former may not be designed to pursue profit whilst the latter is explicitly designed to compete for profit. In the cultural sector, a Cultural Institution (museums, libraries, etc.) deals with other cultural institutions in order to organize events... Read More

NU Spaarpas – The Netherlands

Another exemplification of the possible complementarity between conventional money (i.e. the Euro) and other types of currencies comes from the domain of ‘green currencies‘. For instance, according to Peter North, in Rotterdam the NU Spaarpas was a ‘green loyalty point’ currency that was piloted from May 2002 to September 2003. ‘Green points’ were earned when residents separated their waste for recycling, used public transport, or used locally owned shops. Residents... Read More

SCEC – Italy

In general complementary currencies are designed to create new wealth, both financial and social. In a nutshell, they are thought of as financial resources to increase social capital while maintaining in the best conditions the natural capital. Therefore, they foster co-operation, because they resemble some of the features a gift economy presents: horizontal and a-centered connection between peer-participants. Both complementary currencies relationships respectively with scarcity... Read More