unMoney Convergence Day 3 of 3

A list of all the sessions is here. Here's a brief recollection of the sessions I attended.

A Currency Definition Language by Arthur Brock was the first presentation I attended. Arthur identified the problem (borrowing from John Rogers analogy of taking flight) as our having this dashboard of knobs and dials but we don't know what they are or there's no agreement on what to call them. On the previous day, John Rogers noted how the complexity of our financial system corrupts our language. (Language corruption also seems like a consequence of private money creation. Who wants to play a game where someone else gets to change the rules? Truman: "if you can't beat them, confuse them.")

Arthur, like Bernard Lietaer does with the word community, asks what is the origin of the word currency? If we look it up here, it says curraunt - in circulation. I liked Arthur's analogy of the flow of currency being like the flow of packets across the Internets: each hop is a transaction. In my experience, I often see ourselves grasping for a word to describe this important aspect of flow. "Velocity" is often used but that word is ineffectual. The right word is right under our nose: currency. But that's not the agreed upon definition. If you look up currency in wikipedia or any dictionary, they don't say flow or current. They say unit of exchange. Lame.

Here's some video from the session with Arthur talking about the undesirable consequence of assuming there's just one currency. When people say "there's no market for that," they're inherently saying "there's no demand for that" but that is not true. If you create a niche currency that measures demand, then a new market can be created. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Galloway: "If one ignores a certain protocol, then it becomes impossible to communicate on that particular channel."



Arthur provided a mindmap (Java). Arthur emphasized targeting currencies to particular problems: don't try to compete with monopoly money in its domain on its terms. Like Arthur says in the video, our background assumption that there's only one currency is the main problem. Our experiences with that assumption are limiting. For instance, when we borrow monopoly money, it is borrowed from a private entity at interest. Contrast that with borrowing from the community with zero interest. We can't take our experiences with monopoly money and project them onto community currencies or we'll never get off the ground.

One of the questions that came up during Arthur's session was "what happens when my boss leaves?" Does all the work I did for my boss go unacknowledged? This is a good segway for the next session which I facilitated called "OpenID and the Commons." Not many people showed up in part because people already understood and supported OpenID. This included those who showed up. So, I said a few words about how using the entire URL namespace allows work to be acknowledged by everyone, not just your boss or whatever entity is attempting to bogart your identity. Then, we talked about things having nothing to do with OpenID: the Seattle protests, financial terrorism and money laundering. Having just a few people show up means you're not obligated to talk about the planned session.

"A Truly National Public Banking System" was facilitated by Ellen H. Brown, author of Web of Debt. In this article, Ellen writes about having states create money to take care of local needs instead of borrowing at interest. The tenth amendment states "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." I asked Ellen about the states creating money. Why not?



Bill Aal closed the unconference with a question: "How do we unleash that energy that has been locked in that power system that's embodied in the Federal Reserve?" Then, Bill gave us directions to a nearby bar for drinks. That was a great way to end the unMoney Convergence. Later that evening, I met up with my friend William for seafood at Anthony's Pier 66. William and I programmed Apple II's back in high school in Houston. It was fun to compare notes on where we've been since then. I stuck around for another day and checked out Office Nomads co-working space and then met up with Anders for sushi and many beers in Belltown.

unMoney Convergence Day 2 of 3

Brownies for breakfast! Yes!...I walked up Pike Street from the hostel (on 1st) and took note of the Kinkos as I made the right turn on 8th street to the Town Hall on Seneca. Kaliya explained the open space format and we signed up to lead sessions. For the first session, I decided to attend Michael Linton's presentation "Get the Money Moving." In the video, Ernie Yacub walks in to assist Michael. I was fortunate to join Ernie and Lori Heath for lunch.


[Part 2][Part 3][Part 4]

Michael describes a novel currency system that leverages businesses, nonprofits and the community to grease the wheels of exchange. The idea is that businesses give coupons/currency/points (a particular system implemented with card readers is discussed) to non-profits. People in the community give cash to the non-profits in exchange for the coupons. Now, people can buy things from those businesses with dollars and the coupons. The businesses have earned loyalty. The non-profits have a new source of revenue and the people get a good deal with participating businesses by supporting their non-profits. From time to time, you can hear Alan Rosenblith help the conversation along. You may know Alan as the director of the film The Money Fix.

Now is when I go back to that Kinkos to file an extension for my taxes, so I miss the first part of the second session. However, I return to see John Rogers. I love his response to Ellen H. Brown's question "Can you define a gift economy?"



Everyone seemed energized by Nipun Mehta's talk after lunch. Chris Lindstrom had met Nipun at another conference and invited him to give a talk. Nipun wanted some of the presentation off the record, but here's 10 minutes of Birthing the Gift Economy.



Next, I saw Kaliya give a great talk about user-centric identity. I asked lots of questions and I really appreciated the opportunity to talk digital identity with her. Kaliya was into identity before identity was cool.

I slept through the dinners provided by the hostel and the conference but my friends Rajeev and Ramya picked me up and we went across the lake to Factoria to the local sports bar for pizza. They dropped me back off at the hostel where I got to talk shop with Geoff Chessire as he showed me regenerosity. Needless to say, my first feature request was OpenID.

unMoney Convergence Day 1 of 3

It was a surreal experience today as I'm seeing at least a dozen people for the first time that I've only known from the Internets. People came from as far as Germany, England and Australia. Since we didn't start checking in until 3pm, it was mostly introductions and a dinner that was worth the wait. See you after a little bit of sleep.

unMoney Convergence in Seattle April 14-16

This is great! Kaliya Hamlin and Chris Lindstrom are putting together a conference you do not want to miss. Two different communities of practice will finally converge: the complementary currency folks and the web identity folks! If you're one of the few regular readers of this blog, you know both Kaliya and Chris. Here's the announcement.

Update 1/31: Hazel Henderson will give the keynote.
Update 2/6: Added unMoney Convergence to the blogroll...
Update 2/9: Wiki for the unconference: unmoney.wik.is

Dark Side of the Rainbow

Last night, I joined a couple of friends at the Alamo Drafthouse downtown for a midnight showing of the Dark Side of the Rainbow. Since I've been reading a book that starts each chapter with a quote from the Wonderful Wizard of Oz and references David Parker's The Rise and Fall of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, there were more than a few sublime moments.

The members of Pink Floyd deny that they intentionally synchronized Dark Side of the Moon to the movie. Anyone who has read excellent books like How We Know What Isn't So or Fooled by Randomness are well acquainted with the phenomenon of seeing patterns where none exist by discarding data that doesn't fit. So, if it's true that last night was a Type I error, consider Dark Side of the Rainbow the biggest "rhymes with blind duck" in history.

Contingencies

Last week, Rich and I gave a talk at OWASP Austin, the open web application security group. Social network security was the title. The main idea is how the health of social networks and communities can be compromised by attacking the identities - replacing identities known to the community with ones that are less functional. When identities are degraded or made more anonymous, then the community is at risk.

Of course, we talked about complementary currency and among RSnake's several good questions was how does a complementary currency system keep someone from taking too much. Of course, we mentioned the idea of putting a credit limit for each person in the code, but as everybody knows, it is less about the code than it is about the people and if the community is healthy and all the transactions are transparent, then people will police it themselves. If the community is sick, they won't. Even for the hackers at the OWASP meeting who are immersed in code every day, this idea seemed agreeable.

So, again it comes down to participation and as Henry Jenkins says, "as soon as we begin to talk about participation, the emphasis shifts to cultural protocols and practices." In Alexander Galloway's new book about networks and protocols The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, he often uses the word contingency. It's a word that deserves more use because often times relationships break down because we don't consider or acknowledge the contingencies that our peers might face. That is what protocols are for. For instance, Galloway says that how a DNA computer breaks down the traveling salesman problem "could just as easily be reconceived as a contingency problem." Galloway says that protocols emerge through our complex relationships and they must "accomodate a high degree of contingency."

Inspired by Edgar Cahn's idea of a social operating system, I've written about how communities break down under complexity. As complexity increases, it becomes harder to acknowledge contingencies that can arise for those around us. Simple protocols are needed to take care of each others needs. For instance: You work an hour. You earn an hour.

Oops.

Update 11/24: Speaking of the cost of degraded identities to communities, Kaliya Hamlin (Identity Woman) reveals the biggest threat to identity as described by Bob Blakley:

We might fall into the trap of reversing this relationship, and come to believe (or at least act as if we believe) that our status as persons derives from possessing an electronic “identity” - that is, a record in a database.

If this happened we’d be in danger of becoming “unpersons”

Unpersons are bad for community.

Ellen Hodgson Brown

Update 12/2: Here is the website (with blog) for the book.

A week ago, I ordered Ellen Hodgson Brown's new book Web of Debt. Since I'm still waiting for it (alas, the order is bundled with Toni Price's yet-to-be released cd), a podcast announced on the IJCCR mailing list is a welcome gift in the meantime.

She notes that money is just a receipt (or as Thomas Greco often says credit) that the community agrees on, so there's no need for a private issuer. She clarifies that silver versus gold wasn't William Jennings Bryan's main issue. The main issue was that the government and not a private bank create the money.

Currency is a commons. When it is privately controlled, decisions are made in secret and language is inevitably deliberately obfuscated and dishonest. As I've mentioned before, history is repeating itself on the web as Shel Israel noted that Google is not joining discussions. Last week, this twitter by David Recordon caught my eye. I look forward to the book. I also got to hear Toni's cover of "Right where I Belong" on the way to meeting up with Rich yesterday.