Evolving community currencies from barn raising

February 23rd, 2009

The biggest challenge of community currency adoption is probably education. People don’t understand why they would need a different currency, or they don’t trust the community currency as much as the government-issued currency.

Over at the opensourcecurrency group, Benjamin made a very exciting suggestion based on an adaption of the Amish barn raising.

With Barn Raising, we all get together
in January and break up into groups of 4-6 households. We then
schedule our work days – about one every other month – throughout the
year. When your day comes up, everyone converges on your house and you
put them to work for the day. It’s a great way to get big projects
hammered out in a short amount of time, and it’s way fun! The problem
is that anyone who doesn’t get in during that first meeting has a hard
time joining a group. I see ATEN as a way to facilitate even more of
the BarnRaising spirit without having to do all the organization up-
front. You have a bunch of folks over to your house and then pay them
in hours. Go to someone else’s house and get some of that time back
working for them, etc.

So, the idea is essentially for the community currency, here time-based, to be used as a tool to make the barn-raising more flexible.

What I really like about this idea is that it makes the community in community currency very real in a social sense: you get to meet and accomplish something with other community members.

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Posted by Guillaume Lebleu Filed in barnraising, communitycurrency
Comments

  • Jct: If you find the Pauline's LETS reports at my home page at http://johnturmel.com for Belgium, they had a custom called a Salongo where everyone showed up at one member's home for party inthe evening after a day of work fixing up everything around. Doing a different neighbor every weekend. And registering the hours in their JEU-style notebooks.
    Imagine a world-wide time-trading UNILETS network. I'm working on it. See my http://youtube.com/kingofthepa... channel for how Argentina used community currencies to beat their crash. 4 hours worth, 24 videos.

  • Thanks Guillaume,

    Sounds a great idea.
    Also it makes me think in a way to carrotmob: http://carrotmob.org/
    Same kind of approach...no ?

  • From what I understand - it's not launched yet - CarrotMob is about conditioning aggregated money flows based on values compliance.
    The only similarity between barn raising and carrotmob, is that they both mobilize groups to create value for the group. But I don't see more beyond that. Please elaborate if you can.

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