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Markets are sticky. They are inefficient and prices are slow to adjust. More trade would happen if markets were more efficient. What would cause the markets to be more efficient? Better information. What’s the web good for? Access to better information. Better access to information provided by the web will cause markets to become more efficient, and more (and better) transactions will take place. We offer this site as a forum where we can all explore these coming changes. Please let us know what we could do to better express these points. Bernard Lietaer’s new book on the future of money is now available online. New models of doing business online continue to develop, with the open source model sparking innovation in software, music, and other industries. Take a look at our directory of online business models and our table comparing the pros and cons of the major e-commerce models.
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a Shockwave toon on the same theme. |
Building Community Capital
Why are we publishing free of charge? Actually, it’s not because we lack hobbies.
We put information out for free, for example, our San FranZiskGo! weekly listing of promising events in the Bay Area and our Web Design 101 tutorial, as part of a larger effort to help create community capital–lasting resources for everyone to appreciate.
Many communities are suffering from unemployment, social isolation, and the degradation of living creatures and their natural habitat.
These communities have plenty of human resources–talented people with the energy to make a difference–but because they have to rely on loan-based currency from the federal government when they use those resources, each exchange spirals them further into debt.
Just imagine if each transaction in these struggling communities conserved local resources instead of leaking interest–people in a community would be encouraged not to hoard currency (hoarding chills employment and corrodes the social bonds that develop in gift- or wealth-based economies) for the sake of the interest, but instead to trade their time, expertise, and extra property freely with other people.
Yes, it’s perfectly legal, and has proven effective too: Citizens in several communities–for example, Minneapolis, MN; Lyon, France; Ithaca, NY; Vancouver Island, BC; Fremantle, WA (Australia); Austin TX; Zurich, Switzerland, and others–have built on this idea, and (sometimes with the help of new online payment systems) have supplemented national currency with their own interest-free non-inflationary currencies. They’ve succeeded to a great extent in replacing unemployment with “remunerated leisure” and in building social ties among community members.
We’re inspired by their successes, and offer our space as another community-building “medium of exchange”. We hope it generates some ripples of value throughout the entire community.
What else would you like to know about us? What do you think about us?
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