Moved to official ideas list
The 'mint of the realm' is not the only store of wealth or medium of exchange. Community currencies facilitate trading all over the world.
Such currencies
- are resilient against recesssion and collapse
- do not favour the rich by charging interest
- belong to communities, not to banks
- prefer local goods and services over the globalised economy
- are used for economic regeneration and international development
Not being a sexy or emotive subject, community currencies have attracted little interest from business or donors, and these communities need software to support their trading. Old, paper-based systems put off young people and do not scale well.
Working with the UK LETS coordinator, I built a prototype online trading / social network system which would support different kinds of trading mechanism. Here's the whole story. But Drupal is now the obvious platform because it has such a huge buy in. (and because it rocks!)
Here is a requirements document for a community trading facility, which includes wisdom from seasoned activists,(it's long, and could be more polished) and here is a plan for how to build it as a set of Drupal Modules, to plug into existing community web sites. We are currently investigating making an API for the java application, Cyclos, so that currency schemes can choose to outsource the actual banking functions and data.
Since I'm not a student, this project needs a student to champion it. I hope to be able to co-mentor the project, as I'm not good enough yet at Drupal to make the best decisions