According to Bernard Lietaer, a community is "a group of people who honor each other's gifts, who can trust that their gifts will be reciprocated some day, in some way." Community Forge gives your community the tools you need to build cohesion, involvement, and resilience more easily and efficiently.
Aid and Community Development
Targeting environmental, health and economic development projects around the world is possible with a new technique. By creating local economic networks in your target communities you can be sure that your funds will reach and stay in the community you are helping. This reduces corruption and increases transparency and social cohesion. See our work in Kenya .
Association or Movement Building
All communities need ways of sharing the organisational and other burdens, ideally without using money to measure. Our tools can help you keep track of who does what and make sure everyone's work is acknowledged. The default installation includes other useful tools for running any organisation, including a calendar and photo galleries.
(Social) Chamber of Commerce
Most businesses are in debt and have to pay interest to banks for use of their money. When a Chamber of Commerce launches a business to business barter network, every business in town can have some interest free credit. We are seeking enthusiasts who want to go out and sell to this market. Our software platform, Drupal is capable of hosting large sites with hundreds of thousands of users. We are actively seeking a small town which is ready to issue its own interest free digital currency, and even better, allow the payment of a portion of local taxes in that money. This is a courageous move, but it really works. We are seeking enthusiasts who want to go out and sell to this market.
Intra-Company
Larger organisations sometimes use internal accounting procedures to ensure that every 'cost centre' is making a profit. But accounting with bank money is laborious and expensive. With our software this accounting can be done much more simply, without the trouble and expense of moving money around
LETS or Time Bank
This is what we do best, as our software was designed for these communities and these were our first adopters. The principle both use is called 'mutual credit' that means that the accounting is a network of IOUs which are 'cleared' or cancelled out by the computer, leaving each member with a 'balance'. All the balances add up to zero. These groups also traditionally include a directory of offers and wants.
