Partnerships

February was a very exciting month for Community Forge, with the Lyon Conference and the Tiocan weekend, and their resulting projects.

Tim and Matthew are all in together, and have been for two years. Tim takes the decisions and speaks French, while Matthew does the software and maintains relationships with users of the software all over the world. Building on this foundation,

• There is also small handful of skilled, committed freelance volunteers who maintain the web server, which we aim to make more secure, robust, and colocated. We are currently migrating servers, and soon there will be the massive task to upgrade everything to Drupal 7
• We have plans to build a Community of Practice site, by upgrading to Drupal 7.
• We are discussing a future steering committee with Ben Segal, Art Brock and Peter Koenig, among others.
• We are collaborating with respected Stephen De Meulenaere on the next iteration of ComplementaryCurrency.org.
• The largest non-monetary mutual credit system in the world, CES in South Africa is considering rebuilding their online platform using our technology. We working together on an architecture which will support many other similar projects.
• With a couple of of other volunteers, we publish the Community Currency Magazine a magazine which seems to be much appreciated.
• We are working closely with many LETS in South Belgium, who are considering setting up a Cforge 'branch' or similar structure. They are pushing for tools to trade between community currencies.
• Time Banks USA is in the process of migrating to our technology, with some cooperation from us. We are talking to Time Banks UK. And New Zealand.
• We are engaged with the Apres, the nonprofit Chamber of Commerce in Geneva and other local groups, advocating and advising on mutual credit systems.
• We are advising a multicurrency project in British Columbia about appropriate accounting software.
• In late March, Tim trained ten people to Paris to be administrators of their own site. Two groups will be using Mutual Credit to experiment with alternative systems for giving value in a volunteer environment.
• We are in dialogue with Community Tools, who are building comparable sites, and looking for opportunities to share technology both ways.
• We have a positive exchange-based relationship with Route des SEL, in which we swap accounting services for accommodation around the world.
• We are communicating with the makers of Cyclos about separating out the back-end accounting functions and the front end user features. The aim in the long run is to make our software more inter-operable.
• We are part of a discussion process with NESTA next month which aims to help coordinate CC software efforts.
• We are putting a funding proposal together along with the Eco-Pesa project in Kenya, to use Complementary currencies as a methodology for development projects. In this case we are proposing a tree planting, and community store proposal. This project will depend heavily on an SMS interface for making transactions.
• We have strong relationships with various projects in in USA, including Metacurrency, Exchange Stewards, Bernal Bucks.
• We have been participating in Finance Lab to share our analysis and activity with NGOs, professional institutes, corporate consultants and financial firms, so they can help us to understand institutional cases for participating in or supporting CCs. one of our advisors, Professor Jem Bendell, works with us on this engagement.
• We are part of a project which may supply a B2B trading platform for Social Economy members in Geneva.

In addition to all of these we stand ready to engage with Transition Towns, and FLab, and BALLE in US, LETSlink UK and Timebanks UK, various groups in New Zealand and Australia, as well as the CC movement in Europe in the world, but we just don't have the capacity to reach out to everyone.

As a result of the General Assembly we anticipate reducing the prodigious communication that all of these relationships entail, in order to focus on producing usable stuff. So forgive us if we seem less proactive than usual.