Forming the Local Food Economy

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techforfuture
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#1

Hi everyone! I’d like to introduce myself and start a conversation.

I’ve been talking with a few beautiful members of OFN about a potential collaboration to create a new economy to support the new food systems you’re creating.

We’d like to get some feedback from the larger OFN community about this collaboration and what it may look like going forward.

First, about me.

I am fortunate enough to be in a position where I no longer need to “work” to meet my needs and thrive. The reason I say this, is to let you know that this project is entirely passion led.

My primary purpose with this project is to create a more beautiful world to raise my family in. To not only avoid the many challenges humanity faces, but to use this as an opportunity to fundamentally shift society and create the paradise we all know is possible.

I believe that the destiny of our society is rooted in how we feed ourselves and the systems we use to interact. I believe resilient local food systems are central to the creation of this beautiful world.

I also believe that our economy is the most powerful invention of mankind. My background has been in understanding our present economy and the many presented alternatives. Using this to craft an economic model that’s meant to facilitate, finance and promote these new food systems we’re building.

My organization is building an economic platform that’s meant to support the many beautiful groups (such as OFN) to better accomplish their mission by creating a currency and economy that’s designed with them in mind (opposed to the USD, Euro, etc).

We’re reaching out to organizations now to see who else is aligned with this vision and who would like to collaborate on creating this new economy.

I would love to know what the general thoughts about such a collaboration from this community.

For a bit more about our intentions:

#2

Hi @Rieki,
I love what you wrote about your passion and ambition. I went through most of the SEEDS presentation and I’ll admit, I got a bit lost because I only barely know about such things as bitcoin, which seems to be the closest economic system to what you’re proposing. So I wouldn’t have replied necessarily except that no one else has. For myself, I’m just a volunteer with a new small veg co-op in Scotland that is still trying to figure out how to use OFN itself, and therefore miles from being ready to think of a new economic system.

Nevertheless, I’m very interested in creating a ‘more beautiful world to raise my family in’ and the ways in which we could do that. I’d like to know more about what you’re doing, and wish you luck.

#3

@RachelDuBois! Thank you for sharing!

I realize I did a pretty poor job at introducing this concept in a digestible way.

My intention here is simply to say that we can build a new currency on top of our food movement to exchange with. It is a bit detailed how we do this, but it’s much more simple that the systems of USD or Euro, etc today.

The vast majority of people may not need to know ‘how’ the currency works. Only what the outcome is.

Which is simply building a currency that we - the people - own.

Which can reward us when we spend it (opposed to the fees, hidden or otherwise).

Pool resources for us to direct towards expanding and financing the local food movement.

Rewarding platforms (such as OFN) for their contributions without them necessarily needing to charge fees.

And a variety of other benefits. However, what I am going to do is create a new proposal here and power-point that speaks directly to what you may be more interested in knowing :slight_smile:

#4

Hi @Rieki thank you for posting this message here :slight_smile: We had two discussions already with Rieki to get to understand the general idea behind his SEED project. it is not so easy to understand I guess yes. I’ll try to sumup in bullet points my understanding:

  • SEED is an operating system for ecosystems: it creates the blood (currency) that circulates within all the various stakeholders of the ecosystem (trees, humans, animals, vegetables…). In the SEED system the currency created on a regular everyday basis is distributed given certain % to the various stakeholders of the ecosystem: maintainers of the ecosystem, all entities using the seed currency, local communities who have meaningfull projects and need money to achieve them, entities building appications in the seed ecosystem, etc.
  • to avoid overflows (that can cause disease, like inflation in that case) the processes regulating this ecosystem integrate mechanisms to regulat the flow of blood (money) > invite people to “store” some money to avoid too much money in circulation, or mechanisms to destroy some money (through services “sold” by the ecosystem to members). The regulation of money in circulation aims at controling inflation, and then preventing the possibility of speculative usage of this currency (one big problem with most cryptocurrencies).
  • the communities in this ecosystem will together be the “central bank” (blood central regulation system), so decide the policy around money emission etc. Not everyone has the same weight in the decision, it is based on reputation. So when you contribute to make the ecosystem thrive, and others recognize the value of your contribution you gain reputation and influence in future decisions.
  • if OFN would like to be part of this ecosystem, it means we would “in the backend” (users don’t even have to know and continue using their regular currency if we don’t want to disturb them) use the seed coin as a base for all transactions within the OFN. Seed coins would be convertible to €,£,$ etc but if inflation regulation is well one, at stable rates so change losses/gains would be low. Contributors could be partly paid with seed coins received as part of the “harvest” process (regular emission and distribution of coins to application builders)

Did I understand well @Rieki ?

I like the whole idea and definitely agree that we need system design, and put all ideas together to get something consistent end-toend. And I see where you want to go and share most of your views. But I have some outstanding question marks:

  • You are putting together lots of concepts in a whole system, which makes sense. But the stage of blockchain use today is mostly prototype, no one has found yet how to build a stable coin, neither to organise dispute regulation properly, neither to organize fuctionnal distributed autonomous communities (see big DAO failure) or contributive accounting, etc. It sounds pretty ambitious (unrealistic for now?) to build a secure and operating system with so many complex blocks to tackle at once?
  • I am unsure about the way you propose to regulate inflation. The technic used to stabilize the currency is based on a wrong analysis of the cause of inflation. Given certain economists, inflation doesn’t come from too much money on circulation compared to offers. Inflation is caused by shortages or full employment that impacts prices of services and goods (in shortages people can pay disproportionate prices for goods and services, and then ask more salaries, and then as a consequence more money needs to be introduced) > SEED seems to create artificially shortages by forcing people to artificially limit the quantity of SEED circulating when they might need them for their activity. So could cause inflation instead. I’m happy to connect you with a very good ecologist/economist who has worked a lot on it and on the future of currencies :wink:
  • Also about contributive accounting (= valuing contributions from others) I have experienced it with Backfeed in OuiShare and it was sincerly unbearable, we were spending our time reviewing and evaluating other people production, instead of producing ourself value. I would rather go for some form of self-evaluation with some peer-control random process.

Last comment is that we have SO MUCH to build around the OFN project and not so many contributors. We are trying to identify priorities. I don’t think we are in a position where we can really dedicate lots of time to this reflexion at this prototype stage, even if we are happy to sometime give some feedbacks in that prototype design stage… Just be aware of that :slight_smile:

Can you formulate more precisely what “collaboration” you want to propose to the OFN community? In wich timeframe, what it requires from us, what value we would gain for OFN by dedicating time to it?
I like the idea and reflexion but I (and lots of people in that community) work far too much at the moment so we’ll need to be pragmatic as well and prioritize :wink:

Info for others: some notes from precedent calls with Rieki here