going to the Source

The openmoney project is relocating from our incubator site with kinkylogic.com to SourceForge.net. We are making the move not only to access the SourceForge site's extensive resources and but also to make the openmoney project most accessible to the community of developers there. (Our thanks to all at Kinky Logic Inc. for their excellent technical service and support in getting us to this stage.)

The project will start with three related processes -

open money - open documentation

developing the kernel of open money theory and practice in a moderated community of qualifying contributors - in the beginning, the document set will be assembled using a cvs (Concurrent Version System) process, but will hopefully soon adopt a content management system more suitable for the task.

open money - open source software

development of "cc" server and client programs in perl, java, etc will (of course) be supported with cvs - contributors can take part in LETShare - a peer evaluation process for rewarding content.

open money - open space for discussion

dot.openmoney.org - a space for discussion, news, announcements - where the action is manifested in words.

Playing with pay - rewarding content

Open source software development will be more attractive when developers are rewarded for their content.The "wall street performer" protocol (by Chris Rasch) is one of several attempts to get funds and code flowing. The open money project will go in the same general direction, but with two distinct advantages.

The first is inherent profitability. Open money software will generate revenues and savings in so many places for so many people and organizations that it's easy to devise business models to fund both general and particular programming objectives. And we have. This opportunity is unique to this project.

The second advantage is that we can include virtual money in the business model. This is a recursive development, in the best traditions of the coding community. After all, if open money programs are useful, it's because open money is useful, so we should use it to bootstrap its own development. This opportunity will become progressively applicable to other IP projects as the use of open money is more widely adopted.

LETShare - it's completely backed, virtually

Please be clear - the open money project is NOT offering cash for hours working on code. Rewards for content are initially awarded to contributors as a form of sweat equity - but while the equity is virtual, the sweat has to be real.

It's a process of checking off squares on a board representing the accumulating value of the contributions made by all those involved, by ongoing mutual assessment. As the product becomes effective, and shows that it will in some way earn money, various people and organizations will be willing to "front" cash for the contributors by buying their squares.

The "fronters" then get the eventual yield - equity - for those squares they have bought out, which is likely much more than they paid. Essentially this is just informal stock generation and transfer. However, to generate mainstream money resources for development budgets, it takes advantage of the convertibility of community money emerging from full scale implementations of the software.

The current estimate is that at least $2 million in identifiable revenues can be allocated to coding. So if the average geek is worth, $50 an hour (just a guess) then that would be 40,000 hours or maybe 1,000 geek-weeks. Which means there's funding projected for perhaps about 20 geek-years, or, if it all goes fast, maybe 80 quarter geek-years.

The main focus for coding will be the development of the protocols and programs to network local cc service providers and thus allow users to trade in cc systems beyond their immediate communities.

Making "real" money for making virtual money is making sense.