August 2023 Senka HadzicOn 17 August, 2023 we presented the Demo paper, Community Networks powered by Community Currencies, at ACM Compass in Cape Town. The demo showed how a mutual credit-based community voucher or currency integrated with a community-owned network could be used to purchase digital services such as internet access on the iNethi platform. […]
April 2023 Senka HadzicIn April, 2023 we released the “Community Networks Meet Community Currencies” manual with the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), to provide guidelines to those who would like to launch a combination of a community network and a local community currency. APC’s Local Networks (LocNet) initiative in partnership with Rhizomatica is a collective […]
September 2022 David JohnsonFor many years, the current CEO of the Community-based Wireless Network in Ocean View, and a long time resident of the area, has spoken about the need for a community currency. In an interview in 2017, he spoke about the challenge of 90% of the economy leaving Ocean View and not getting […]
8 June 2022 Senka HadzicWe held two workshops in 2022 to introduce the Ocean View community to community currencies. Ganief Manuel, who now runs the local wireless community network in Ocean View had a vision of building a community currency, to help grow the local economy in Ocean View, as far back as 2017. Workshop 1 […]
8 June 2022 David JohnsonThe purpose of this trip was to build the Kilifi wireless network, setup the iNethi platform in Kilifi, discuss integration of Community Inclusion Currencies with the iNethi (to purchase internet vouchers and digital services on the iNethi platform), and chew through some disaggregation and decentralization philosophy on Stand-Up Paddleboards, over fresh […]
Two months after the project kicked off, we started planning our first in person meeting and decided it should take the form of a hackathon. At the end of September Keegan and Senka flew to Kenya and spent 12 days with the Grassroots Economics team in the beautiful town of Kilifi. Survey analysis Similar to […]
16 July 2021 David JohnsonThe initial thinking behind the work on this project is basically this. Althea have made a really good system that couples blockchain economics and mesh networking and has successfully been deployed in the US and Grassroots economics have created a community currency that runs on blockchain and is successfully running in […]
12 December 2021 David JohnsonIn my journey building community owned networks with communities, I have always dreamed of the scenario where members of the community are empowered to expand infrastructure and services themselves without much intervention from people who are outside the community. I have seen this happening in communities like Altermundi in Argentina, Guifi.net […]
Incentivized network and localized services growth with blockchain-based community inclusion tokens In this ISOC funded project, we ask if decentralized blockchain-based economic systems combined with mesh and localized cloud services can incentivize vulnerable communities to create and grow their own networking infrastructure, services, and content and hence become more resilient.Our hypothesis is that lack of […]
Why did we change our architecture?Many contributors have struggled to integrate their work into our codebase and deployment environments. In 2020, we ran four honours projects at the University of Cape Town and only one student was able to integrate their work into our codebase. This was only possible after numerous onboarding sessions and lots […]