Résumé

Credit Commons is an infrastructure, aiming to link existing and new communities in an open, grassroots, intercommunity value exchange environment. This paper aims to demonstrate that an infrastructure for intra and inter community exchange cannot be considered, merely as a technological project. It needs to be founded on a sociotechnical approach and deployed within an inclusive approach ensuring the early engagement of users and communities, as well as, other organisations such as academic institutions. Credit Commons comes to reinforce existing currency interchange hub solutions (Huber et Martignoni, 2013) having Switzerland as their initial center of activities. In this sense, the Credit Commons infrastructure would operate on three areas developed in this paper: Firstly, explaining the concept of mutual credit in a credit commons infrastructure. inclusive, crosscommunity participation, based on local communities accounting systems and mutual credit principles. Business entities engaging in bartering, online payments and transactions services, timebanks, LETS each with their respective time management systems are possible Credit Commons nodes. Secondly, mapping and discussing on the Credit Commons community. This part is looking closer to what kind of pilots and communities would be interested to use this infrastructure. The Credit Commons propose an inclusive design methodology, integrating a horizontal gender approach on Credit Common’s impact, social metrics and evaluation Thirdly, early deploying the open protocol layer as the backbone of the Credit Commons, where the aforementioned entities develop their activities. CoWaBoo is a protocol aiming to provide a sociotechnical section in between an early technical implementation of a intercommunity transactions protocol, confronted to group formation, knowledge curation and redocumentation of results in distributed, blockchain, architectures. This paper will end with a short discussion on the promise of a more transparent complexity that protocols based on blockchain and smart contracts bring with them. We are entering a new era of possibilities, and responsibilities, where sociotechnical tools will be conditioning both to our understanding and acting in it.

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