I have been saying that I know of no complementary currency system based on a social networking platform apart from my own, marketplace, but all that changed this week.

Congratulations to Austin Time Exchange, who launched their site days before my first site. (watch this space).

We’ve got Swaporamarama and Swishing and now, the Topshop Swap Shop…

Topshop Swap Shop

Just in from the inimitable Space Hijackers: Ladies and Gentlemen we are proud to announce the restyling fashion mash-up event of the year! In the light of the current economic crisis and the outrage over the sweatshop conditions that most high street brands make their clothes in, the swapshop is your chance to re-vamp your wardrobe with a free conscience! Leaping away from the drudgery of big corporate fashion with it’s dodgy business practices and spend spend spend attitude, the Topshop Swapshop takes fashion back to its roots.

Simply turn up at TOPSHOP on Oxford Street wearing an outfit you wish to upgrade, then on the stroke of 2, marvel as hundreds of fashion moguls offer to trade your clothes with you.

Fancy that girls jumper? Why not offer to swap your belt for it? That boy’s hat is to die for, how about a trade for your jeans? Nice skirt, fancy trading my t-shirt for it?

After a hectic re-working of your look you can then walk proudly back onto the streets of London town with a new wardrobe and not having spent a single penny.

You can buy lots of clothes but you can’t buy style.

DISCLAIMER:

The above event is in no way supported or condoned by TopShop. Any similarity to any brand living or dead is merely coincidental.

2pm sharp on Sat 29th November – Topshop Oxford Street.

These are my links for November 20th to November 24th:

• The Mad Housers – an Atlanta-based nonprofit group engaged in direct action to shelter the homeless – MAD HOUSERS Inc. is an Atlanta-based non-profit corporation engaged in charitable work, research and education. Our charter outlines our goals and purposes:
  * To provide shelter for homeless individuals and families regardless of race, creed, national origin, gender, religion, or age.
  * To develop low income housing for people in need of housing.
  * To help people develop the skills and knowledge for constructing and rehabilitating housing and shelter.
  * To increase the quantity and to improve the quality of housing in the world.
  * To act, if necessary as an advocate for the homeless, to ensure that their moral and civil rights are protected.

  The Mad Housers believe that if a person has a secure space from which to operate, they are much more capable of finding the resources to help themselves.

• Complementary currencies | drupal.org – Currencies like dollars and Euros are not the only way to recognise and track work done and contributions to the social good. Local, community currencies such as LETS and timebanks facilitate trading in communities all over the world. Such currencies
  * are resilient against recesssion and collapse
  * do not favour the rich by charging interest
  * belong to communities, not to banks
  * prefer local goods and services over the globalised economy
  * are used for economic regeneration and international development
• ‘I will create a standing order of 5 pounds per month to support an organisation that fosters alternatives to the current profit-driven economic system’ – PledgeBank – I will create a standing order of 5 pounds per month to support an organisation that fosters alternatives to the current profit-driven economic system but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.
• Welcome – SoundCloud – SoundCloud lets you move music fast & easy. The platform takes the daily hassle out of receiving, sending & distributing music for artists, record labels & other music professionals.
• optimaes – Open Project to Investigate Money and Economic Systems – Open Project to Investigate Money and Economic Systems

These are my links for November 13th to November 18th:

• Survey: Software for LETS – The web archive page of a list of software project for community currencies
• Richard Kay’s 2005 WSFII Bullet Points – Links to some open source community currency software projects
• Dimdim: Free Web Meeting, Free Web Conferencing, Meetup, Open Source, Net Meeting, eLearning, web conference, Unified Collaboration, Online Meetings, Online Training, Free Screen Sharing, collaboration, live meeting – Dimdim’s mission is to become the leading provider of open source web meeting software. Dimdim strives to be an open and transparent company, with source code, product roadmaps and simple technical documentation freely available online. We also listen closely to the needs of the open source community and are actively improving our product based on their feedback.
• WCBC: Social Enterprise Toolkit – The Social Economy Project, in partnership with Liverpool Plus, produced a step-by-step guide to starting and running a social enterprise, which is available free of charge to community organisations in Wrexham.

  The Manual for Developing Social Enterprises is available to download or alternatively a hardcopy or CD ROM version can be obtained from AVOW. (Tel: 01978 312556).

• home – ammado – ammado connects nonprofits, socially responsible companies and engaged individuals in an interactive and unique environment. We harness the power of the internet to accelerate communication, awareness and fundraising. The ammado community will generate inspirational stories and create real heroes.
• Repoze Notes : /tom_gross-repoze_plone-20081113.html – Props to Tom Gross, who has tackled the job of figuring out and documenting the minimal set of changes needed to make use of repoze and WSGI from within a stock Plone buildout.

These are my links for November 11th to November 13th:

• The New York Times – Breaking News, World News & Multimedia – Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom were brought to an unceremonious close today.
• The Yes Men – Impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else.
• Secure Form Mailer Plugin For Wordpress · Dagon Design – This is the WordPress plugin version of my secure PHP form mailer script. This plugin has a wide range of features including: Support for multiple instances, an easy to use dynamic form generation system (any number of fields, in any order), multiple recipients, multiple file attachments, optional auto reply feature, an image verification system, numerous security features (including protection against email header injection), a message template system, multiple languages, and too many other things to list. This plugin was designed to be easy to use, while still being extremely flexible. If you just want a simple contact form, you can set one up with just a few clicks. For those of you who need something a bit more advanced, you can completely customize the plugin to fit your needs – whether it is 5 fields or 500. A non-WordPress version is also available. ReCaptcha support has also been added, as well as support for storing the data in a delimited file.
• Australian Social Forum » Media Cooperative Pilot Project – From November 2008-January 2009 a Media Cooperative Pilot Project will be run by Nicholas Roberts and Cameron using the Octapod Association as a base to develop the self-sustaining Media Cooperative. The main 5 sub-projects will be
• Social Media Classroom – Welcome to the Social Media Classroom and Collaboratory. It’s all free, as in both “freedom of speech” and “almost totally free beer.” We invite you to build on what we’ve started to create more free value. The Social Media Classroom (we’ll call it SMC) includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes—integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting are the first set of tools.
• CMS Summary – techmeet – A lot of work has been done over the past year researching candidates for a new Indymedia CMS. The purpose of this summary is to provide a snapshot of all the work that has been done researching and analyzing existing Content Management Systems. The goal of that project has been to find one that fulfills our requirements document. In addition, the intent is the collate all the information about the CMS project onto one page for convenience. At the end is an attempt to break down all the data and show where we are.

These are my links for November 6th to November 10th:

• Attention Profiling: APML Beginner’s Guide – Robin Good’s Latest News – Attention profiling is quite possibly the next wave of smarter, more relevant web browsing. APML is an emerging standard that promises to make it much easier for websites and services to cater to your exact tastes, reducing the information overload of seemingly endless web content.
• Core Developers – Plone Social Network Experience was: 18 Things I Wish Were True About Plone – Interesting thread about plone
• Paris Bobun Sprint #2 at Google HQ : getting Open Social into Plone – Plone Social Networking | Google Groups – The goal of this sprint is to enable Plone as an Open Social container,
  allowing any Plone site to host Open Social applications (also nicknamed
  "gadgets", or "boxes", since those applications tend to be enclosed in a
  well-delimited box of a social network website).
• Managing Multiple Plone Sites at Oxfam — Plone CMS: Open Source Content Management – Managing Multiple Plone Sites at Oxfam. Duncan Booth's presentation from Plone Conference 2006.
• Solheimer in Iceland –
• Plone vs. Drupal, Take One | modulus – Recently, my colleagues and I decided that we needed to replace our public website's content management system. After some preliminary evaluation, we determined that we would evaluate Plone and Drupal. In the end, we went with Plone at work, and I've been working with it a lot for the past few months. However, I was also impressed by Drupal, and that's what I use to run this blog.
• Digital image resizing with the GIMP – Processing digital images is a very common task today. Image processing tools are so common that users often process images by trial and error, without really knowing what they are doing. One of the operations people fail most commonly is resizing an image. In this article I will explain how to resize images. This is a way for me to celebrate 10 years since I started studying digital image processing!

This is part 3 of the original Zeitgeist Movie (see some of my thoughts on that here), all about money, banking and the Federal Reserve in the US.

After the first Zeitgeist Movie was released it was saddening how many people took at as the whole and complete truth without asking any further questions (particularly when the homepage of the films producer used to read “It is my hope that people will not take what is said in the film as the truth”).

The first part of the original movie made too much of the obvious fact that most monotheistic religions share lots of similar threads, building on what came before.

Sure, many religious institutions have become dogmatic conservative bodies and some extremists perpetuate divides. But the fact is that, being part of a church group or similar is one of the most statistically likely thing to increase reported quality of life (best explained by the human desire and need to belong and experience community, I guess)

The second bit of the film was all about 911 being an inside job. There is certainly more evidence for that than there is for the official story, but there are many better documented examples of false flag terrorism and of US (and UK) governments violently overthrowing democracies to instill dictators. So I don’t like how much emphasis people place on 911.

Two examples that come to mind are the Iran coup 1953 and in Chile on September 11th 1973

This sort of stuff has been normal practice for a long time so I don’t like how much emphasis people place on 911.

Anyway, I thought the beginning of third part of Zeitgeist – The Movie about the Federal Reserve was well done, and the bulk of this second film follows on from this:

This very long (215 minutes) money documentary has lots of interesting history in it about the battle over the control of money and banking in the US. If I remember rightly the presenter proposes going back to the gold standard, but whilst that might be better than what we’ve got now, it doesn’t really make much sense either (as nicely explained in Money as Debt)

“The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching plan, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole…Their secret is that they have annexed from governments, monarchies, and republics the power to create the world’s money…” THE MONEY MASTERS is a 3 1/2 hour non-fiction, historical documentary that traces the origins of the political power structure that rules our nation and the world today. The modern political power structure has its roots in the hidden manipulation and accumulation of gold and other forms of money. The development of fractional reserve banking practices in the 17th century brought to a cunning sophistication the secret techniques initially used by goldsmiths fraudulently to accumulate wealth. With the formation of the privately-owned Bank of England in 1694, the yoke of economic slavery to a privately-owned “central” bank was first forced upon the backs of an entire nation, not removed but only made heavier with the passing of the three centuries to our day. Nation after nation, including America, has fallen prey to this cabal of international central bankers.”

I know Paradox from the London party scene. He’s a good chap

Here is a great poem he wrote about money and banking…

The Matrix