This summary of the plan I recently wrote in an e-mail to a list of lovely people is probably the best on paper outline at present:

In short, here are my thoughts and the idea:

Purpose:
to create a Happy Planet. To improve quality of life on Earth whilst simultaneously reducing ecological footprint. To create a world where everyone one is able to live long happy lives without wrecking the planet.

Starting points:
* Timebanks (I worked for TimeBanks UK), LETS (my Mum ran London’s biggest for 5 years), Bartercard, etc. etc are really great community building and exchange tools, BUT
* Until there is a community currency in which I can pay my rent and by food and energy, I/ we will be forever a slave to the capitalist banking system that creates money as debt (and requires constant economic growth, i.e. social and ecological destruction)
* Therefore, if I/ we want to launch/ create a scalable values-drive community currency and create a Happy Planet, we need to acquire land and invest in food, shelter and energy infrastructure.
* Together We Have Everything. All the money, skills, contacts etc. we need to make this happen. United Diversity was set-up in recognition of this.

The plan:
* The deal is that all members of United Diversity agree to invest at least 1% of their income into a shared pot and decide together how best to invest it in eco land and infrastructure projects, and to spend at least 1% of their time working on common goals.
* Actually, the idea is that everyone agree to contribute at least one “contributary unit” each, with 1% of income and time both representing 0.5 of a unit (e.g. one could contribute 2% of income and no time, or vice versa, but all are encouraged/ incentivised to invest as much as they can.)
* Members will be allowed to decide where their money goes both geographically, and what proportions goes into the land fund (for buying land) and infrastructure fund (for lending to eco land projects so they can get more infrastructure), e.g. one. might decide that I want 25% of my contributions to only be spend in my London postcode, another 25% to be spent anywhere in Europe and the remaining 50% to only be spend in Sub Saharan Africa, with 75% going into the land purchase funds in those areas and the rest available to loan to existing community/ eco land projects for infrastructure investments.
* How will we make decision about what to spend the money on? Well, everyone should be able to have a say in anything that effects them. And since everything and everyone is connected that means everyone should be able to have their say on everything. However, the amount of say that one has on a particular issue should be proportionate to how much that issue affect you, i.e. people who live and work in Smallville should have more say about what happens in Smallville than people who don’t. Ideally, therefore, ratings and votes in the decision making process (see below) will be weighted according to one’s degree of seperation from the matter at hand.
* So what is the decision making process?
1. Brainstrom ideas, rate them on one or more criteria on a scale of -2 to +2. Ideas that, say, get and overall average of +1 got through to the next stage…
2. Top ideas are debated. Members make for/ against arguments for each idea outline how they will increase quality of life whilst reducing ecological footprint, or not. Again, these arguments are rated. Each idea is clear presented with the the strongest for/ against argument clearly visible.
3. A vote is taken, in which all members can participate but where votes are weighted as outlined above. Additionally, members can choose to accept “vote recommendations” from other people they trust on the issue, thereby effectively delegating their vote to whomever they beleive is most informed on the topic. This allows people who have neither the time nor inclination, or simply don’t trust themselves, to still have their say.
* So, we’ve brought a load of land and lent money to lots of nice eco/ community land projects to invest in new infrastructure. What now? We rent the land out and/ or sell leaseholds to people who agree to work according to ecological prinicples (in a similar way to how http://ecologicalland.coop/ plan to operate, see http://ecologicallandcoop.wordpress.com/example-elc-hamlets/ecological-land-management-criteria/ ) and we collect infrastructure loan repayments.
* Any surplus money coming in from land rentals and loan repayments is split 50/50. 50% is re-invested into yet more land/ infrastructure projects and 50% is redistributed to members as dividends.
* The amount of dividend income a members recieves us proportionate to how much they’ve contributed in “contributory units” (i.e. money and/ or “sweat equity”, as outlined above).
* But is not just how much members put it that effects the amount of dividents they receive. It how much they take out too, i.e. what share of the world’s resources do they use? i.e. how big is their ecological footprint?
* What do you mean? Well, the amount of dividend a particular member receives will be based on an equation a bit like this:
Number of contributory units multipled by reputation (based on peer rating or any work done) divided by ecological footprint.
* This incentivises member both to contribute a lots (and care about the quality of their work) and to reduce their ecological footprint, great!
* But there is more! The dividends are not paid out in pounds, dollars, euros etc. but in a new United Diversity currency backed by the real wealth and use value of our shared land and infrastructure assets. We might call the currency “ecos” or “freedom tickets”.
* Also, eco land projects who fully buy into the whole mission will be invited to issue this currency themselves, and to repay their infrastructure loans in it, backed by an agreement to accept the currency themselves in exchange food/ shetler/ energy.
* And people who have no money but lots of time and williingness to work the land will be able to pay their rent on our land in this currency too.
* And each year will hold “Building Man” festivals (because its a play on the amazing Burning Man festivals) where instead of creating a temporary city in the desert and then destroying it, we’ll harness all that amazing creativity and self-organising power to build ecovillages in sensible places (i.e. on community owned land) and leave them there! (a great opportunity for people put int their 1%+)
* And we’ll celebrate that we’ve finally freed ourselves from the money as debt bank slavery system and created a saner economic model!
* Yay!

Is that clear? Thoughts, comments, suggestions?!?

Josef if I don’t have any income can I just give you 1% of the bread that I bake and weasel my way onto your land?

To which I responded:

Well, 1% of 0 is zero!

But, also, you are lying! Job seekers or working tax credit is still some income! Expected contribution is 1% of income and time, with minimums being £5/ month and 10mins a day.

Actually, my plan is for the agreement to be that everyone contribute at least one “unit” each, with 1% of income and time both representing 0.5 units. i.e. you could choose to contribute 2% or time and no income, or 2% of income and no time. Do you follow?

Either way, YES you can weasel your way onto our land

Vinay and I are very much on the same page when it comes to infrastructure stuff and, it seems, also how how to fund it and spread the word.

I strongly recommend you listen to the talk he gave at the Temporary School of Thought:

* Vinay Gupta on Infrastructure for Anarchists – audio / lecture notes.

Also, he recently penned this, which very much ties in with our plans:

The Global Village Development Bank
financing infrastructure at the individual, household and village level worldwide

If the World Bank was being created at the dawn of the 21st century, how would its basic model and operations differ from the mid-20th century model which currently supports projects worldwide?

There are two significant developments which affect infrastructure financing since the foundation of the World Bank. The first is the development of distributed infrastructure (DI) – a library of technologies and techniques which provide the same class of services that are provided by systems like the water and power grids, but without the massive one-off investments in physical plant. Dry toilets and solar panels can provide high quality services household by household without a grid. The second development is information and communications technology (ICT) which enables organizations to span continents with ease, and makes the details of project progress accessible from the other side of the world, given a satphone and a camera.

There is a natural synergy between distributed infrastructure and ICT. Keeping track of hundreds of thousands or tens of millions of small infrastructure projects would be impossible with conventional paper record keeping. The analysis of which systems can be used in which climates is difficult for systems like solar and wind, but is easily automated. Digital mapping technologies enable overviews of structural and society-wide progress in service provision. The other side of this synergy relates to pace: in a digital society, and in the digital world, progress and change come faster than ever. The stability required to finance an infrastructure project with a 30 year payback period exists almost nowhere in the world today, as the political situation, energy policy and technology, global governance and other factors move the landscape.

Small scale, low cost infrastructure projects have often been seen as less “efficient” than large scale megaprojects. However, as Small is Profitable (http://smallisprofitable.org) conclusively demonstrates, this is largely because different accounting practices must be used to fully reveal the value of small scale projects. Large scale project accounting practices work for comparing one large project with another, but the economies of agility which go with small projects, plus the better fit between local need and local provision of services, plus less complex resource financing and distribution administrations, plus many other factors combine to make it much harder to compare large scale and small scale projects accurately. Suffice it to say that in chaotic areas and areas of low population density, large scale infrastructure projects are simply not an option, and few (if any) experts in the field campaign for megaprojects in rural areas or (post-) war zones. But microprojects can efficiently reach into these areas, providing services one village or one hut at a time without the unbounded risks required by projects which must be large, or not exist at all. Everybody on earth needs infrastructure to attain a high quality of life, and nations require generally available infrastructure to support public health and economic objectives, but total industrialization, population concentration and massive resource and capital footprints are not available to most nations on earth.

Constructing a financial institution – a Global Village Development Bank – which understands DI and ICT at a profound and instinctive level is not a simple undertaking. There are three profound shifts from conventional practices which must all be implemented simultaneously to even dream of creating an effective institution.

The first change is in the nature and scale of the projects to be financed, and how they are understood. Triple bottom line accounting practices must be applied at every level of this venture. A water project in Africa generates not only financial returns on investment, it saves lives, and both of these truths must show on the balance sheet. A million small stoves in Bangladesh impacts household economies, but also global climate. Triple bottom line (planet, people, profit) reveals these aspects of projects. The projects themselves are likely to be surprisingly simple in most cases: dig a well, train villages in integrated solar cooking, set up local manufacturing of efficient stoves. To account such small projects as infrastructure financing is the key to actually raising funds to pay for them.

The second change is in risk management. Nobody can afford to hire expensive technical consultants to oversee each one of these hundreds of thousands of tiny projects. Rather, a combination of technical expertise and local knowledge about those undertaking the project must be combined to assess the technical risk and implementation risk of entire classes of projects at once. Each of a class of Namibian well projects is similar in some ways. The implementation team is known. Combined, these factors give rise to a degree of confidence in the project outcomes. Many small projects allow for statistical analysis of project performance, and for systematic investigation into factors which affect project success. Because each project is small, and they occur in generations, project methodologies or funding decisions can be adjusted depending on performance data from the field: in short, what does not work can be defunded before more money is wasted, and what works can be allocated those funds. This is a decision that can be made day-by-day. Another factor to consider is who makes the decision: pooling funds into a single bucket which is managed by experts is efficient on paper, but in practice this approach has not proven able to meet the challenges of funding DI. Processes like Kiva (http://kiva.org) allow each investor to manage their own portfolio of humanitarian investments and, with expert advise and good tools for visualization of project outcomes, this approach is likely a much better fit for massive funding of distributed infrastructure projects. Precisely how to facilitate expert input into these processes without overwhelming investors is an open question, and a critical one as we attempt to pair investor empowerment with systematic performance analysis.

The third change relates to ICT. Ronald Coase and Yochai Benkler have examined, from slightly different angles, how increased access to information changes the relative efficiency of different kinds of enterprises. The general trend is that in information-cheap environments, networks of small enterprises form efficient markets and provide services in aggregate. In information-expensive environments, larger organizations form to amortize the cost of understanding the environment and making decisions. The modern world is an almost quintessentially information-cheap environment, and service provision networks are ubiquitous in many areas, from franchising through to software ecologies like Linux. Enterprises like the Grameen Bank, Kiva and Akvo (http://akvo.org) all examine, from different perspectives, how financial architectures which make full use of ICT and provide services in the developing world at a scale and cost which makes sense. The conclusion is that the eventual form of a Global Village Development Bank might be a series of legal agreements and software protocols which create a similar business process to the World Bank, but as an interaction between tens of millions of people, providing capital, maintaining software systems, implementing infrastructure and development projects, objectively reporting on performance, monitoring risk and ensuring efficient allocation of capital in triple bottom line terms.

Such a global financial architecture might not be immediately recognizable as a development bank. However, the essential function of capital management clearly does not require a single monolithic command-and-control structure in a networked world. A networked approach to capital management – a distributed bank which understands and financed distributed infrastructure – is a plausible equilibrium state for financial affairs in an information-cheap environment.

Akvo is a charitable foundation which produces software to help small-scale water and sanitation infrastructure projects find funding. They epitomize several aspects of decentralization in their business process, including allowing investors to manage their own portfolio of projects to suit their risk and other preferences. They collaborate closely with a variety of partners to raise awareness, funds, to implement projects on the ground, and to report on the fundamental success or failure of individual projects within their whole portfolio of projects. The network-centric approach to infrastructure financing allows for buildups of local knowledge and expertise in financing specific technologies. However, Akvo only coordinates grant funding, not loans, and is focussed heavily on water and sanitation technology rather than operating as a more generalized capital market.

However, Akvo’s success is strong support for the notion that a decentralized infrastructure can be funded by decentralized finance. The network-centric nature of day-to-day operations (the team operates in four countries, and has partners in dozens more) is a further testament to the effects information-cheap environment on financial institution design.

Streamlining transaction costs has three parts: reducing the cost of making an offer, reducing the cost of making a decision, and reducing the cost of acting on an offer. All of these costs are amenable to reduction by ICT, and the perspective of Coase (for which he won a Nobel) was that changing the transaction cost landscape inevitably reshapes the enterprises which work most successfully in that environment.

Current approaches to infrastructure financing are failing the villages globally.

Financing distributed infrastructure using information and communications technologies to reduce transaction costs and manage risks has the potential to roll out infrastructure in critical areas – water, sanitation, energy, education, information – where conventional capital management approaches have failed. The distributed infrastructure market is several billion people. There is room at the bottom.

I’m spending the day with Vinay on March 31st to do a “Global Swadeshi Dialog interview with me and write up our plans.

Thought you all might to know that you can check out exactly where the land is using this website:
http://sigpac.mapa.es/fega/visor/

Once its loaded up, hit the little binoculars button at the top to open the search dialog box. Choose “Coordenadas” and enter these details in the appropriate fields:

X 584051
Y 4441660
Huso 30

That puts the map squarely on the 9m x 9m foundations we’ve already got

You can use the bar on the right to zoom in. Once you’re really close (i.e. the scale bar at the top is 200m) some check boxes appear under “Capas” on the left. Check the “Parcelas” box and you can see the boundaries of all the different parcels of land.

Our land is actually 3 plots. The one you’re centred one, plus the L-shaped one just above and the small one immediately below.

Enjoy!

Josef.

PS you can see some photo in the image galleries on the wiki:
http://wiki.uniteddiversity.com/tiki-galleries.php

(got a load more photo’s too – will upload them somewhere sensible eventually…)

Also, there is now a new European Cooperative Society legal structure that may useful since the land we’ve already got is in Spain. Need to investigate further though, and to find out A LOT more about Spanish legal structures.

Josef.

United Diversity members _agree_ to pool at least 1% of their income into a _shared pot_ and spend 1% of their time working on commons _goals_.

We _decide together_ how best to invest the _pooled money_ and individually _choose tasks_ to work on.

Together We Have Everything.

Do you agree? _Join now_.

The Plan…

Put time and money into a pot. Party.
Buy land. Party.
Tour. Party.
Build eco homes. Party.
Grow organic food. Party.
Generate renewable energy. Party.
Rent out affordable homes. Party.
Sell sustainable food and energy. Party.
Distribute 50% of surplus to members. Party.
Put 50% of surplus back into the pot. Party.
Repeat.

Join now!
Members simply agree to put at least £5 per month into the pot. And to party.

Here is how to put your money into the pot:

* By standing order or bank transfer into the following bank account (£5/month, £60/year, or more if you can afford it):

name: uniteddiversity LLP
sort code: 09-06-66
account: 40375992
reference: your email

* Online if you live outside the UK (or just know you wont get round to setting up the standing order) its probably easiest if you subscribe online:

£5 per month (about 7 eur or 10 usd)
Make payments with PayPal – it’s fast, free and secure!

£60 per year (about 85 eur or 120 usd)
Make payments with PayPal – it’s fast, free and secure!

* If you want to invest large sums of cash, have land to put in the pot, or simply can’t afford £5/month and/ or want more details about how to to invest your time, get in touch

Our members know how to party.

For more detail info about the Commons Creation project, read the We Have Land post, the original proposal and the presentation (.pdf 1.13Mb).

You may also like to read the archives of the (now defunct) Commons mailing list and United Diversity’s internal mailing list. And for more context check out some of our other ideas

As of Nov 13th 2007 there are 20 individual contributors to the Commons Creation Fund including representatives of The Synergy Project, Peace Not War, Sustainable Event and United Diversity.

We’ve got about £300 in the bank and 5 acres of land in Spain worth roughly £30k.

On 30/10/2007, osb AT defactodesign.com wrote:

Thanks for pushing this forward Josef,

Thanks Oli

Perhaps you could just outline briefly for me, and all the other
super-forward-thinking people on this list, exactly what this means?

I’ll do my best…

How will you formalise ‘ownership’ of the land in ‘the commons’

With my Dad transferring the land into my name (what is happening now) I am essentially becoming the trustee owner.

The plan is to transfer the ownership of the land from me to some collectively owned and controlled legal entity.

Once we’ve sorted a member agreement this could just be United Diversity LLP. Alternatively it could be an Industrial and Provident Society for Community Benefit, or a CIC.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I planning on meeting some people next month about LLP aggrement. IPS law is currently under review so it seems prudent to wait until that is over before trying to set up a IPS or CIC (because everything may change, notably how much it costs to register and limits on investment size etc.)

what sort of ’shares’ will we have in this land and any revenues
generated from it

The amount of ’shares’ each member has, and the proportion they receive of any revenue generated by it, is proportionate to how much “monies worth” they have invested in the “commons” relative to everyone else.

Members can invest cash (like we’re all doing), or other resources (e.g. land, like my Dad has done), or their labour (if we identify a need for particular skills we will advertise a “job” to which people will be able to apply and for which they will be at least part paid in “shares”).

Before and redistribution of revenues, 50% of any surplus revenue will simply be re-invested in the commons creation fund. The remaining 50% will be redistributed back to members proportionate to their investment relative to others, e.g. if you’ve invested £10k out of a total £100k invested, 10% of the revenue redistributed to members would go to you (because £10k is 10% of £100k).

I really need to create and maintain a nice table with who has but how much in and when so I can illustrate this more clearly. I shall endeavour to do so this week.

and any decisions that affect its use/future etc?

The idea is that we agree on and formalise (in our member agreement and/or our IPS/CIC rules) some basic principles about how our collective land is used. These are pretty much already implied – the land is to be used to provide sustainable and affordable food, shelter and energy. Will we seek people who are willing to rent out/lease the land at affordable rates in return for sustainably working the land.

Within the agreed co-operative and ecological land use framework, leaseholders should probably have as much autonomy as possible to get on with what they have agreed to do (so long as they keep paying their rent and can demonstrate that we are acting in line with our shared principles).

Like most co-ops, it will probably be necessary at some point to start electing a “board” or coordinating group how take care of day to day decisions, but part of their role will always be to encourage active member participation in all decision making.

Like you say, it seems like a no-brainer, but it seems important to
get this clear now since this is the first ‘proposal’ ever made to
invest from our common savings.

Does what I’ve written above make it clear enough for now?

I hope so

Thanks,

Josef.

We’ve currently got about £750 which aint bad.

Very interesting information! Thanks!

G’night