There's a small group of passionate individuals planning a new community currency for Ottawa. The system (named Ottawa Community Currency Network) will target individuals and businesses and aims to promote trade without the use of cash. We're currently looking at various technology options to use and one of the contenders is Drupal (v6), and specifically http://www.CommunityForge.net / CForge, which uses the mutual_credit module. This code is currently maintained by a single individual, Matthew Slater.
Our goal is to get a prototype website up quickly with the basic functionality of a mutual credit trading system and looking like this HTML mockup: http://www.ottawaccn.org. I'm in the midst of doing that now.
Our future goal is to expand the functionality to include mobile payment, notifications by SMS, geo-tagged information to support "real-life" markets, multilingual support and more - eventually even tie-in with other community currency systems. Interested in helping out?
Many of our goals overlap with those of Matthew and CForge. I'm hoping there are some Drupal developers in the area who would like to contribute some time and expertise to this local initiative. (mostly to advance our website but also potentially to contribute back to CForge). It's an opportunity to build local economic resilience at a time of job loss and uncertainty.
We're also focusing on a draft business plan and marketing plan, understanding that the technology side is only one aspect and much pavement pounding is to be done.
For more info on why this system is needed and what problems it aims to help alleviate, see the links on the left site of this site: http://www.ces.org.za/.
Post here if you're at all interested or even if you're just curious. I'd be happy to answer any questions.
Thanks!
Ron Rancourt (dregster)
Member of Transition Ottawa