matslats.net

Tim (from Seldulac and Community Forge) is this week showing off http://french.communityforge.net at a mini festival of the SEL groups in France. The response, he reports, is pretty good, but like the English before them, they are balking at our proposed price of 5 Euros per person per year. Some are asking if they can have the first year free.

More and more groups are choosing Marketplace for Drupal not only because this is exactly the product for communities doing mutual credit, but because there is nothing else available that can help them. Well, the nearest 2 products are:

1. CES in South Africa is an advanced system which allows trading between groups. However they are running into trouble because they have NO INCOME. Their code is too messy to release as open source. Furthermore with CES your web site will live in South Africa and your community will have no autonomy.
2. Cyclos is being used with some success by Germans. However Cyclos only does one thing. If you want to use your site to manage a campaign, or vote, or blog, or social bookmarking, or use your own terminology or design your own interface, or add a column to a table, or integrate with delicious, or show tweets, or optimise for google, you're completely stuck. There are probably 20 people who know their way around Cylcos, but thousands who know their way around Drupal.

How much would they would like to pay? how much is reasonable? how much maintenance do they think a national IT infrastructure takes? How much do computer guys cost, How much is the competition is charging, and how much have they lost to inflation in the last 12 months because of their over-reliance on bank money?

* 5 Euros is the cost of a single credit card transaction when booking an online flight.
* It is a fraction of what banks charge for bouncing checks - overdrafts are free in our system
* It's a bottle of wine for some people who anticpated your needs, and worked for nothing for over a year to meet them
* If a hundred people each pay 5 Euros that would employ a professional for a single day. How many days will it save them?
* If 30 groups in France each pay 500 Euros a year, they couldn't even afford a 22 yr old graduate. If they want complementary currencies to flourish, they will need more than a graduate to keep things running. Software is a continuous investment. We gave the first year for free. Our prices for a hosted site are even cheaper than paying anybody else to set up Drupal for them. (Such a site would typically take a few days to set up)

Of course on the web, end users are not used to paying - they benefit from economies of scale and venture capital. however we have neither at the moment. Dare we ask the financial and governmental forces for support when they have a well documented history of opposiing such projects in Europe? If end users don't want to pay then they should find philanthropic alternatives, like the Robert Owen Community Trust are doing, and CamLETS. But even philanthropy capital is short term and subject to the whims of trustees; Cyclos is funded by an NGO and it meets the needs mainly of that NGO's specific projects. I have talked to several people who just gave up trying to adapt Cylcos for their own needs (although the Taushring system has had some success by collaborating closely). For a strong grass roots movement, everyone should have a stake.

On the subject of working for free, those days are over for us. We're too busy and too poor at the moment. We have produced a French Demo site. In the next three months I'm implementing for a grand new project in Belgium, and setting up Lausanne. Drupal solutions are under consideration by Auroville and New Zealand, and several groups in the US are starting to work with it. This is despite having no resources for communication and not even having released version 1.0. We don't need to seed the software any more, it has it's own momentum. We have a tonne of improvements planned and are bracing ourselves to meet all these needs but I regret that I am still doing totally irrelevant work to pay the bills.

For 5 Euros per person we will stop everything to set the French up with cutting edge sites and a support network (that means their IT guys will try to support each other). They will then have one year to find other sources of funding or work out a 'better' deal with us. After that, we will hand over the data in standard CSV files, and 99% of the software will still be open source.