Background

A LETS (Local Exchange Trading Scheme) is a system whereby people in a particular area can trade goods and services without money. It extends the concept of barter by having a 'local currency'. I can do someone's gardening one day, and someone else will babysit for me a couple of weeks later.

It's not like money, because members don't earn or pay interest, it is worthless outside one area, and most importantly, because the system is under the control of the people that use it. It's good for the local community because people who are excluded from the conventional economy (i.e., unable to get a job) can easily take part. It keeps value in a local economy. Through the scheme, members get to meet people that they wouldn't in the normal course of things (if you like buzzwords you can call this 'community building').

My LETS is in Edinburgh.

Running the LETS

To run the LETS you need to:

• keep track of the members (where they live, phone nos. etc.)
  
• allow them to advertise what they want to buy, and what they are offering to sell
  
• process transactions (the actual buying and selling is usually done by  cheques)

At the moment this work is done only by a few people. The obvious disadvantage is that the information is concentrated in a few places; this makes it very hard to share the work, and increases the possibility of information loss.

Information Flow

To anyone with an IT background, the answer leaps out: put all this info on the net, in a database with a web front-end. This would allow individual members to do a lot of their own admin. The rest of the admin work can be shared by a group, rather than done by one person.

It is not surprising that this has already been tried. So what's the point in starting again?

Previous projects were limited in numerous ways.

• they simply weren't finished, and insufficiently documented to be worth continuing
  
• they didn't handle any personal information (for legal reasons)
  
• required manual configuration for routine tasks
  

I'm hoping that by taking a run at the task, and treating it as I would any other consultancy job, I can reinvent the wheel in a suitably impressive manner. I'm already studying and learning from previous wheels, to this end.

To increase the amount of time I can spend on this, I am hoping to get funding from a charity or the government.

Next time: choosing technologies, proprietary competition, requirements.