Hi all
When I posted here just a few days ago, I was thinking in the lines of building af personal finance module for OpenAcs, because I need some of the functionality myself.
However, Fred's posting got me thinking that there could also be a need for a general accounting module. Looking around the net, I found that there where many projects going on currently, and we might be able to integrate some functionality with these.
However, as often happens on the net, I began surfing around, and happend to come by http://www.transaction.net/. Turns out, that there is many communities, where people are creating their own money, which facilitate cooperation and sharing work. Our community relies exclusively on the good will and spare time of the members, as well some free capital in the form of the software that Phillip Greenspun contributed ( and AOL ).
However, this may not be enough for all projects, and therefore it could be extremely relevant for the community members to buy services of each other. However, this would not have to be in the form of actually paing $ but it could be in the form of exchanging a community currency.
Going back to the communities around the world, that are using these forms of alternative currencies, they are currently functioning by people phoning in there trades to a central phone number ! Wouldn't it not be much more practical to view accounts, register trades etc. over the internet ?
I'm not aware that such a model currently exists for the openacs system ( or anyware else for that matter ), and I think it would be better to try and build such new functionality, rather than trying to replicate software ( i.e. business account system ), that may already exist plenty of. Anyway, the general functionality would be easily converted into more traditional forms of an accounting system, which would always have had to be customized anyway.
Let me here your thoughts on this turn of events. I will try to write up a paper outlining the functionality in more details, for the people who are unfamiliar with economics.
