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3. If you had to think of an offline version of LETSplay, how would you conceive it?

LETSplay was originally designed for offline application. In 1986, Vancouver hosted EXPO '86. For several months many thousands of people spent days wandering in a huge fairground and waiting in line-ups at the popular pavilions. Our plan was to sell a daily broadsheet of current EXPO information with the LETSplay game on the reverse and perhaps have hundreds if not thousands of players every day.  However, we couldn't raise the financing.

Other formats we drafted at that time included a newspaper insert, a radio broadcast game with phone-in play, and a version suitable for an office workspace.


4. The game requires a minimum number of users/players to work and be more entertaining, which is in itself a good reflection of the CC idea and other economy models. How large is the LETSplay user community, and what is its approximate growth rate?

As of 2007, nil and nil.  In a few weeks, an open money software release will be supported by a parallel reintroduction of the LETSplay game, and growth rates will be (potentially) exponential.

A group game, on-line or face-to-face, is possible with 6 players, but begins to work properly with 10-12 or more playing at more or less the same rate. An individual can join a game but will be necessarily playing at the rate of the majority of players.


5. Apart from LETSplay, you have worked for almost 2 decades on the CC concept in different environments and contexts (the Japan experience, the smart cards in Canada, Cybercredits, and probably others we don't know about). Which of these proved to be more effective when trying to communicate and spread CC? Why?

Actually, none have (yet) achieved much that merits comparison -as the progress from 1983 to this date clearly shows. The score remains: dominant paradigm 100% - open money 0%. No significant armour has yet been pierced, all break-throughs have been brief and self-healing.

Thomas Kuhn, in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", describes very well the problems of paradigm shift that have made it difficult for us to be persistently successful either in our home community -where local ideas are not trusted- or in others -where they wonder why we aren't more successful in our home territory.

However, we think the imminent release of open money ccsp (community currencies service provider) software will enable this idea to reach into the long tail of the internet community as never before.


6. Even though you obviously believe in it, do you conceive Community Currency as an utopia (a eutopia, if you want) or rather as a perfectly viable short-term reality (generalized, not based on relatively small communities)?

In my view the present global economic situation is a temporary dystopia -society's dependence on money as a thing of value in itself (therefore commodity in limited issue) and the almost total exclusion of all other forms is absurd, and has been for decades, arguably for centuries. Conventional money perfectly reflects and perpetuates the FUD -fear / uncertainty / doubt- that has run the world for so long. 

It's not even about the form of that money -legal tender does what it does very well indeed, and will do for some time to come. Our oversight is not seeing how other forms of money are possible, and acting accordingly.

Open money circulates and returns, while conventional money doesn't. These are not selective conditions, they come with the form and function of the two types. When conventional money is spent, it's gone; spend open money and it stays around.

So we see no good reason why any person or any organization would avoid the use of open money in addition to their current use of conventional money.

Open money fits all. Viability is perfect.


7. Atomisation on a large scale (such as in the Debian 'apt' packaging system) has allowed large software projects to employ an amazing degree of decentralised, collaborative and incremental development. But what other kinds of knowledge can be atomised,and how? How money can be atomised?

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