Ghost Stories

The story from an August 1969 Yankee this morning was entitled Spirit Capital of the Universe which apparently 100 or so years ago was Chittenden, Vermont. The story is about William & Horatio Eddy. The Wikipedia article gives the gist about the facts in the article, but the "neutral tone" that Wikipedia misses some of the fun of the magazine article. Yankee is a good source for ghost stories and I remember as a boy seeking them out to read. Indeed the illustrations to the article I picked up today seem familiar to me now.

I have no idea what to make of ghosts and find it rather convenient not to be much bothered by them. Over the years my sisters' and brothers' children have come to visit here in the summers. Now most of them are adults. A few years back I heard that while they enjoyed these visits they also often found them terrifying. Then a while back I mentioned this to one of my sisters who in turned wondered why I should be surprised; afterall, "You're the one who told them all those ghost stories." I hadn't the faintest idea what she was talking about and let her know that. She just rolled her eyes. And another time I had the same discussion with my niece. No ghost stories huh? "What about the one... and another one, and another one?" Well, this time there was no denying those were my stories and I had told them after all.

New England surely has no monopoly on ghost stories, but it's no slouch as a region when it comes to them either. I've always been interested in the number of old buildings around that were Spiritualist Churches. And of course New England is quite famous for witches. I couldn't imagine that I'd been the source of so much terror to my darling nieces and nephews growing up. I feel quite sure I hadn't meant to terrify them. But that my now adult niece could recite so easily from memory the the stories I'd told busted my pretences completely. So when the story about Governor Palin and the witch hunting Pastor Muthee made the rounds it was hard for me to get into high dudgeon about it. We all compartmentalize what we think about and it would seem we put ghost stories way back in our mental closets. Sometimes it's a bit embarrassing to get them out and sometimes we worry about the cold water that might get poured over them. But still we hardly ever really discard them; rather store them way back in our mental closets until we might use them once more.

I have no ideas how to connect ghost stories with a couple of links to share, so I won't even try. Emeka Okafor at Timbuktu Chronicles links to a great article about open source hardware in Wired. Phil Jones linked to SomeRightsReserved a site where designers post blueprints for making things. Both of these developments may be on the edge or periphery of things right now, but I strongly suspect they'll make it to the middle before too long.

Okafor makes the point that open source hardware could be a real boon to African manufacturing culture. That's a good point, but also as the reality of job loss begins to settle in here in the rich countries, many smart people are going to be scrambling to make some income. We're accustomed to talking about outsourcing here in the USA, but the discussion of social media and how it might impact our making a living is just beginning. I said a couple of links, but I'll make it three. Susan Mernit posted a great post Susan sez: Social media must haves for the recently laid off. I liked it because while I frequent all sorts of social media online, I'm really quite stupid and haphazard about it. Her straight forward post suggested to me ways I could be smarter about it. That may be wishful thinking on my part,still it's a great primer on the subject.

Naturally there are great differences and distances between people in developed economies and in developing economies. But there are fundamental challenges we all face and new tools and models of work are available to people all over.

Grace Ayaa--oh here's a fourth link--posted a great post from Kampala A little light in the shadows about her visit to learn more about the Kampala Junior Team. I was so moved by the post. First of all because Madam Ayaa does so much on behalf of her fellow Ugandans and I'm so happy to see her blogging to tell her stories. Oh and what a great story teller she is! And secondly the idea I've been mulling about the last few days is how to make some money to help support the Kampala Junior Team. Her post encourages me not to give up on that. I need encouragement and I think others do to. I'm beginning to see how these social Web tools can make a big difference here and abroad. Together we can create something good in small increments.

The Wired article about open source hardware suggests that this sort of distributed effort can actually speed development. But it's going to mean we'll have to rethink a few things.

Bazungu Bucks Aren't Heavy

In the comments Prettyobvious asks: And exactly how many Bazungu Bucks can I get for 363 tons of $100 bills?

One hour of your time is equal to one Bazungu Buck. Since the 363 tons of $100 bills represents about four billion dollars, one dollar exchange per Bazungu Buck would make for an honest days work of five hundred million people. A more generous $8 per hour wage would mean that 363 tons of $100 bills could be exchanged for five hundred million hours of work.

Bazungu Bucks, however are not convertible to real money, they are a form of Time Dollar. Time dollars are not the only kind of alternative currency. There are a wide array of alternative currencies. One model is LETS or Local Exchange Trading Systems. Phil at Blahsploitation linked to a recent BBC article about a local currency, the Urstomtaler used in Magdeburg Germany. I was surprised to learn in the article that there are 16 regional currencies in Germany. The surprise comes because such currencies are officially illegal. Time dollars in the USA have legal precedents which suggest their legality, but perhaps the best known alternative currency in the USA, Ithaca Hours bear more resemblance to the local currency of the Urstomtaler than Time Dollars. The BBC article explains the Bundesbank view the regional currencies as in a "grey area" and a form of social money. Ithaca Hours also fall into a gray area, but the scheme has been left alone so far as I can tell.

I printed about 100 Bazungu Bucks, and I've tried giving them away and still have plenty left. I think the difficulty in spreading them around isn't just people can't imagine what a Bazungu Buck is good for, I think it's because they understand the idea of an hour in service to African people. It's not that they don't want to serve so much as not knowing what to do. So the currency has built into it an unintended "guilty feeling" factor, a very serious problem. I think I'd have much better luck saying: "Do this that and the other and I'll give you X number of Bazungu Bucks." Alas, I'm not organized enough, so Bazungu Bucks are stalled.

Nonetheless, social money is a sticky idea, and I'm sure we'll see various systems and instruments tried in the future. One quite handy Web site is BillMonk. I'll admit to not using it and that has to do with my lack of friends. It's a great idea, and the developers are right, I think, in their expectation that social money will become rather large business.

I don't recall where I first saw the link to a YouTube video made by Michael Wesch but I do know that Christian Long posted it in a post, A Delightful Re-Think and encourage you to follow the link to his blog, think:lab to watch it and then look around Christian's blog. Education is something we all care about and think:lab never ceases to delight and inform. One of the great points in Wesch's video is: The Web is linking people. Traditional money links people well in some ways but fails to connect in other important ways and these failings are made more obvious by the social Web.

Perhaps money is exactly the wrong sort of metaphor needed for peer production. But one reason alternative money schemes emerge is we're used to doing things with money. It's the intersection of peer-production and traditional money that's so interesting. It's a subset of social entrepreneurship and business that's changing our ideas about money and business. These surely are "interesting times" and the need for inventiveness has never been greater. A bedrock observation of conventional economics is: "People respond to incentives." Social money fits neatly with my ideas about incentives, so the various experiments along this vein seem worth paying attention to.