Geoff Chesshire

I am Canadian by birth (1958), British by birthright (through my parents) and American by naturalization. I was born and lived on Vancouver Island the first half of my life (that makes at least four of us from the Island here on TheTransitioner). I have lived in the U.S. ever since.

After working for fifteen years in applied mathematics (PhD 1986 Caltech) at various resesearch laboratories, I made a career change to work mainly with young people in their social communities. In 2000, I helped to found PartySmart, the New Mexico Chapter of DanceSafe. Our mission is youth empowerment for community health. In support of this mission, I have been working on ways to recognize and validate the contributions of young people to their communities. My latest project reconnects my former and present careers, and turns my concern for our collective future into constructive action in the present.

I have built an online system called Regenerosity (please try it out at PartySmart.org/vcsh). Its byline is “Thanking ... not Banking.” It places accounting systems for reputation, gift economy, time and local exchange side-by-side on a level playing field. It supports any number of communities that may overlap in arbitrary ways. The exchange side uses many ideas from LETS, providing each community with two local currencies, one based on time and the other based on money, plus community import/export accounting in national currency. The gift side honors all other kinds of contribution to community, such as voluntarism, philanthropy, civic & social engagement, home & family time, and gift among peers, businesses & the community as a whole.

Both gift and local exchange generate social capital in equal measure for both parties and for each community in which they both participate. Social capital is accounted as time invested in building and maintaining the relationships that form the community networks. This may be used individually as a reputation system and collectively as a measure of community effectiveness. Any mutually-beneficial interaction between two parties contributes social capital equally to all of the communities they participate in together. However, each community may apply a different depreciation rate to the contributed social capital, based on the kinds of relationships that the community represents.

In addition to accounting for social capital (a community commons), Regenerosity can account for beneficial and/or detrimental impacts on any set of commons recognized by each community, recorded as side effects to any transaction. Examples might be natural commons (air, water, soil, energy, etc.), man-made commons (community-based projects, transportation, communication networks, etc.), social commons (educational, governmental, health-care systems, etc.). Impacts on the commons are recorded as changes in the capacity of the commons to support life-worth-living, in units of person-hours. Each commons may apply a different depreciation rate to these impacts, based on its inherent rate of decay or recovery.

Account summaries and graphical network analysis tools provide insight into the standing of each participant within each community, community impacts on each of the commons, connectivity and strength of the community networks, and measures of the local economy versus import/export. The online representation of each community can be customized using a wiki interface. Custom interfaces have been implemented for special-purpose communties, such as online games. As Regenerosity is a “thanking system ... not a banking system,” it provides features to encourage and facilitate the writing of thankyou notes as an integral part of the accounting (for each transaction and for each relationship).

Regenerosity implements a global namespace of servers, registries, communities and accounts, and functions as a peer-to-peer network of web-servers communicating securely. All management, processing, storage and backup of accounts, transaction flows, and associated text may be distributed across the network. Regenerosity is implemented using PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, SSL, XML (and XML packages XML-RPC, RDF/OWL, SVG).

I look forward to opportunities for collaboration with all of you. Please click here to send me a message.