Kilkenny and the Quid: Fertile grounds

This week, very promising meetings between The Liquidity Network initiators and local authorities as well as the public in Kilkenny, Ireland, took place.

The situation in Ireland due to the financial crisis is worsening. Local councils are forced to cut back expenses, and might be pushed to more cuts in the next months.

Out of these conditions, local authorities develop an interest in being able to still pay wages to their employees. Scenarios, in which they pay them wages partly in Euro and partly in alternative currencies, are being discussed.

The meeting with the local government of Kilkenny has been very fruitful. They are very interested in supporting the adoption of the quid in their area. For this to happen, approval from the Minister of the Environment needs to be sought first. This will be our next step. If we get approval, the introduction of the quid alternative currency comes much closer to realisation.

There have been also voices for the issuing of paper notes of quids. Initially, this was not included in our draft, but as it has been requested, we don’t see any major problems in running the mainly electronic quid system alongside a limited amount of paper bills.

On a public meeting, Kilkenny citizens have expressed interest and acceptance to an alternative currency, and individuals offering collaboration and leadership have already emerged.

Both the local government as well as the public are very supportive of the quid system. This offers for The Liquidity Network an ideal situation: support as well from bottom-up as from top-down. There could be no better fertile ground for the system.

A next meeting is scheduled for September; until then, we want to get green light from the Ministry, a crucial step. That meeting will flesh out in more details how the quid (or however Kilkenny wants to name its local currency) introduction could work, and possibly be able to demonstrate as much as possible.

So this spurs the developer team on making progress for the simulation. A vertical integration of software components using the simulation environment SimPy took place; for now it is only a very simple simulation of people getting quids into accounts. In subsequent sprints, we are going to refine the simulation, continuously adding functionality.