Generalised Merits for Respect and Social Equality
= "our aim is to try and evaluate various anti-rival compensation and governance structures".
URL = https://gmerits.eu/
Description
1.
"Peer-to-peer technologies, such as Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs, including blockchains) are providing completely new opportunities to organise our society. However, technologies are just enablers. We must set a direction for these developments. We must proactively conduct large scale experiments with alternative economic structures. The future of our society must rely not solely on ideologies, but on solid experiments and data.
Our Generalised Merits (GMeRitS) endeavour aims to tackle this huge predicament by taking baby steps towards wide scale experiments with alternative economic structures. In particular, our aim is to try and evaluate various anti-rival compensation and governance structures."
2. The GMeRitS vision
"Money and debt, as we know them today, are arguably among the most important social innovations within the last 5000 years. According to some scholars, those innovations have even shaped the way we perceive ourselves as individuals and how we relate to each other. The innovation in these domains has not stopped: on the contrary, it is accelerating with a rapid pace.
There is early but growing evidence that the current forms of ownership and payment are insufficient to efficiently clear new kinds of markets our society is increasingly based on, especially those related with information and data. We are evidencing structural market failures, evidenced by the birth of the giant data monopolies and the accumulation of “knowledge silos.”
Industrial revolution continues, and DLTs are one of its latest manifestations. DLTs may be considered as the most potential accounting innovation since the 15th century, when double entry bookkeeping became commonplace. However, DLTs are not economic solutions themselves. Although DLTs enable governance decentralisation, tamper proofness, censor-resistance and resilience, the technology is still free to be exploited almost to whatever ideological and political purpose one wants.
We surmise that these themes – including societal pressures and technological possibilities – will lead to a very fundamental change in the way we perceive the economy and even ourselves. Careful institutional experiments and design is needed to set a direction for these developments. GMeRitS is carrying out these experiments."
Projects
Mesensei
.. "is a community empowerment framework. It’s software engine is used by communities such as Tapiola High School (Finland), Dare to Learn Festival of Rethinking Learning (Finland), The Children and Youth Foundation Finland, Finnish Institute of Public Management, and University of Cambridge (UK) to build their own community platforms. A specifically interesting case is the Village of Giampilieri (Sicily, Italy), where Mesensei works with the villagers to create an app to bring the village out of isolation and save lives in the future. Primarily, the app helps the community to organise food festivals, but it also doubles as an early warning system about an imminent land slide and automates the mobilisation of evacuation volunteers." (https://gmerits.eu/cases/)
REC (REC Real Economy Currency in Besos - Barcelona)
.. "is a social currency created as a method for channelling public expenditure towards the local economy: 533 families that live in the Besòs area of Barcelona spend 25% of the MIS (Municipal Inclusion Support) payment using RECs in local, independently managed businesses."
As a result, the local multiplier effect of the public spending has increased by 54% within the first year, coproducing an additional public policy in supporting the local economy." (https://gmerits.eu/cases/)
Merits - Milan
.. "is a Milan (Italy) -originated platform created to facilitate the transition to a sustainable economy, by assisting and rewarding individual and collective behaviours that generate sustainable and shared prosperity. Society needs people and organisations to invest in little, daily acts of generosity, courage and care for people and nature.
Merits helps people to realise that they are not alone. It rewards their positive behaviour with digital tokens that, according to each specific project, can be used to buy qualified services or goods from small local business or to pay fees of public services or taxes.
Merits has already implemented and ended a first experimental project of the Municipality of Milan, Department of Social Policies, rewarding with merits tokens a number of refugees volunteering to clean and take care of the public green of a neighbourhood of Milan." (https://gmerits.eu/cases/)