Francois Rey

Francois Rey is a researcher on complementary currencies, based in Riviera (Provence), France

Update: Mr. Rey is no longer working on the project below.

Interests

"In 2003 I looked into the Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) phenomenon and realized why it was giving so much trouble to lawyers and economists: because it defines a way forward very much at odd with the premises of our present structures of ownership and economic exchange. This also meant that in order to fully unleash its potential new economics and new rules must be developed.

I then started to focus more on understanding gift economies. In particular one striking feature for me was the absence of money in the exchange. Despite the absence of such key element in our society, tremendous achievements can still be observed in the case of F/OSS. Therefore I started to look more into the role of money, what it is and what it can be.

For that purpose Bernard Lietaer's book (The Future of Money) was an eye opener. Since the time read it in the summer of 2003 there has not been a single day in which I have not thought about money, how it was failing in our present life, how it relates to our human nature, and how else it can be. With my new understanding it became difficult to stand still in the face of the absurdity of our economics. Deep within I knew there were better ways and I felt compelled to do something. Money may not be the cure for all ills, but it sure is something that has a lot of influence. As a tool, we can do much better.

After having contemplated the ideas around complementary currencies and open money I felt we were missing something in our vision. Therefore I flipped the coin and looked at the other side: exchanges. Then a whole new space opened up in which the vision of Open eXchange grew without hitting the wall of mystery and emotions surrounding money..." (http://www.thetransitioner.org/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=Fran%C3%A7ois%20Rey)

Open eXchange Project

Open eXchange (OX) is the online equivalent of markets found in every village, town, or cities, except it does not carry the same limitations. At the very least it will provide a tactical solution to the need of facilitating and organizing economic exchanges within a community, or for one-off needs (e.g. disaster aid, hay shortage). However the openness of the platform and its rapid adoption can potentially have a major impact on the way society organizes itself, how we connect to each other, how we cooperate and share our resources.

The creation of an infrastructure such as Open eXchange will make every individual a market operator and participant, thus distributing the role of traditional market places and circuits that organize economic exchanges: local markets, online markets, market exchange institutions, etc.

More importantly, OX adds an application layer to the commons of online tools (identity, reputation, ontology, etc.) that directly empowers individuals to self organize and connect in ways previously unthinkable: mutual insurance without centralized structures geared towards profit, aggregation and bundling of goods and services into higher level value-added services and goods, virtual organizations and distributed enterprises with no centralized command and control structure, holoptical tools that can facilitate collective responsibility towards society and the environment (e.g. a better adequacy between demand and production since both can be globally visible), community supported production (an extension of the Community Supported Agriculture concept), etc.