Matthew Slater
* Community currency engineer, a.k.a. matslats
URL = https://matslats.net/ (his own web site)
Bio
Born 1972, Birmingham, UK. Teenage years in Cornwall. After my theology degree I allowed myself to be confused, depressed, experimenting with drugs, travelling, failed teacher training and even married. Towards the end of that decade I started computing, specifically Macromedia Director and made a meagre living from my bedroom making online arcade games.
I turned 30 during a year in India and set out to use my computing skills to make the world a better place. Taking career advice I consciously decided to become an expert in something, but what? Learning PHP I volunteered then worked for [Shelter Centre](https://sheltercentre.org) for 3 years during which time it relocated from Cambridge to Geneva. Around the time of the Failure of Bear Stearns in 2008 I set out on my own as a community currency engineer providing 'lifeboat platforms', became nomadic and lived 'in the gift' to save money. Met everyone in that field, attended many conferences, tried many ecovillages.
In 2018 I accepted that the humanity was vanishingly unlikely to evade a climate, energy and biodiversity collapse. I settled down with a partner, moving to South Italy where I now reside, combining my previous work in designing and implementing small scale monetary systems with new goals of living more resiliently and closer to nature.
Work
In 2003 I developed a php application for my local LETS, but without sufficient engagement on their part and it was never deployed. I took it to LETS link UK where, despite much more work being done on it, it was never deployed. But in Shelter Centre I discovered Content Management Systems (specifically Drupal) and realised that this was a great approach for building highly configurable web sites which diverse community currency groups could manage themselves, while I provided a distribution which included an accounting module. So Community Forge was founded with the Chairman of the Geneva LETS, Tim Jenkin. That org continues to this day hosting my Hamlets Drupal distribution for free for 2-300 mostly francophone groups.
Sybille_Saint_Girons and I developed the trading floor game, a fun 2 hour workshop session to help participants think about the nature of money as a medium of exchange and the effects of monetary policy on the marketplace and the soul.
Always looking for new possible use-cases, I spent time in the Global Ecovillage Network helping with their website for a while and surveying the ecovillage economy. I didn't find a context for a new accounting system either within or between the larger ecovillages.
“My theology degree did not equip me to live in this world. […] I re-started my career aged 31 from scratch, learning php and using it to support a local nonprofit, Shelter Centre. […] In 2008 I turned my attention to local money systems and to building really useful community accounting software so that communities could easily design and run their own economies in the event of a more serious economic calamity. That was when Tim Anderson and I co-founded Community Forge, to help the LETS movement upgrade and manage its software. […] I'm living mostly in the gift, currently nomadic, getting to know and connect people as many people in the movement as possible by staying with them.[…] I'm focusing less on building software and more on being open to opportunities that present themselves. In that spirit, I've co-created the trading floor game with Sybille Saint Girons, and a co-written a MOOC with Prof Jem Bendell. In 2016 I co-authored the Credit Commons white paper with CES creator Tim Jenkin, describing a money system for the solidarity economy.”
— https://matslats.net/about-matslats
More Information
Pages on This Wiki
- Matthew Slater on Complementary Currencies and Mutual Credit
- Matthew Slater and Ross Gentleman on the Credit Commons
- Matthew Slater and Dil Green on the Credit Commons Protocol
- Art Brock, Michael Linton, Michel Bauwens, and Matthew Slater on Currencies and the Credit Commons
- Money as a Commons
- Credit Commons Protocol
- Protocols as Organizational Forms
- Credit Commons Open Protocol and Accounting System for Interoperable Local Currencies
- Community Forge
- Money and Society MOOC
- Collaborative Credit Systems
- Economics of Ecovillages
- Integral Technology
- Solidarity Economy Networks
- Permaculturing Finance
- Open Protocols
- Ecovillage Economics