CCLite is an open source application for managing community currencies. Hugh Barnard just released 0.9.0.

I thought it would be interesting to ask him a few questions.

What is CCLite?

Software for mutual social currencies, therefore LETS style currencies but fairly adaptable to other models.

When did you start work on it originally?

About 2005 but it’s off/on depending on the rest of my life

How did you get into the Community Currency world?

Encyclopedia of Social Inventions which opened my eyes to other ways of doing currencies. Then I met Michael Linton in about 2005 and started cclite.

How many currencies do you estimate are currently using it?

10 that I know about, it’s GPL so I don’t really know my users.

Is it mainly used in the UK or elsewhere as well?

Downloaded from everywhere but that doesn’t, of course, imply use. That’s why I’ve been machine translating foreign language templates recently. Thought I’d give nonenglish use a head start.

What kind of currencies are supported?

Good question, mutual social certainly but I ‘think’ [because it has cash facilities and system accounts, for example] that it can be used for something more broadly

Tell us about a particular success story?

All the current user groups are pretty small.

Tell us a bit about the UK community currency world

Again this is a mixed story because there are timebanks [which I don't consider to be genuine attempts at currency], backed ‘conventional’ local [again not really currency because it's backed by national currency, so it's an extension], LETS [local currency but not very successful] all small scale and a certain amount of internal division between the actors. There must be other things going on that I don’t know about too..

How is the uptake of Community Currencies doing in the UK?

Can’t answer, need an academic like UEA’s Dr. Gil Seyfang for example, one of the problems is fragmentary knowledge and limited ‘conversation’

In light of the Euro crisis, how do you see the future of Community Currencies in the UK

Good, especially as there are big regio systems in Germany, but we ‘believers’ have to carry on anyway…stupid eh?

Is there anything in particularly unique that we should know about CCLite?

There are bits of design in cclite that are probably ‘unusual’:

• a trading group can have multiple currencies in parallel, something I believe in and discussed with Michael Linton.
• a trading group can transfer value to another trading group using the same [semantics rather simple] currency. this is very controversial in community currency world though. It’s one reason why cclite had SOAP and now REST built in. Also my interest in MQ etc. is centered here.
• because of the SOAP and REST, cclite aims to be part of an ‘ecology’ rather than a stand-alone, a lot of the current work points in that direction
• I [we] are doing quite a lot of SMS work because [obviously] of the success in Africa and the need for ‘network’ that is not banking-owned.