TEDXLEEDS2012: ALTERNATIVE MONEY CONFERENCE

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V15 2012 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 15, Number 10, March 4, 2012, Article 20

I heard about this event too late for last week's issue. On February 29th there was an event in Leeds, England focused on alternative currencies with speakers on topics such as Community Currencies and the Brixton Pound, Complimentary Currency Systems, Time Banks, and the Zero Rupee Note. -Editor

At TEDxLeeds2012, we'll be showcasing the most interesting ideas about the future of money and promise that any stories of stockbrokers, building societies, accountants, call centres or bankers will be challenging and provocative!

Humanity has begun to see money as a natural force - like air or gravity - speaking of "market forces" as if they exist outside human agency, yet the constructs and cultures of money are entirely of human invention...and consequently anything we invent, we can innovate and enhance. Wall Street's "unnovation" of money - thousands of little algorithms... volatile, unpredictable, and impossible for humans to comprehend - brought us a global financial singularity, which still threatens to form a black hole...

However, there are others that are innovating new futures for money - as tools for localism, as exchanges for creative skills and as anti-corruption mechanisms. We're going to take you on a tour of people currently remixing the meaning of money. Leeds is a city of inventors and TEDxLeeds will return Leeds to its role as an innovator of money.

But this won't be simply be about talking heads. TEDxLeeds is about activism, and we intend to demonstrate some of the ideas being discussed...

a basic clothes swap
the creation of a local currency (a Leeds Pound? the Holbuck? the Jimmy? the Loiner? the Ludos?) which will exist for just the evening of 29th February!

Here's an article from the Guardian about the banknotes issued in conjunction with the conference. -Editor

Here's joyful news for all children of Leeds: we are about to get our very own banknotes.

Not for long admittedly, but on Wednesday at the city's noble Corn Exchange you will be able to use the pink 3 Ludo and blue 5 Ludo notes within a closed economy at a conference on the future of money.

Tired of the long-standing pound versus euro debate, the organisers of TEDxLeeds, a homely Leodiensian version of global blue-sky thinking conferences in California on 'Ideas worth spreading', have printed a stack of Ludos. The work of local freelance web designer Tom Morgan, they were named by Emma Bearman of the city's excellent CultureVulture blog.

The big pink man on the 3 Ludo is Matthew Murray, an engineer on a level with James Watt who was commercially out-manoeuvred by the latter. One of the great mysteries of my life is why my great-grandfather Richard, an exuberant entrepreneur who claimed to have invented a smokeless chimney, commissioned the statue of Watt which stands in City Square.

THE BOOK BAZARRE

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