Community ... via Facebook
Glenbrook Neighborhood Association

Someone has put the activities of the Glenbrook Neighborhood Association on a Facebook page

Go to the Facebook page

This is very positive and can serve as a good way to motivate people to become engaged and to some extent stay engaged.

According to Catherine Austin Fitts, I learned that there are some 3,200 counties in the United States, and within these counties there are several communities or neighborhoods. There are likely to be more than 30,000 communities or neighborhoods in the United States, and the challenge is to have both the local motivation and the aggregation of initiatives that together give a picture of performance.

Artificial intelligence, big data mining, and such techniques can be helpful, but they are apt to lose a lot in the process of manipulating the data. I argue therefore for some way for 'good' activities to be 'valued' even though they are not 'traded'.

There is no question in my mind that a 'market' is a better way to establish a 'price' than to have it done by a government bureaucrat. I have spent upwards of 30 years watching economic disaster brought about by the inability of government bureaucrats to get a 'price' right.

On the other hand I have experience of cost accounting in the corporate world, and I am confident that in well managed companies there is deep knowledge about the cost of most everything. This knowledge of cost is the starting point for the development of strategy about price, and from there, the revenue and profit projections.

I argue that the same approach to value can be used with TrueValueMetrics so that society has some quantification of the 'value' associated with all the 'good' things that are in the community (state) and get done (transacted) in the community.

I do not believe that 'value' should be expressed in money units ... that is dollars in the USA ... but quantified in separate value units. Over time, value units are likely to retain their value far better than the money units that we have become accustomed to using. There was a time when a cup of coffee was 5 cents ... now it is 100 or 200 or more. The cup of coffee has not changed very much, but it would appear that the dollar has.

With respect to Glenbrook Community Association it would be interesting ... and maybe very useful ... to make some cost and value estimates.

• Estimate how much they would have had to pay to get the work done that has resulted in the beautification of their community. My guess is that a professional contractor would have wanted (say) $50,000 to do the work.
• Estimate how many hours of volunteer work went into getting the beautification results ... assume this added up to (say) 500 volunteer hours
• Estimate how much got spent (but not reimbursed) for materials used to get the beautification results ... assume this came to (say) $5,000

• one can say that the beautification improved the neighborhood by the commercial price of the work ... that is $50,000.
• one can say that the labor cost was 500 * (a wage rate ... say $20/hour) = $10,000
• one can say that the material cost is ... $5,000

A further step is to get some data about the quantities of beautification improvement that were done. Say:

• 10,000 square feet of area cleanup ... what is the time and material per 100 square feet?
• 1,000 planters planted ... what is the time and material per planter?
• etc.

When these data are pulled together the value proposition for this effort can start to get quantified.

But best of all ... volunteers who really need some 'buying power' can be rewarded with local complementary currency that can be used locally to buy goods and services that are needed by these volunteers.

As long as the amount of complementary currency 'issued' does not exceed the amount of the valuadd in the community, the complementary currency initiative will be value wealth positive and the currency worth its weight in value.