Ojai Group Aims To Create Local Currency
Thursday, July 30, 2009
By Ric Romero
OJAI, Calif. (KABC) — The small town of Ojai is considering making their own form of currency to help insulate local businesses from fiscal collapse.
Greenbacks. Ben Franklin’s. Our money has a lot of names, but it may soon be getting a new one — at least in the town of Ojai. The resort community is almost two hours north of Los Angeles.
It relies on tourists spending their cash as its main industry.
“There is no big factory. There is nothing that has people employed here. Ojai itself is the industry,” said Roberta Raye, Ojai business owner.
Lately the quaint town has been seeing fewer dollars. Community leaders have come up with an idea. They want to create their own town currency, and some businesses are all for it.
“It is an interesting concept. I’m very into exploring the opportunities,” said Catherine Nation, Ojai business owner.
Since March a team called the Ojai Community Group has been meeting to iron out the details of the new bucks.
“We look at this is a complimentary currency to help strengthen the local economy, which has its struggles in part because it is tied to the national economy,” said Tyler Suchman, community leader.
But only recently have they come up with a mock-up card and a working title for the new currency, it is called the Ojai Buck.
The Ojai Buck is going to be similar to a person’s debit card. They are planning to have three ATM machines in town. It is a way of keeping all of the money in the community.
“Anything we can do for our community to bring it together and keep all of us driving will be better for us all in the end,” said Susan Coulter, Ojai business owner.
A community currency is not something new. In 2006, western Massachusetts started their own money called, Berkshares. They now have over $2.5 million in circulation.
A few questions remain before Ojai Bucks go out to the public, like federal and state tax ramifications. But the plan is to roll out the new currency by the end of September.
(Copyright ©2009 KABC-TV/DT. All Rights Reserved.)
]]>The promise of interactivity between potential customers and display technology is only at its beginnings; however, advertisers are looking to enable a higher level of engagement with digital signage audiences by enabling a backchannel. Due to the simplicity of SMS messaging and the ubiquity of wireless handsets, 40% of new network digital display platform installations will leverage SMS for interactivity by 2012, according to MultiMedia Intelligence. This is up from approximately 5% in 2007.]]>
As you read a log, you have the curious sense of moving backward in time as you move forward in pages—the opposite of a book. As you piece together a narrative that was never intended as one, it seems—and is—more truthful. Logs, in this sense, were a form of human self-correction. They amended for hindsight, for the ways in which human beings order and tidy and construct the story of their lives as they look back on them. Logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending. So they have plot as well as dramatic irony—the reader will know the ending before the writer did.
Anyone who has blogged his thoughts for an extended time will recognize this world. We bloggers have scant opportunity to collect our thoughts, to wait until events have settled and a clear pattern emerges. We blog now—as news reaches us, as facts emerge. This is partly true for all journalism, which is, as its etymology suggests, daily writing, always subject to subsequent revision. And a good columnist will adjust position and judgment and even political loyalty over time, depending on events. But a blog is not so much daily writing as hourly writing. And with that level of timeliness, the provisionality of every word is even more pressing—and the risk of error or the thrill of prescience that much greater.]]>
Lesson: You must grow within your community, especially in the early days. Later, leaders will arise who can handle some of the day-to-day things and welcome new members. But in those first few days, weeks and months… you are the welcoming committee, janitor, house mom, judge, jury and banninator.]]>
