Civic IT

As a kid growing up in PMB, I saw the Mayor. From my position about 20 paces from the dignitary, all I could see was his gold chain. To be candid, at the first glint of gold, I thought he had egg on his tie, but then, seeing the size of the mayoral chain, it had the desired effect. I thought “Wow. What a lot of expensive gold”. I think that Mayor was named Downes. Wally Downes, maybe.

My father was a civil servant. Mayor Downes was a business person. Neither occupation fawns over the other. In time, my dad let slip the word “blockhead”, about a mayor, I do not recall whom. The lesson was: my father did not automatically khombisa nhlonipho to mayors.

Anyway, in my musings about the mayoral chain and “blockhead”, my mind (like “Word Association Football”) comes up with ‘blockchain’, and that is my subject. It is simply:

Accuracy

Famous money authors Robert Kiyosaki & Sharon Lechter and social media influencer Anna Bocca, say it is bad that we got no business education at school. I have been known to blather on about this since I was at school, meaning sixty years. Nothing could have changed much if these younger people are still on about the problem.

Why is it difficult - t should be simple enough to change a curriculum? Ms Bocca thinks it is because:

• finance has become impossible to understand,
• the rich intend to keep it that way.

You won’t find me arguing with her.

Not your Mother’s Money

Even if I had been educated about business at school, I would flounder as much today: business and money are unrecognisable from how they were seen in my parents’ youth. To start with, few young people today care about what ‘profiteering’ means. While I was at shcool, laws were in place to regulate markup on cost. There was a notion of ‘reasonable’ profit.

My parents left school straight into a jobless world. They lived through the crash of 1929, and knew what happens when hucksters are in charge.

What To Do?

Let’s just make money. I don’t mean, go into business, make a profit, and get rich. That ¹ has become next to impossible. More commentators every day (it is becoming like 1950s ‘Ford vs Chev’ arguments), and who are much more sussed about finance than me, tell us this: Yanis Varoufakis, Anna Bocca, Clara Mattei or Richard Wolff. Add politician Bernie Sanders if you think only economists think this way.

A story.

By ‘make money’ I mean something else. My mother once drove my six year old niece 3000 kms from Cape Town to Lusaka in a beetle. 2500 kms along the way she visited friends in Mutare. On arrival, she was told that the husband was ‘making your bed’. Puzzled and a little miffed that making her bed prevented him from simply emerging from the bedroom and greeting her, she eventually found him in a workshop. He stood, saw in hand, cursing quietly, tools strewn about. He was making her bed, out of wood sourced from a local sawmill.

That’s what I mean. Crafting it, creating my/our own money. That way, my vision is to accomplish a few things:

• train youth in coding
• create decent jobs
• involve youth in civic office+
• publish municipal expenditure
• prevent double payments

Achieving even only one of these aims is worth it.

By making money I mean specifically, local currency. Why?

1. Because with blockchain money, everyone in the chain can see every transaction. Money is reporting is money.

2. The use case. Crooks are very smart, but if money is useless outside a town or country, there is no point to trying to disperse it to that great gatsak in the sky, known as ’the cloud’.

Blockchain code is just code. I am sure I could write it, but why reinvent the wheel? There are other ways, like ‘forking’ from a coin already created. Although early crypto currency threatened to be dangerously heavy ², at least one coin creator has come up with a solution.

Pascalcoin

The wily creators of Pascalcoin had a few things going for them: they

• didn’t need money
• had computer science degrees and/or IT experience
• knew that carrying the entire blockchain around on all devices was impractical
• created SafeBox

Safebox conserves the integrity of the chain, while displaying only the last 100 transactions. Problem solved. From our standpoint, we need to find whether we can use, or fork, PASC. It is not widely regarded, trading at roughly one hundred of an American cent. R 1000 will buy roughly PASC 50 thousand. Good! We can get in at the bottom! We are not, though, looking at PASC appreciating on the open crypto market, although that could happen. PASC is open source. That, for student coders, is a good place to start.

My vision is this:

Colesberg Youth Pilot

After setting an exam, two learner coders who pass a test can be chosen as interns or apprenctices ³. They, and another two from any small town, and similarly qualified, can collaborate on a bare-bones civic budget template, to be coded in the Oberon programming language, running in the Oberon OS. Reasons and details are set out in the proposal linked below.

If the pilot is funded and works, it can spread to municipalities country wide. The aim is return to resident block control, a la the UDF Civics movement, with even closer detail, to create decent youth jobs, involve youth in Civic information, analysis, budgets, planning and implementation. Forget imported systems. We can roll our own and show the world how to govern, by the people, for the people, as discussed in the Proposal.

Local service and equipment suppliers are preferred. They may not appear as cheap as getting stuff from the ‘big guys out there’, but keeping the money in the area is the priority. Those big guys are less likely to starve than our little guys.

Blockchain Howto

The main thing is to DO the blockchain, not how to, but since the aim is complete demacratic transparency, there are things we can strive for, and even a side benefit or two. First we need to cut out the internet - it is too unsafe.

Blockchain = Four things:

1. Automatic financial reporting
2. The transaction is the
   • report
   • money
   • ledger
   • archive

Every person, everywhere, can check every transaction on device (phone, tablet, pc, watch).

There is an implied constraint: the system needs to be light. The leanest, text-only system will win. That’s why I suggest staying with tried and trusted old school IT.

That way, we can network all 52 of our municipalities, and the blockchain will produce near real time transactions and ledgers, showing what local currency came in, and where it went out. With that local currency being worthless outside South Africa, there will be little in it for the crooks.

There are side-effects. If the blockchain and planning become essentially the same thing, things remain untouched by human hands from the planning phase on. At planning time:

1. Vendors register
2. They quote (potfoles, water leaks, electricity cables, whatever)
3. The money (from treasury and/or local reates and taxes) is allocated on the blockchain
4. The job is done
5. Residents sign off ‘job done’ in 24 hours (or democratically agreed period)
6. Blockchain registers payment.

Every Thomasina, Richardina and Harriet can see the payments on a device.

The hard part, you will object, is ‘who decides who gets the job?’. Good thought. This is where scaling becomes important. Vendor decisions must no longer be made at municipality level. We have to borrow from the old UDF/MDM (truly democratic) playbook. We, the residents in a block, know what has to be done, and we will band together, quote for the job, and fix it ourselves, unless we lack the skill. Then only will we hire from outside our area.

We residents will assemble a task list of jobs to be bid for. If not grabbed, done and signed off as done, koebaai julle. As Ricardo Semler famously said:

You have done nothing, until the money is in the bank.

For our purposes ’the bank’ is replaced with ’the blockchain’. If Tannie Margaret can fix pipes, her firm gets the job, and the blockchain does the rest.

The councils will have less to do. They can wear suits and drive fancy cars around, and fix things wherever people don’t live, and if we need to change things such that these are business opportunities, and they lose out if they don’t grab them. In other words, we won’t need to fire them. They will comfortably achieve that themselves by failing to act.

That is the nub of the suggested system: services by the people, for the people.

One possible side-effect, a good one, is that the municipality could publish a newspaper.

Vendors who register with the blockchain are advertised for free, those who don’t will pay for ads. The newspaper can co-operate with local retailers with delivery systems, special offers, flash sales, and so on. Editor section will deal local comment, sports, fashion, inventions, and the rest of news.

That way, every residential area in the country can be kept informed of local news, business and doings. Think of it as the old Cape Province Divional Councils publishing what they are up in real time, on local devices. It does not have to be seen by the world at large, but can be at the flick of a media switch.

Of course, me being me, as a senior I want the youth to carry the torch. We want a world that works. We old stagers need to steady the ship, show what is cost-effective, available, and has a future. Subjecting our youth to anything less than excellent IT, like Swiss science would sub-standard. We don’t want ‘The Return of the Revenge of Bantu Education’.

I do not advocate anything American. They throw huge sums of stupid money at things, by way of tying us in to their dollar- and data-banks. Ayikona!. Avoid their software, and focus on European systems. It is time for

Yankee, go home! And stay there.