 So, I'm here today to talk about a project I've been working on since October of 2012. It started just as an idea, realizing, waking up and acknowledging that I had a lot of people in my life that had a lot of skills and not a very good way that they could share those skills with one another. So, firstly, a little bit about who I am. I'm an unemployed university graduate, but I don't let the fact that the economy defines me as unemployed define my life. So I have a degree in marketing and philosophy, but I'm also a journalist, I'm also a poker coach, I'm also a photographer, an entrepreneur, a consultant, a writer, illustrator, creative artist, an activist and community space organizer. I am the quintessential Jack of all trades and Johto is the Jack of all trade universe. So our mission is very simply, even though it's all fancy words, to build a two-part system. To build a system with an online community marketplace, so a space for exchange of value, of any type of value that you can imagine that you want to trade or sell or rent, and as well as a community currency generator. So a literally a money printer for communities. So a way that when communities say, hey, we need a garden, well we can just print the money and make that garden. There's no excuses anymore. And our vision is to build an economy that's based around the human being, based around human welfare as compared to our current system, which is very clearly not. So what is Johto? It's an open source project. All of our code is going to be completely accessible. You can check out our GitHub. There's more to come. We have a couple of forks already. We're building it in Django. That's why I'm here. And it's 16 months that we've been doing it. It started for about eight months, was just working on the idea itself just to see if there was something there. And bit by bit it came along and realized that there was something valid that it was worth continuing. So now we'll talk a little bit about the marketplace itself. So I want you to think about the things that you know how to do, the skills that you might have that you might be able to offer to somebody else. Think about the things that you know how to make, the things that you know how to grow, build, create, generate, anything, anything that you can make of value that you either want to sell or you want to trade or you want to rent, you want to give, you want to lend, any manner of exchange that you're interested in doing. So all of that would be on a basic profile. And this is a mock-up that my designer put together. So this is maybe what it'll look like once we're ready so it can break it into different levels. As you can tell he's a game designer. So that's pretty much what it could look like. So that's the basic profile. From there we come along to a community. And it's not worthwhile unless it's really local, unless you can walk there in a very short time. So the idea is we're segregating it into spaces that are all public open spaces. So either public parks, schools, libraries, what have you, that are accessible. So those will be the hubs. The very first hub is going to be at Concordia. I'm working with D3, District 3, they're an incubation hub. And so they're, I'm using that space to work from. And we're going to have that as the very first location. So the idea is if you live near Concordia, that would be your first location. And then let's say you wanted to, you're willing to travel a little bit further out. Well these would be your extended communities. And then these ones are too far, you're not willing to travel to them. So when you do a search result, you're going to get something like this. So you're going to see the difference between what's right local very close and what's a little bit further away. But if you're young and spry and you bike all over the city, then it's no problem choosing a lot of different hubs. And maybe if you're a little older, you only want to choose the one that's closest to you. It's up to you. It's up to you. It's up to you to choose your own community boundaries. From there, again a mock up of what my designer puts together, of how it might look, a comparison. We have a pricing, pricing situa, pricing as well as hashtags and some other things. And then we go into the actual exchange. So once you've found what you were looking for, you were looking for photography, you make an offer to the photographer. Maybe the photographer has a price already set and you want to just say, I'll give you that. Or maybe the photographer says that they really like transacting in banana bread. And so you're going to make them an offer that includes banana bread in it. It's really up to the two individual parties to decide how they're going to trade. And in fact, it's any currency. There's not a limit to the currency. So if you want to say, I'm going to give you $10 and a portion of a Bitcoin and some banana bread in exchange for some bike repair and a haircut, that's up to you. That's up to the two individual parties. So I'm making this very clear because there's a difference between an individual transaction and a community offer, which I'll explain in a moment. There's also the Jo2 unit. That's the currency. So the currency. It's a direct democracy generated currency. So the Jo2 universe is the whole thing, is the marketplace, is the place where the people transact value. The Jo2 unit is a portion of the currency generator. So the currency being generated when the community wants something that they deem valuable. So for example, I could offer a public class. I could write up a how-to guide. I could share notes. I could offer my tools. I could create a community garden. It's up to you and it's up to the community to decide what they think has value. It's really, your imagination is the limit. And so the Jo2 unit will be created to fund these projects. So just for a second, I want to explain something that I'm going to explain in a minute. So I want you to think about the way that bank systems work now. So this isn't the best diagram, but basically think about it like this. We get about 2% interest right now. So if you put in $100, you're going to get about $102 back the following year. When a business borrows $100 from the bank, they're borrowing it at a higher interest rate. So they're borrowing it at, let's say, about 5%. So they're paying back $105 the next year. So if they're borrowing it and paying back $105, well, it only makes sense that they have to charge you more. So they're going to charge everybody $107. So you're getting $102, great, you got your 2%, but the bank's charging, but the company's now charging you $107. Effectively, 2% interest is negative interest. We're losing money by getting this 2%. We're being told that we're gaining this 2%, but it's just a ploy. That's a very oversimplified explanation of that, but it's the gist of the situation. It's all to bring us to this point. The currency that we're generating here is a 0% interest rate. So just to say that that's why I had to explain that. So there's not going to be any interest in it. So when you earn JOTU unit, they sit in your JOTU account and they don't gain interest. It's not accumulating like that. It's a credit system with no debt. So if you want JOTU unit, you have to do something to warrant them. You can't just get them for nothing at all and you can't go into debt with them. And it's inflationary as compared to deflationary and not to be confused with inflation. So that's to say that there's not a limit to the currency that will be generated. Bitcoin has a limit of 21 million. This has no limit. So this, over time, the value of the currency will decrease. That's to promote the fluidity of the currency and to keep people from hoarding it. So if you're going to try and buy a house with JOTU unit, I wouldn't recommend it. It's really meant to be spent to help your local community and to promote value in your local community. And they're generated on demand when the value is for the community through direct democracy currency valuation. And then there's also an intercommunity valuation averaging so that you saw all those different communities while they all have a different generator. And so we're going to set up a system so that they'll be balanced slightly so that wherever you go in the world, it's not going to be as if you go to the, here we have Canadian money, we go to the Philippines and we're very rich. It's going to try and rebalance that a little bit. So the way that that balancing will work, the valuation comes like this. So you're going to, everyone's going to fill out a profile at this point. Everyone's going to say that I have these things to offer. I'm going to say I have an hour of event photography. Someone else is going to say they have an hour of plumbing. And now we get questions that look like this. And so we have to compare an hour of two individuals offers. And then we as individuals, everyone will fill out the survey, decide which one adds more value to society. And we order these, we'll give a plus one to the one that we think is more valuable. We'll come up with a list and then we'll be able to determine a retail price. Now this retail price that's on everyone's profile doesn't necessarily reflect the actual price that they will charge. Just gives you a sense of what the community believes this offering is worth. Now for the currency, for the community, we take these. We take all of the different types of skills. And then we will just have you order them. Effectively, these are all just different types of community offers. So every community offer that you can imagine, ideally should fit into one of these categories. If it doesn't, I'll address that in a second. But if you're going to offer a massage class teaching people how to give massage, that'll fit into well-being. If you're going to go dig holes for a garden, maybe that goes into food distribution or maybe community labor, something like that. So people decide these contributions, order them, and then they'll follow up with this second question, which gives you 100 units to distribute among them. So really, the community is deciding upon for themselves how much value they want to allocate to different community offers. It's up to them to decide. From there, you get something that looks like this. I'm going to offer a photo class, very simply. I'm going to write a description, explain where it's going to happen, who I am, why it has value, why it should happen. And then I fill in that it's going to be three hours. And because the average came out to 10, let's say, well, then it's going to be worth 30 Johtoom. So what happens is I make the offer. Once it's approved as legitimate, the offer is given. The offer is verified by references left by people who have attended my course. And then those units are placed into my account. So for things that it doesn't apply for, and there's going to be a lot of those, it happens a little bit differently. So we'll fill out the form the same way, but instead we'll select other as the type of offer. And this person's deciding to offer a high-quality class notes. So what's happening is they explain who they are. They're a 4.0 GPA student, and they're taking a biology class, and they're giving 25 pages of high-quality notes. Now these notes are then decided upon by the community as to how much they're worth. So it's going to go a little bit like this. The person's going to receive a notification that says that this person's offering these notes, and this person believes they're worth seven. These people believe they're worth five, respectively, three, ten. And we're going to average out the medians to determine where we feel it's valued. So then the five units will be generated, and the person has these five units that they can then put back into the community to pay for things such as a cooking lesson or a personal cooking lesson or borrow a guitar for a week or something like that. So we're generating the value to build up the commons. Because those biology notes now belong to everybody who ever wants them. So just think that if for UCAM, for example, we got people to submit high-quality notes for every course that exists in the school and was accessible to everybody, how many people would actually need to go to school anymore? Couldn't you just take the notes and get all the information you need? Unless you want that piece of paper. If you really want that piece of paper, still go to school. But otherwise, you're getting the essential information from every course that exists in the entire university. That's one of the goals of this, among others. So what can currency generation accomplish while we can fund great causes, open-source projects for one? So if a community believes that a project is worth funding, they can say this project should be funded and they can get paid in JOTU unit for it. We can create a decentralized commons. So things like a tool library or an information library. So just think about... All you have to do is make a listing of all the tools that exist there or that you want to see in your community and then have the people in your community fill in the blanks and say that I have this tool, I have this tool, I have this tool. And then when you click on that tool, you have a conversation with the person who has that tool. So you don't even need a central tool library. You have a decentralized tool library that's just centralizing the information. And then you can set it all up that you can borrow it for free. These are all possibilities of what we can do with this. And educational efforts. So I had this idea the other day. I don't know how many of you have seen the epic battles of rap history. It's, yeah, I think it's great. I checked afterwards. I went, I looked up the video about Rasputin and then I typed in Rasputin into Google Trends and there clearly was a spike in searches for Rasputin. So I thought that was a really interesting and innovative way to try and get people to research history. So what if we tried to do the same kind of thing but for biology or chemistry? And then we set up some mechanisms so that we can create a bounty. So if you create a video that has educational properties and you're trying it and you get it viral, you succeed. Well, you can get paid for having succeeded in pushing forward this education into society. I think that would be, these are just ideas. I mean, these are one person's ideas or one group's ideas. The ideas are up to you as well. And then you can make requests for community projects. So if you have a plot of land in front of your house that you want to offer to build a garden that anyone can access, you can do that. You can request a garden be planted into your front yard. Why not? So development. So a little more technical side, I'm sure this is a little more up your alley, a little less up mine. So we're using Azure right now. We got to deal through BizSpark, oh, sorry. We got to deal through BizSpark. So we're using MSSQL and MySQL for local development. Bootstrap, Twitter Bootstrap, version 1.61 of Django. I don't know what most of this means. I'm sorry guys, I'm hoping you do. I do everything to do with this project except for this. So I'm definitely looking for more people interested in this and I do have programmers who are working on it currently, but we definitely need more. And especially someone who has a very take charge attitude and is not afraid to get their hands dirty because it's a big project as you can probably tell. Python version 2.7, is that new? I don't know. And yeah, we have a couple of GitHub's, a couple of Forks. And that's it. As far as tools, Google Hangouts, Trello, User Voice is a neat little tool that I want to integrate for currency bounties and currency generation. So someone who wants to play around with User Voice, I'm looking for that as well. We use Poplet, Google Docs, and InVision for design mockups. So right now we're still in stage one. We built the signup sheet and registration. We have a login page, we have a profile page, we just need to work it out a little bit better. Phase two, we're building in the valuation. So we're talking about the individual offer survey that you saw. We're talking about the community offer survey that you saw, and then that fitting into building a weighted averaging and so on. Phase three, just a messaging system with a contract built into it, so that you can have a contract proposal back and forth negotiation, a contract confirmation, service rendering, and then a reference system as well. Phase four, community offers. So when you want to offer something to the community, you fill out the form, you fill out the information. It calculates how much it should be worth, and then it lets people vote in how much they think it should also be worth. So there's two aspects to it. I won't get into too much detail. I'm sure I've already gotten into way too much detail about tons of things, but you can be as lazy or as not lazy as you want to with the value creation. So if you want to vote on every single thing that anyone ever offers to the community, you're more than welcome to, you have that option. And if you just want to vote that one time that you came into the very first time you saw the site, that's fine too, it's up to you. And then lastly, the event calendar. So very simply a way that people in your community and the extended communities can be notified of the events coming up. The community offer would happen, the verified user would say that, oh, this happened, this was a great event, and then the units would be passed into the person's account. So what do we want to do over 2014? Well, very basically we want to be able to give people who are underemployed and unemployed an opportunity to become freelancers. It doesn't make sense for me to create a photography website, a photo website, a marketing, it's insane. We have so many skills and little skills too, but it's really interesting what your friends can offer if you just start to ask them. So I really want to give people that opportunity to be freelancers. An increased sense of community security. So you're going to start walking down the street and you're going to start to recognize the people that you're walking next to because you might start working with them. A discovery of personal usefulness. The ability that people can start considering that they have something that they can offer to other people even if they didn't realize it before. So I think that that'll increase their sense of self-worth and overall increase the values in society. And a hyper-local listing of available goods and services. So we're talking about everything that's available and very close to you as well. And you choose your boundaries for your location as well. Free education for students. So I can offer that photo class. I get paid and then all the students who come to the class come for free. They don't have to pay for it. All the community offers are given for free. That's the thing. It's only the individual offers you pay for. So if you don't even want to be a part of Jo2, you just want to come to a bunch of free classes, you can. Promotion of skill acquisition, diversification, learning, paid guerrilla gardening. I want to see all the green spaces covered in food. I think it's absurd that we have so much land that's not covered in food. And a hive mind for evolving value generation. For that, I think about subsidies for oil. We're still paying $6 billion a year in subsidies for oil. What if that didn't exist because it couldn't? What if you always had to reapply and apply for new types of subsidies on a continual basis? Well, that's kind of how Jo2 functions. So over time, we want to build direct democracy into liquid democracy. So direct democracy is one person, one vote. Liquid democracy is one person has their vote divided into a bunch of subcategories, into hashtags, if you will. So there's one for medicine. There's one for education. There's one for street repair. And so my dad knows about street repair. So he gets my street repair vote. And my old professor knows about education. So he gets my education vote. So you subdivide your vote into the people that you trust, that you have confidence in, and it can be anybody in society. So everybody, every member of society becomes a potential elected official. And then maybe if they have a certain number of votes, they join a committee and they start working towards public policy. And then they can use this public policy and say, hey, we made this public policy. Is that worth any Jo2? And the community says, of course it is. And so all of a sudden, you have freelance politicians. And that's a very technocratic approach. From then, we also have a very meritocratic approach because we're doing money creation through people who are offering things that other people deem valuable. So if someone has a lot of positive reviews, well, it only makes sense that they should continue to be able to receive units. But if they have very negative reviews, well, why do we keep electing the same politicians? It's that kind of thing. So that wouldn't happen. In this system, you can order it by references. You can do all kinds of things like that. Overall, we want to build a welfare state-like protection. So over time, we're going to include things like retirement homes. We can include things like basic needs, food and shelter. Bring up the barrier so that fewer people fall into poverty. Community and inter-community self-sustained. So we're going to be moving towards more energy efficient systems. And we want to make it everything as sustainable and self-sustaining as possible and to help other communities become more and more self-sustaining. Overall, a global network of Jo2 communities that can trade between them, that can share knowledge and greater public commons. And now, this isn't for everything, but ideally a type of the scariest wording ever. But like a world governance, but really just from just a community-centered world governance that says that we only for global environmental policy and egalitarianism. Because we can't seem to get our heads together about that, but very specifically, that's something that we need to do. Some quickly, some sites worth checking out. This is another Jo2-like project that's in Berlin. This is for building hardware that you can build your own village. This is another really cool direct democracy engine. And this is an open government project. Yeah, sorry I'm moving so fast, but I really need programmers. I really need all of you. I really need anybody interested in working with the project. That's how it's been going. Everybody's volunteering. We're all volunteering because we believe in it. And I'm not giving up on this, so I'm going to keep doing it. Just some examples of things that need to be filled in over time. You can volunteer in any facet just by sharing Jo2. Or there's so many ways. Just talk to me and we'll figure it out. And that's it. So thank you very much for your attention.