The Future of Money and Technology with social entrepeneur Bruce Cahan, a strong advocate for high transparency, accountable banking, utilizing the emerging semantic web to inform people of the environmental and social impact of their purchases and Mira Luna, founder and coordinator of Bay Area Community Exchange, both participants of the recently held Future of Money and Technology Summit in San Francisco.
Bruce Cahan is an Ashoka Fellow, and CEO and co-founder of Urban Logic, a nonprofit that harnesses finance and technology to change how systems think, act and feel. Urban Logic began in 1991 as Bruce’s idea to make New York City a livable city, more accountable for its sustainability decisions in real time, by using geographic information. He is working on creating a high transparency bank, known now as the GoodBank™ project. Through the bank, regional quality of life measures would reward credit and savings customers, favoring sustainable choices. As municipal finance, the bank would provide new options for livable cities and their environmental, public health and other social sector programs, and their nonprofit and social entrepreneur partners. Bruce was trained as an international finance lawyer and merchant banker. Bruce acquired skills as a government technologist, emergency responder and someone who enjoys reconnecting meaning to how the world works. Bruce graduated The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (B.S. Economics 1976) and Temple Law School (J.D. 1979), and is licensed as a lawyer in California (2006), New York (1980) and Pennsylvania (1980). His website is http://www.urbanlogic.org. His Good Bank Project is described here- http://www.frbsf.org/publications/community/review/vol5_issue2/cahan.pdf
Mira Luna is a San Francisco-based activist. She is working to connect the movement for community currencies as experiments are blossoming all over the world to reclaim local control over economies and to educate the public about the primary importance of currencies in creating the new economy. She founded and coordinates Bay Area Community Exchange, an organization that supports the development of community currencies and education about the money problems and alternatives in the greater Bay Area, as well as a regional open source time exchange. She is coordinating the currency section of the US Social Forum and a community currency toolkit as part of her work with the US Solidarity Economy Network. Bay Area Community Exchange is hosting a conference on currencies and other alternative forms of exchange later this summer in San Francisco. The Bay Area Community Exchange website is- http://sfbace.org/ Mira hopes to bring Joaquim de Melo, founder of the successful Brazilian Palma Bank http://www.banquepalmas.fr/IMG/pdf/Community_Banks_-_Microcredit_The_Case_of_Brazil_.pdf to the US Social Forum.