In recent years, there has been a surge of government-independent projects aspiring to create a more egalitarian economy. Today we will examine several projects which experiment with the idea of money itself: specifically, those which aim to implement a universal basic income (UBI), and complementary initiatives with a similar vision.



The rise of cryptocurrencies is behind many of these projects. Through crypto, the claim goes, everyone in the world will be able to receive an amount of money which would cover for their basic sustenance and livelihood.



Each UBI project interprets the challenge of a basic income differently. This evening, we will embark on a discussion of each one’s economic assumptions, adoption strategy, governance system, identity layer, underlying technology, and philosophy.



Together, we will address some difficult questions: What is the advantage or disadvantage of establishing these projects independent of existing nation-states? What is the relevance of distributed ledger technologies? How do the different projects overlap, and how do they differ? Are there any hidden conditionalities within these UBI projects? Is this REALLY a basic income, or is it something else? What IS money, anyway?



Join us on Monday January 28th, on 18:00PM at ThoughtWorks, where we will explore these questions together with friends from the OpenUBI community and beyond. Doors open at 17:45PM.



Projects that will be present include: Value Instrument, Circles UBI, Duniter G1, Project Greshm, SwiftDemand, GoodDollar, BrightID, UBIC, Trustlines, members of the Basic Income Earth Network and others TBD.



Livestreams and other methods of attending and sharing your thoughts will be available.



There will be a live demo using the BrightID beta. To download the app beforehand, visit:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/L99RcYEc (IOS)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.brightid (Android)



For those, who are joining online we created an doc as an openspace:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BU3IvPIIj8QoVHEg52_CM60DZQdUpOWu89iou1i0kGY/edit?usp=sharing



See you there!